This American Life

Keiko was a hugely beloved adventure park attraction. He was also captured in the wild and taken away from his mother when he was just a calf. When Hollywood learned about him, a colossal effort began to un-tame him and send him back to the ocean.

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• Prologue: Ira introduces a new series from Serial Productions and The New York Times. "The Good Whale" is about the killer whale Keiko and is reported by Daniel Alarcón. (2 minutes)
• Act One: Daniel Alarcón takes us back to the early 90’s when Keiko lived in an adventure park in Mexico City, swimming with human friends. (43 minutes)
• Act Two: Producer Diane Wu travels to Minnesota, where the turkey set to be pardoned by The President of the United States later this month is having the turkiness trained out of him. (10 minutes)

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With Donald Trump’s victory this week, many people looked at the election results and thought, yeah, this is the country I thought it was. For some people, that was a hopeful thing. For others, kind of the opposite. This week, we talked with people who helped make it happen and some who are looking to what’s next.

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• Prologue: Ira talks with Zoe Chace about watching Trump’s victory from an ecstatic room in Michigan. Then he checks in with a DC cop who was injured at the Capitol on January 6. (7 minutes)
• Act One: Trump has claimed that he will be able to deport between 15 and 20 million people. But neither he nor his team have spelled out exactly how they’d do it. Producer Nadia Reiman looked into what mass deportation could actually look like on the ground if and when it comes to pass. (17 minutes)
• Act Two: Trump won record numbers of Latino voters this year. Ike Sriskandarajah spent the day with a guy in Pennsylvania who's been working to bring Latino voters to Trump for years. (15 minutes)
• Act Three: Ira talks with two of Trump’s “political enemies” about their post-election plans. (8 minutes)
• Act Four: Ten different states had abortion rights measures on their ballots this election. Producer Miki Meek got curious about a particular kind of political ad that aired in many of those states and called up a few of the women whose stories were featured in them. (9 minutes)

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A wee flame, flickering in the dark.

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• Prologue: Who’s trying to bridge the gap between Blue America and Red America? Ira gets a glimpse of one guy who might be able to do just that. (3 minutes)
• Act One: A politically divided couple searches for a news source they both can trust. (26 minutes)
• Act Two: "June" is making a tactical decision about her vote this election. (13 minutes)
• Act Three: Frank Filocomo thinks people care too much about politics when it comes to dating. His dates don’t necessarily agree. (10 minutes)

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People who tell a lie and then believe the lie more than anyone else. 

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• Prologue:

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Thirteen parole board members decide whether or not one man should be released from prison.

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• Prologue: Henry Dee has been locked up for most of his life, nearly 50 years. Now, he’s up for parole. Reporter Ben Austen tells the story. (19 minutes)
• Part 1: The parole board members puzzle through the pros and cons of releasing Henry Dee from prison and cast their votes. (26 minutes)
• Part 2: Reporter Ben Austen continues the story. (8 minutes)

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Ira Glass has news to share about some things happening here at This American Life.

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So much of the fight for the presidency is coming down to battles for small slices of voters who can help throw swing states to one candidate or another. Abbas Alawieh, a leader in the Uncommitted movement, grapples with how to get his voters the thing they want.

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• Prologue: When you have some power, but not a lot, how do you wield it when you’re suddenly cast into the spotlight? (4 minutes)
• Act One: Zoe Chace and Ben Terris follow Abbas Alawieh as he fights to broker a deal at the DNC – a way to potentially satisfy the people who voted “Uncommitted” in the primaries as a protest vote against Biden’s handling of the war in Israel and Gaza. (33 minutes)
• Act Two: Three weeks after the Democratic National Convention, Abbas speaks at a tense community meeting in Michigan about the Uncommitted organizers’ general election recommendation and hears back from voters on how they feel about the Democratic nominee at this point. (15 minutes)

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Chen Almog-Goldstein was kidnapped by Hamas along with her three youngest children on October 7, 2023. This week, she tells the story of their life as hostages in Gaza.

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• Prologue: The 251 hostages taken by Hamas a year ago have become a divisive symbol in Israel. Host Ira Glass talks about the father of one hostage, and what happened to him at a protest last week when he called for a hostage deal. (6 minutes)
• Part One: On this week’s show, we’re airing excerpts of interviews with former hostages produced by an Israeli podcast, Echad Bayom. In these interviews they describe, in a remarkably detailed and complicated way, what happened to them a year ago. 
• Part Two: Chen’s story continues, with a description of what it was like to be hidden in a small apartment with her children and their captors. (6 minutes)
• Part Three: Chen talks about the complicated relationship between her family and the people holding them hostage. (6 minutes)
• Part Four: Chen describes hearing the Israeli news while in captivity, including one night when her own father was interviewed. (4 minutes)
• Part Five: Chen talks about what it was like to walk around the streets of Gaza in disguise and their eventual release, 51 days after they were taken from their home. (13 minutes)

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People caught in limbo, using ingenuity and guile to try to get themselves out.

• Prologue: Rachel has two kids. Elias, age seven, is a vegetarian. Theo, age five, is not. But Elias wants Theo, and everyone else in the house, to be vegetarian too. So Rachel and her husband are in the middle of negotiating the desires of two very strong willed kids. (12 minutes)
• Act One: Sara Corbett's father-in-law Dick is 81. And he's become obsessed with a limbo most of us hate – the music he hears whenever he's on hold. (14 minutes)
• Act Two: Mark Oppenheimer reports on agunah in the Orthodox Jewish community. An agunah is a woman whose husband refuses to give her a divorce – in Hebrew it means "chained wife." If you're an Orthodox Jew, strictly following Jewish law, the only real way to get divorced is if your husband agrees to hand you a piece of paper called a get. Without the get, women who want out of their marriages can stay chained to their husbands for years. In New York, a couple of rabbis were recently accused of using violence to force men to give their wives a get. (17 minutes)
• Act Three: Brett Martin documents a previously unnoticed human phenomenon, one that involves airplanes, crying, and Reese Witherspoon. (11 minutes)

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One kid comes to America as an exchange student and commits herself to the senior year experience.

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• Prologue: We talk to high school seniors in Salt Lake City who are trying to have the perfect year. (5 minutes)
• Act One: Every year, thousands of teenagers come from all over the world to experience American high school. Last year, thirteen students from Palestine came to the US on a program sponsored by the US State Department. We tell the story of a girl named Majd, from Gaza, and her extraordinary year in America. (50 minutes)

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