Meg Wolitzerpresents three stories featured in the  anthology A Century of Fiction in the New Yorker.The magazine celebrates its 100th birthday, and this is the second of two programs this season in which we join the party.  Robert Coover’s “Going for a Beer” begins with a date and a drink, but you’ll be surprised where it ends up.  The reader is SELECTED SHORTS’ late founder and host, Isaiah Sheffer.  Cynthia Ozick’s moving story “The Shawl” pulls grace from the worst of circumstances in a powerful reading by Lois Smith.  And V.S. Pritchett turns a ladder into a sly symbol of marital discord in our third tale.  “The Ladder” is performed by Cynthia Nixon.

What is it about them, our mean friends? They treat us poorly, they don't call us back, they cancel plans at the last minute, and yet we keep coming back for more. Popular bullies exist in business, politics — everywhere. How do they stay so popular?

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Prologue: We hear kids recorded at Chicago's Navy Pier and at a public swimming pool discussing their mean friends. And Ira Glass interviews Lillie Allison, 15, about the pretty, popular girls who were her best friends—until they cast her out. (5 minutes)Act One: Jonathan Goldstein interrogates the girls, now grown up, who terrorized him and his classmates years ago in school—and finds they can be just as scary as ever. (18 minutes)Act Two: We conduct an experiment to test whether being nice actually pays by equipping two waitresses with hidden microphones to record their interactions. Each waitress is instructed to be super friendly with half of their tables while remaining aloof with the other half. We then compare the tips to see which approach was more profitable. (10 minutes)Act Three: A case study in every word from a friend meaning its opposite. (4 minutes)Act Four: An excerpt of Bernard Cooper's story about the bill he got from his own father, for the entire cost of his childhood. Actor Josh Hamilton reads. (19 minutes)

Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org

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Meg Wolitzer presents two stories about the things she loves most: books and words and why they matter. In Ben Loory’s “The Book,” a contrarian volume becomes a literary sensation, and alters one woman’s life. The reader is Jane Kaczmarek. In “Things I Know to be True” by Kendra Fortmeyer, originally published in One Story, a damaged veteran uses words to hold his life together. The reader is Calvin Leon Smith. And in a special feature, Wolitzer visits a favorite indie bookstore, Three Lives & Company: http://threelives.com/who.html The Greenwich Village icon, which was founded in the 1980s, is a haven for readers, writers, and book lovers of all kinds. Michael Cunningham calls it “One of the greatest bookstores on the face of the Earth. Every single person who works there is incredibly knowledgeable and well read and full of soul.” And you’ll meet some of them—and the books they treasure--on this show. 

The story of the most commonly performed surgery, and what goes wrong with it – terribly wrong – 100,000 times a year in the United States. We’re excited to bring you the first episode of The Retrievals, Season 2, the new show from longtime This American Life producer and editor Susan Burton. It’s from Serial Productions and The New York Times.

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Prologue: Ira Glass introduces the first episode of an inventive new podcast from longtime This American Life producer and editor Susan Burton.Act One: Susan Burton introduces Mindy, a labor and delivery nurse at UI Health at the University of Illinois at Chicago. (5 minutes)Act Two: Another labor and delivery nurse at UI Health, Clara, gets ready to deliver twins at her own hospital and receives an epidural. (19 minutes)Act Three: Clara’s anesthesia is not working. She is now in the middle of major abdominal surgery, and she can feel that surgery. (21 minutes)Act Four: Heather, the head of obstetric anesthesia at UI Health, gets up onstage and asks a ballroom full of hundreds of anesthesiologists to wrestle with the question of why patients are feeling pain during C-sections, and what they can do to solve it. (8 minutes)

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Host Meg Wolitzer presents a quartet of summer stories.  Umberto Eco endures trial by mini bar in “How to Travel with a Salmon,” read by Jin Hah.  A scenic getaway turns eerie in Elizabeth Spencer’s “The Weekend Travelers,” read by Campbell Scott.  Life looks up—way up—for an overworked restaurant owner in “The Man, The Restaurant, and the Eiffel Tower,” by Ben Loory, read by Stana Katic.  And upper-class “frenemies” have a reckoning in Edith Wharton’s “Roman Fever,” read by Maria Tucci.