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- 220: Testosterone
NPR This American Life, 8/30/2002. In the Prologue, producer Alex Blumberg explains that he wanted to do this show because of his conflicted relationship with his own testosterone. He tells host Ira Glass that the reasons go back to a girl in his eighth-grade homeroom and the 1970s seminal feminist novel The Women's Room. We also hear from a man who stopped producing testosterone due to a medical treatment and found that his entire personality was altered. Act One - Life at Zero, Act Two - Infinite gent, Act Three - Contest-osterone, Act Four - Learning to shut up.
- 562: The Problem We All Live With
This American Life, July 31, 2015 Right now, all sorts of people are trying to rethink and reinvent education, to get poor minority kids performing as well as white kids. But there's one thing nobody tries anymore, despite lots of evidence that it works: desegregation. Nikole Hannah-Jones looks at a district that, not long ago, accidentally launched a desegregation program.
- 579: My Damn Mind
This American Life, episode 579, Feb 12, 2016 The brain! It's powerful! Two stories of the brain working for and against its owners. Prologue: A staffer at St Joseph Medical Center in Houston finds a patient shot on the floor of his room. He is unarmed, and has been shot by the cops in the hospital. (3 minutes) Act One: When Your Hospital-Borne Infection Is a Bullet (Ira Glass) We tell the story of that patient, Alan Pean, and how his delusions lead him to a situation that's just as strange as the worst thoughts his mind is cooking up. This story is a collaboration with the New York Times. (40 minutes) NY Times article: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/14/us/hospital-guns-mental-health.html
- Vic removed the link here (show 585: In defense of ignorance)
- 600: Will I Know Anyone at This Party?
OCT 28, 2016 This week: Republicans struggling with the split in their own party. There’s a seismic, historic change going on in the Republican party this year. Producer Zoe Chace tells Ira about a place you can eavesdrop on a group of Republican friends as they fret and argue about that change week after week: a podcast called Ricochet. Ira talks to Rob Long, one of the hosts of the podcast, and to Avik Roy, who’s appeared on the show. Act One - Zoe connects the anti-immigrant sentiment in St. Cloud with a national network of organizations promoting anti-Muslim views and spreading fear about Sharia law. We hear how the Somali immigrants in town deal with their neighbors’ fears. And then a violent attack at a local mall inflames both sides. (44 minutes)
- 607: Didn’t We Solve This One?
This American Life #607, WBEZ, Jan 6, 2017 We’ve fought two wars since 9/11. We got help from tens of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans—some were targeted or killed because they helped us. We owe these people. We’ve passed laws that say so. So why has it been so hard for us to get many of them to safety? Prologue: Host Ira Glass interviews Congressman Seth Moulton (D., Mass.), who served four tours as a Marine in Iraq. Moulton talks about an Iraqi translator he grew close to, and about a special visa program that allows Iraqi and Afghan translators to come to the U.S. What will happen to the program after Trump takes office? (8 minutes) Ira Glass Act One: An Iraqi translator named Sarah has been trying to get to the U.S. for eight years. Finally, this fall, she got a call to come in for an interview for her visa. Now she was one step away from a verdict that could lead to a new life for her and her two sons—or leave them in jeopardy. Producer Nancy Updike tells what happened. (23 minutes) Nancy Updike Act Two: Nancy returns with a story that explains the origins of the special visa program for interpreters. A decade ago, a young guy named Kirk Johnson inadvertently became the point person for American policy about the Iraqis and Afghans endangered by their work for us. Kirk reflects on the visa program’s successes and failures—and on how, recently, his advice to translators who want to immigrate to the U.S. has radically changed. (25 minutes) Nancy Updike
- 608: The Revolution Starts At Noon
This American Life (WBEZ), Jan 20, 2017 Some people are super-stoked for the political changes that are coming. We hear from them. And others. Prologue: Host Ira Glass talks to a man driving to Washington, D.C.—with his brother, father and a whole lot of neckties—for his first job on Capitol Hill. (5 minutes) Act One - Meme Come True. Producer Zoe Chace attends the DeploraBall, a party for trolls and others who say they memed Trump into the presidency. (12 minutes). Sam Black Act Two - Dreamers Get Real. Kenia and her brother Henrri make a trip back to El Salvador. They’ve lived, legally, in the U.S. for the last 12 years but are worried things might change under President Trump. (12 minutes) Act Three - Law and Border. Border Patrol agents were stoked when immigration became a centerpiece of Trump’s campaign. Producer Stephanie Foo went to find out how they hope their jobs will change. (15 minutes) Stephanie Foo Act Four - You Are Still Fired (Podcast Only). Reporter Sam Black visited factory workers in Indiana to see how they are feeling. Trump saved some of their colleagues’ jobs. But not theirs. (7 minutes) George Saunders Act Five - Debate Is Not Allowed During a Vote. Democrats don’t run the White House. Or the House. Or the Senate. Here’s what life might be like for them in the coming years. (2 minutes) Sam Black Act Six - A Change In The Office Climate. Two civil servants who do not like our new President weigh their options. Quit? Stay? Stay and fight? (11 minutes)
