If you've never heard This American Life, our staff's favorite shows page provides a great
introduction to what we do. You might want to start there. After a few
episodes, we're sure you'll figure it out. Or, if you're looking for a
written introduction, here goes:
One of our problems from the start has been that when we try to describe
This American Life in a sentence or two, it just sounds awful.
For instance: each week we choose a theme and put together different
kinds of stories on that theme. That doesn't sound like something we'd
want to listen to on the radio, and it's our show.
So usually we just say what we're not. We're not a news show or a talk
show or a call-in show. We're not really formatted like other radio
shows at all. Instead, we do these stories that are like movies for
radio. There are people in dramatic situations. Things happen to them.
There are funny moments and emotional moments
and—hopefully—moments where the people in the story say
interesting, surprising things about it all. It has to be surprising. It
has to be fun.
Each episode has a theme. That's mostly because a theme makes it seem
like there's a reason to sit and listen to a story about a contest where everyone stands
around a truck for days until only one person is left on their
feet...or a grown man trying to convince a skeptical friend that not
only has he heard the world's
greatest phone message, but that it's about the Little Mermaid...or
a man who's obsessed with
Niagara Falls, lives minutes from the Falls, writes and thinks about
the Falls all the time, but can't bring himself to actually visit the
Falls because, as he says, "they've ruined the Falls." If you're not
doing stories about the news, or celebrities, or things people have ever
heard of elsewhere, you have to give people a reason to keep listening.
The themes make it seem like you should.
We view the show as an experiment. We try things. There was the show
where we taped for 24 hours in
an all-night restaurant. And the show where we put a band together from
musicians' classified ads. And the show where we followed a group of swing
voters for months, recording their reactions to everything that
happened in the campaign, right up through their final decision. And the
show where one of our
contributors went on a fast to find out if doing that sort of thing
leads, as promised, to enlightenment.
We think of the show as journalism. One of the people who helped shape
the program, Paul Tough, says that what we're doing is applying the
tools of journalism to everyday lives, personal lives. Which is true.
It's also true that the journalism we do tends to use a lot of the
techniques of fiction: scenes and characters and narrative threads.
Meanwhile, the fiction we have on the show functions like journalism:
it's fiction that describes what it's like to be here, now, in America.
What we like are stories that are both funny and sad. Personal and sort
of epic at the same time.
We sometimes think of our program as a documentary show for people who
normally hate documentaries. A public radio show for people who don't
necessarily care for public radio.
Some of the writers whose work has been on the program: David Sedaris,
Sarah Vowell, Russell Banks, Dave Eggers, David Rakoff, Tobias Wolff,
Jhumpa Lahiri, Anne Lamott, Michael Lewis, Michael Chabon, Nick Hornby,
Alex Kotlowitz, Dan Savage, David Foster Wallace, Spalding Gray, Chris
Ware, Gay Talese, Haruki Murakami, Aimee Bender, Lydia Davis, Junot
Diaz, Sherman Alexie, Bill Buford.
This American Life started in 1995 in Chicago. It went national
in early 1996 and in the years since, it's won a lot of awards—the
Peabody, the duPont-Columbia, the Murrow, and the Overseas Press Club, to name a few. Ira Glass, the
host of the show, was named best radio host in the country by Time
Magazine. And the American Journalism Review declared that
the show is at "the vanguard of a journalistic revolution."
The program is on more than 500 public radio stations across the
country. They say 1.7 million people listen to us on the radio each
week, which sometimes is hard to imagine. It's probably airing this
weekend on a station near you. If not,
you can listen to the show here on this site. The most recent show is
available for free download or podcast. Older
shows can be streamed from the archive
pages, where you can also buy episodes on CD or via iTunes. And you
can get our greatest hits CDs and other merch
right here on the site. Have fun. And thanks for listening.
Oh, and we know what you're thinking: radio is so 80 years ago, and TV
is so 50 years ago. Well, what about social networking? That's only 2 or
3 years ago, and we're all over it. Find us on MySpace and Facebook and YouTube,
too. We've also got a bunch of instant messaging icons, wallpapers, and
blog badges for your downloading fun over on our Showtime
site. Go nuts.
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