By Rob McGinley Myers
True stories about modern humans
5.0
115115 ratings
I’ve always had a problematic relationship to the news, and I’ve struggled to navigate that even more since this pandemic began. I talk to my father about the night I yelled at him over his insufficient fear of the virus,...
Like most people, I imagine, I've been having a lot of anxious thoughts these days. And I’ve been wishing I could get those thoughts out of my head. Then I remembered that I used to have a podcast called Anxious...
I'm announcing a whole new podcast, and giving you a listen to the first episode. The podcast is called Before It Had a Theme, and on it, Britta Greene an I discuss and deconstruct old episodes of This American Life....
Sometimes in your life, you reach a crossroads, go on a men’s weekend, spend too much time alone in the forest, have a mid-life crisis, and start thinking you can change the world with your podcast. This episode is about...
Parents of young children have an especially fraught relationship with their smartphones. On the one hand, these devices are indispensable tools for getting things done and staying connected to the adult world while in the midst of childcare. On the...
This past week, my kids went back to school. Summer vacation has come and gone. And that’s gotten me thinking about the very idea of summer vacation because every summer, for the past several years, my wife, her sisters and...
Since the wide-spread adoption of embalming in the United States, most Americans have turned the process of handling the deceased over to experts in the undertaking business. On this episode, the story of one family who decided that they wanted...
My older brother Scott lives almost completely outside the network of modern life: he has no internet, no email address, no cable TV or satellite, not even an antenna for his television. Until recently, he didn’t even have a bank...
Humans have been reading for thousands of years, but ever since the invention of television, people have been worried that reading is in decline. The latest worry is that, even if the Internet has caused an uptick in the quantity...
When she was growing up, Adrienne didn’t want to believe she was losing her hearing, and she didn’t want to wear hearing aids. This is the story of how she decided to embrace the technology that restored her hearing, and...
When I heard the news of the recent Supreme Court ruling on marriage between same sex couples, I wanted to go back to an interview I did in 2009 with two women who decided to get married before it was...
Amelia’s childhood was largely devoid of technology. But when she got a computer and the internet in her own bedroom, she found the new mode of communication through chatrooms and email utterly addictive. She’s struggled ever since with how much...
Bernard did not get along with his father, who expected him to work like a full-time employee in the family gas station starting when Bernard was just eight years old. But then Bernard went off to the army, and when...
Humans have been getting intoxicated, and finding new ways to get intoxicated, for thousands of years. On this episode, I explore the history of intoxication, and how that history played out in the life of one young woman. Subscribe (or write...
I recently decided to ask a big question at a cocktail party. This episode is about asking the question, some of the answers I got, and how that question is shaping the stories I’m trying to tell in the second season of...
I’ve always loved telling the story of the first (and only) time I got punched in the face, and not because I won the fight. I lost, by a long shot. But it’s a story about standing up to one...
Sara thought she knew her son, but then a medical diagnosis left her questioning everything. This is the story of how she coped when the medical treatment turned him into a completely different child. Subscribe (or write a review) in iTunes Music: Mario...
Fewer and fewer people writes letters anymore, especially by hand. It’s a dying technology. But for this episode, I have a story from the 20th century about how a single, handwritten letter changed the course of a life. Subscribe (or write...
Sarah’s parents got divorced when she was little. She and her siblings stayed with their mom, even though Sarah preferred her father’s company. She only saw her father for dinner once a week and stayed with him every other weekend....
Mohamed fell in love with air travel at a young age. He lived in Kuwait, but he would fly with his family back to Egypt at the end of every school year, so air travel was imbued with the pleasure...
Kate Hopper had dreamed of a totally natural birth, with no drugs and no medical interventions. But when her baby was born two months early, Kate had to enter the unnatural world of the neonatal intensive care unit, where incubators,...
Tanya grew up in a home with only one approved hour of television a week. She had no music in her bedroom, no cellphone, and no computer access, unless her mother was watching over her shoulder. In Krystyna’s house, on the...
Andria Williams met her husband Dave when they were in their first year of high school. They’ve been together now for almost two decades, but they’ve also spent a significant portion of that time living apart, conducting their relationship over...
On this episode, my guest is Stephen Hackett, who publishes the website 512 Pixels and co-hosts the podcast Connected. We talk about what it’s like to put the life of someone you love, someone you would protect with your own life, in...