- 632: Our Town
WBEZ, This American Life. Dec 8, 2017 We spent eight months and did over a hundred interviews to try to bypass the usual rhetoric and get to the bottom of what really happened when undocumented workers showed up in one Alabama town. The man whose views on immigration are a cornerstone of Trump administration policy—Attorney General Jeff Sessions—apparently came to his opinions on the issue from seeing what happened in the poultry plants of Alabama. He believes undocumented workers showed up in those plants, stole American jobs, and drove down wages. Was he right? We have an economist crunch the numbers, and visit to see for ourselves. Act One - We’ve visited Albertville, Alabama many times now, to figure out exactly what happened when the population shifted from 98% white in 1990, to a fourth Latino twenty years later. We interviewed more than one hundred people. Sessions is not totally right, but he’s not totally wrong either. Our main witnesses to what happened in the plants are three long-time workers named Pat and Martha and Carlos. (29 minutes) Ira Glass Miki Meek Act Two - We hear the companies’ side—they have a totally different story to tell than the workers. We also go to one of the leading researchers on the economic effects of immigrants, Giovanni Peri, who chairs the economics department at UC Davis. He and researcher Justin Wiltshire did a study for us on what happened to wages and jobs in Albertville. They compared wages and employment in the area around Albertville to places in Alabama with similar job markets that did not have an influx of immigrants. Read their full study. (26 minutes) Ira Glass Miki Meek
- 633: Our Town - Part Two Dec 15, 2017
WBEZ, This American Life, Dec 15, 2017 So many people in Albertville, AL wondered what it cost them in taxes when thousands of undocumented immigrants moved to their town. One woman drove our host Ira Glass to the grocery store to watch a random Latina mom buy some milk with government assistance, to try to prove her point. So what’d all the newcomers really cost? And what was their effect on crime, schools, and politics? Act One - Christmas Lights and Fender Benders In the early years, when immigrants first arrived in Albertville, the things that bothered the locals weren’t the things you usually hear about when people talk about immigration. Not jobs or wages or crime. It was small stuff. Neighbor-to-neighbor stuff. (19 minutes) Act Two - The March Latino residents decided to organize a peaceful march in support of a path to legal status, and their white neighbors were shocked when 5,000 people poured into the streets. (3 minutes) Act Three - Backlash Suddenly realizing just how many Latinos had moved to town, longtime residents jumped into action, fueled by a wave of national and statewide anti-immigration fever. Then in 2011, Alabama adopted the most extreme anti-immigrant law in the country. (19 minutes) Act Four - Let’s Do the Numbers One of the things we were excited to investigate when we went to Alabama was to answer the question at the heart of the immigration debate: what does it cost taxpayers when we let in millions of immigrants, documented and undocumented? In Albertville, how much was it? We asked economist Kim Rueben and her colleague Erin Huffer to run the numbers. (6 minutes) Act Five - Today In 2012, the fever broke, and the Albertville city council stopped targeting Latino residents. The mayor says he and the council are taking a cue from the public schools. During the years the city council was picking fights with the city’s Latino population, right across the street, at the offices of the Albertville City Schools, they were taking the exact opposite approach: trying to integrate them into the community. And they did an exceptionally competent job of it. (10 minutes)
- On Hold, No One Can Hear You Scream
253: The Middle of Nowhere Dec 5, 2003 Stories from faraway, hard-to-get-to places, where all rules are off, nefarious things happen because no one's looking, and there's no one to appeal to. Act Two - On Hold, No One Can Hear You Scream. This American Life senior producer Julie Snyder found herself in a ten-month battle with her phone company, MCI Worldcom, which had overcharged her $946.36. She spent hours on hold in a bureaucratic nowhere. No one seemed able to fix her problem, and there was no way she could make the company pay her back for all her lost time and aggravation. Finally, she enlists the aid of the national media—specifically, This American Life host Ira Glass. (22 minutes)
- The Fix Is In - price fixing conspiracy at the food company ADM, Archer Daniels Midland
168: The Fix Is In, This American Life, Sep 15, 2000 There are all sorts of situations in which we suspect the fix is in, but we almost never find out for certain. On today's show, for once, we find out. The whole program is devoted to one story, in which we go inside the back rooms of one multinational corporation and hear the intricate workings—recorded on tape—of how they put the fix in. We hear from Kurt Eichenwald, whose book The Informant is about the price fixing conspiracy at the food company ADM, Archer Daniels Midland, and the executive who cooperated with the FBI in recording over 250 hours of secret video and audio tapes, probably the most remarkable videotapes ever made of an American company in the middle of a criminal act.