This American Life

This American Life

By This American LifeSociety & CultureNewsArts
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This American Life episodes

  • 528: The Radio Drama Episode

    Our most ambitious live show ever! We pulled together a massive team of theater pros at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Opera House—nearly 50 singers, actors, dancers and musicians. The result? Journalism turned into a Broadway musical, into opera. Mike Birbiglia, Sasheer Zamata, Stephin Merritt, Josh Hamilton, Lindsay Mendez, Lin-Manuel Miranda and others.

    • Carin Gilfry explains how she once accidentally locked herself in a hotel closet, and because
    today’s show is being broadcast from an opera house stage, Ira is able to take the story to a place
    he never usually can.
    (18 minutes)
  • Act One: Lin-Manuel Miranda turns a piece of reporting we broadcast in 2012, into a 14-minute Broadway mini-musical, created by people who normally work on Broadway. (18 minutes)
  • Act Two: Comedian Mike Birbiglia, his wife, and his cat take a trip together and meet some parasitic zombie mice. (10 minutes)
  • Act Three: Joshuah Bearman tells a story that’s a sequel to his memorable episode about his mother and half-brother David. It’s done onstage as a play that’s structured like a radio documentary, with Josh Hamilton playing Joshuah, and James Ransone playing his brother. (17 minutes)
  • Act Four: Comedian Sasheer Zamata stages a radio play, complete with sound effects and comedians Nicole Byer, Chris Gethard, and Frank Garcia Hejl. It’s a true story about a recent bus accident. (9 minutes)

    • Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org

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    1 hr 28 min
  • 511: Fiasco! (2013)

    Stories of when things go wrong. Really wrong. When you leave the normal realm of human error, fumble, mishap, and mistake and enter the territory of really huge breakdowns. Fiascos. Things go so awry that normal social order collapses.

    • Prologue: Jack Hitt tells the story of a small town production of Peter Pan in which the flying apparatus smacks the actors into the furniture, and Captain Hook's hook flies off his arm and hits an old woman in the stomach. By the end of the evening, firemen have arrived and all the normal boundaries between audience and actors have completely dissolved. (4 minutes)
    • Act One: Jack Hitt's Peter Pan story continues. Jack is the author of several books, including Bunch of Amateurs. (19 minutes)
    • Act Two: A medieval village, a 1900-pound brass kettle, marauding visigoths, and a plan to drench invaders with boiling oil that goes awry. From Ron Carlson's book, The Hotel Eden: Stories, read by actor Jeff Dorchen. Ron Carlson's newest book is Return To Oakpine. (9 minutes)
    • Act Three: The first day on the job inevitably means mistakes, mishaps, and sometimes... fiascos. A true story, told by a former rookie cop.
    (13 minutes)
  • Act Four: Journalist Margy Rochlin on her first big assigment to do a celebrity interview. It was 1982. The interviewee was Moon Unit Zappa, who'd just released "Valley Girl" with her father Frank. She'd only been interviewed once. Midway through the interview: fiasco! Margy chokes on some coffee, which pumps out of her nose. Moon's mother administers the Heimlich Maneuver. And after that, everyone's so relaxed that Margy gets an interview that becomes her first syndicated article and a big scoop for her paper. When a fiasco destroys social boundaries, it can bring people together. (7 minutes)

    • Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org

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    58 min
  • 492: Dr. Gilmer and Mr. Hyde

    A doctor named Benjamin Gilmer gets a job at a rural clinic in North Carolina. He’s replaced another doctor named Gilmer – Dr. Vince Gilmer – who went to prison after killing his own father. But the more Benjamin’s patients tell him about the other Dr. Gilmer, the more confused he becomes. Everyone loved Vince Gilmer. So Benjamin starts digging around, trying to understand how a good man can seemingly turn bad. Sarah Koenig reports.

    • As Benjamin settles in at the clinic, and people got to know him, something interesting happens.
    Vince’s former patients – who are now Benjamin’s patients – start talking to him about Vince.
    What he finds out surprises him. (6 minutes)
  • Act One: Benjamin starts to get very curious about the murder Dr Vince Gilmer committed, so he begins asking questions and poking around. Soon he develops his own theories to explain the murder, that never came up at Vince’s trial. (25 minutes)
  • Act Two: Sarah Koenig’s story about the two Dr. Gilmers continues. This question lurked throughout Vince’s initial incarceration and court appearances: Was he crazy? Or was he crazy like a fox? Benjamin decides to visit Vince in prison. (23 minutes)

    • Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org

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    1 hr 4 min
  • 360: Switched at Birth

    On a summer day in 1951, two baby girls were born in a hospital in small-town Wisconsin. The infants were accidentally switched, and went home with the wrong families.

    • Host Ira Glass introduces four characters: Kay McDonald, who raised a daughter named Sue, and Mary Miller, who raised a daughter named Marti. In 1994, Mary Miller wrote letters to Sue and Marti, confessing the secret she'd kept for 43 years: The daughters had been switched at birth and raised by the wrong families. This week's entire show is devoted to the story of Mary Miller's secret and what happened when both families finally learned the truth. (6 1/2 minutes)
    • Act One: Reporter Jake Halpern tells the story of Marti Miller and Sue McDonald, the daughters who were switched at birth, and the many complications that came with learning the truth. Jake is a writer of several books and creator of the comic, "Welcome to the New World.” (26 minutes)
    • Act Two: Jake Halpern tells the mothers' sides of the story. At 69, Kay McDonald had to cope not only with the news that her daughter wasn't her own, but that another mother had known the whole time. And Mary Miller explains why she was tormented by her secret but unable for decades to share it. (26 minutes)

    Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org

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    1 hr 1 min
  • 175: Babysitting

    What goes on while mom and dad are away, that mom and dad never find out about. Including the story of two teenagers who decide to invent children to babysit, as an excuse to get out of their own house.

    • We listen in on a ritual that happens in millions of families every week: kids getting dropped off at the babysitters. Six-year-old Dylan and nine-year-old Sarah explain what they can and can't get away with when they have a babysitter.
    After that, host Ira Glass has a few words about Mary Poppins, who is the Gold Standard of all fictional babysitters. The movie Mary Poppins contains the classic modern song about babysitting. We hear several versions of the song over the course of the program. The first is by Chicago girl punk/pop band, the Dishes. (5 minutes)
  • Act One: Lots of babysitting is done by family members. Hillary Frank reports on what can happen when a teenaged son is put in charge of his younger brothers. It's not pretty. (14 minutes)
  • Act Two: The story of several huge companies that accidentally got put into the babysitting business in a big, big way because of snow on December 26, 1988. Every year on the day after Christmas, divorced kids all over America fly from one parent to the other. In 1988, lots of them got snowed in at O'Hare Airport in Chicago. Susan Burton and her little sister were among them. (9 minutes)
  • Act Three: Myron Jones and his sister Carol Bove explain what happened when they were teenagers, and they ended up babysitting children who didn't exist. (25 minutes)

    • Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org

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    1 hr 2 min

About This American Life

From the publisher's feed

Each week we choose a theme. Then anything can happen. This American Life is true stories that unfold like little movies for radio. Personal stories with funny moments, big feelings, and surprising…

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