This American Life

When Zohran Mamdani won the primary race for New York mayor, the Democratic establishment's lukewarm response echoed the treatment of another charismatic, unconventional candidate decades earlier. This week, we bring you the story of Harold Washington, the greatest politician you've probably never heard of, and the backlash that ensued when he became Chicago's first Black mayor.

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• Prologue: As New York City’s Democratic establishment attempts to resist the candidacy of Zohran Mamdani, we look back at another mayoral candidate who upset the established political machine. (7 minutes)
• Act One: A history of the brief mayoral career of Harold Washington and its lessons for Black and white America, as told by people close to him. (39 minutes)
• Act Two: Ira revisits interviews with Chicago voters from the 1997 and 2007 rebroadcasts of this episode. In 1997, ten years after Harold Washington’s death, not much had changed in Chicago. By 2007, attitudes had begun to shift slowly, and another Black politician from Chicago was on the rise — Barack Obama. Ira also speaks to David Axelrod, an advisor to both Harold Washington and Barack Obama. (10 minutes)

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Stories of people who try simple mind games on others, and then find themselves way in over their heads.

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• Prologue: Host Ira Glass interviews Lori Gottlieb about the time she sent a letter to a writer in a magazine, a letter packed with white lies. (5 minutes)
• Act One: Lori Gottlieb's story continues. One complication led to another, and before long, the writer seemed to be lying to her. Or maybe he wasn't. It was hard to tell. Years later, she still isn't sure what happened. (8 minutes)
• Act Two: A group called Improv Everywhere decides that an unknown band, Ghosts of Pasha, playing their first ever tour in New York, ought to think they're a smash hit. So they study the band's music and then crowd the performance, pretending to be hard-core fans. Improv Everywhere just wants to make the band happy—to give them the best day of their lives. But the band doesn't see it that way. Nor does another subject of one of Improv Everywhere's "missions." (31 minutes)
• Act Three: Scott Carrier and his family live in the same Salt Lake City neighborhood as Elizabeth Smart, the fourteen-year-old whose 2002 kidnapping made international news. Though Smart's picture was plastered everywhere throughout Salt Lake City and thousands of volunteers searched for her, her captors brazenly brought her back to the very neighborhood from which she'd been taken. They walked freely through the streets with her in broad daylight, yet no one recognized her. Scott talks with his neighbors and his son Milo—who had attended grade school with Smart—about what was going through their minds that prevented them from seeing what was right there in plain sight. (12 minutes)

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A group of immigration judges, who almost never speak to the press, describes the dismantling of our immigration court system from the inside.

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• Prologue: Zoe Chace gives an eyewitness account of what has been happening at 26 Federal Plaza, an immigration courthouse in New York City. (5 minutes)
• Act One: The judges walk us through how different their jobs have become in just the past few months, because of sweeping policy changes by Trump’s Department of Justice. (26 minutes)
• Act Two: It gets extremely personal for the judges. Also, the story of one person who got pushed through the new immigration court system this summer. (23 minutes)

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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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