This American Life

Things are different on college campuses this year. We see inside the drama, with students and staff.

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• Prologue: We go to orientation at Arizona State University and meet international students who are trying to make friends. (6 minutes)
• Act One: The president of the Black Student Union at the University of Utah fights to keep the B in BSU. (30 minutes)
• Act Two: A definition of antisemitism, canceled classes, and angry professors at Columbia University. (16 minutes)

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Small human plans that run into much larger obstacles.

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• Prologue: Angela's dad, an accountant, made a spreadsheet to prepare for their family trip to a national park. But there are things you never think to put in a spreadsheet. (7 minutes)
• Act One: A young couple, excited to start a new chapter in their lives, is suddenly put on a very different trajectory. (30 minutes)
• Act Two: A sixteen-year-old plans out a prank, and a complete stranger from Honduras ends up in a million-dollar deal. What could go wrong? (25 minutes)

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People starting over—sometimes because they want to, other times because they have to.

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• Prologue: Host Ira Glass talks to Jorge Just, who thought he'd started over successfully. He'd moved to New York, found an apartment that everyone told him was a great deal, things were looking good. Then a reality television show visited his building. (8 minutes)
• Act One: Molly FitzSimons tells the story of her father starting over. After 25 years in the same zip code, as an executive in the same company, he moved to Los Angeles and tried to start over in a new life with a new venture: A cable channel, with no people, no talking, no plots, but lots and lots of puppies. (15 minutes)
• Act Two: Mary Beth Kirchner documents one day in the life of a hustler named Joe, who wakes up every morning broke, hustles as much as $10,000 during the day and then loses most of it by the time he goes to bed. What it's like to start from scratch every day of your life. (18 minutes)
• Act Three: Jonathan Goldstein reads a story about the first people to ever start from scratch, a couple named Adam and Eve. (14 minutes)

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Since October 7th, while the world has focused its attention on Gaza, the Israeli government has tightened the screws on the three million Palestinians in the West Bank in all sorts of dramatic ways. We travel to the West Bank to see these changes in person.

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• Prologue: Ira joins Hamed on his Monday commute. He has to navigate a constantly changing series of checkpoints and roadblocks to get to work each day. Hamed works for Comet-ME, which sets up solar panels, water systems, and security cameras in small villages all over the West Bank. (13 minutes)
• Act One: Settler violence has worsened significantly in the West Bank since October 7, 2023. Yael Even Or travels to a tiny village called Tuba, surrounded by Israeli settlements, to meet the 27-year-old resident trying to protect it. (26 minutes)
• Act 2: Two quick snapshots of life in the West Bank since October 7th. (6 minutes)
• Act Two: After October 7th, Israeli Minister of Security Itamar Ben-Gvir increased restrictions on Palestinian prisoners in Israeli security prisons. Prisoners started dying. Dana Chivvis looks into one of those deaths. (25 minutes)

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How they organize the chaos of the world, for good and for bad.

• Prologue: Ira interviews David Wallechinsky, who wrote a wildly popular book in the 1970s called The Book of Lists, full of trivia and research, gathered into lists like "18 Brains" and "What They Weighed." The book sold millions of copies and had four sequels and a brief spin-off TV show. The list books were like the internet, before the internet. (12 minutes)
• Act One: John Fecile talks to his brother, Pat, about a list their other brother made before he died. They each have different ideas about what the list means and how they feel about it. (14 minutes)
• Act 2: A brief visit with Bobby, who keeps a list in his phone of all the dogs in his neighborhood and their names to save him from the awkwardness of not knowing the name of someone’s dog – because people get upset if you don’t remember their dog’s name. (3 minutes)
• Act Two: Reporter M. Gessen talks to Russians living in America and elsewhere about the lists the Russian government has put them on in the last few years. M. Gessen is also on one of these lists. Each list has its own complex rules and potential consequences for the people on the lists and for their family members who live in Russia. (28 minutes)

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When the best—and perhaps only—way to say something is to write it down.

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• Prologue: Ira goes out with a letter carrier, ‘Grace,’ as she delivers mail on her route. He learns about the people who bring us our mail and also how people treat their mail. (11 minutes)
• Act One: Writing a letter decades after an event that shaped her life was the only way that Nicole Piasecki could make some sense of it. (18 minutes)
• Act Two: Yorkshire, 1866. A farmer overcomes his timidity and writes a very important letter to a local beauty. (3 minutes)
• Act Three: When senior editor David Kestenbaum was still a rookie reporter, he wrote an email to a legend. Then he waited...and waited...for a reply. (6 minutes)
• Act Four: A woman writes an unusual letter on behalf of her husband. (1 minute)
• Act Five: Producer Zoe Chace compares the letters a person gets and the letters they wish they got. (12 minutes)

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Iowa has three million people and a million come to their State Fair, each with their own goals and dreams for the fair. We hang out with some of them, to see if they get what they hoped for.

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• Prologue: A big bull, a giant slide, and cowboys on horseback shooting balloons are just a few sights you can take in at the Iowa State Fair. Some people come for the spectacle, and some are the spectacle. (8 minutes)
• Act One: Bailey Leavitt comes from a family of carnies. For her, one of the most thrilling things she looks for at the fair is someone who is really good at luring people into spending money at their stand. She takes Ira on an insider’s search for “an agent.” (16 minutes)
• Act 2: Motley Crue pledged never to play the fairgrounds. Then they did. We wondered what that had been like for them. They agreed to an interview, but then they flinched. (1 minute)
• Act Two: What life lessons can kids learn at the 4-H rabbit competition? A lot. (11 minutes)
• Act Three: The Iowa State Fair awarded coveted slots to just nine new food vendors this year. All of them are run by people who already own restaurants or who’ve done other big fairs. All except for an unlikely newcomer: Biscuit Bar. (19 minutes)
• Act Four: As the ferris wheel goes dark and the fair is closing down, one game is racing to meet their quota. Ira watches until the end. (3 minutes)

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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)

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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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Ira Glass talks with longtime producer Nancy Updike about the most personal stories they have put on the radio. This is a sample of the bonus episodes we regularly release to our This American Life Partners.

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