This American Life

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.

The coronavirus has now fully arrived in the United States. This week, stories of people trying to rise to that challenge, in some pretty extreme situations.

This week, as the staff creates the episode from their apartments and houses, with our host in quarantine, in this moment when everyone’s reaching out to the people they love, we put together a collection of family stories, with some timely stuff at the top.

Things do not seem fine at all, but it’s hard to say why.

Some information is so big and so complicated that it seems impossible to talk to kids about. This week, stories about the vague and not-so-vague ways we teach children about race, death, and sex.

People squirming in a world where everything is rated and reviewed.

Cryptic messages on a cell phone and a teeter totter at a construction site: these are clues people found, trying to make sense of a death.

People looking everywhere to find a place—any place—where, for once, they don't have to be the odd man out.

We return to our story about Abdi Nor from 2015, with some big news about his life today. When we first broadcast the story, Abdi was a Somali refugee living in Kenya desperately trying – against long odds – to get to the United States. Then he got the luckiest break of his life: he won a lottery that puts him on a short list for a U.S. visa. But before he could cash in his golden ticket, the police started raiding his neighborhood, targeting refugees.

In these dark, combative times, we attempt the most radical counterprogramming we could imagine: a show made up entirely of stories about delight.