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OK, this happens to be Chicago, but every city has a place like this. That weird, desolate area at the far end of town. We're a half mile west of the old abandoned steel mills. We're a half mile north of landfills where methane fires used to burn. Just south of the auto junkyard. Just east of the site of the old city d... |
OK, so let me just ask you this straight off. We're doing a show this week about doomed love. Oh. What was that "Oh"? What did that "Oh" mean? Well, I feel like that's the most frequent situation I get. So frequently, they're hopeful and I am really pessimistic. Right. So we thought to ourselves, me and the people who ... |
OK, one sign that you and your high school nerd friends are pulling a lot of pranks, you give yourselves a name. And it's an acronym. We were called the SCUM club. SCUM was an acronym for the Society for the Corruption and Undoing of Morals. Another sign your prank-life is rather rich? You have a nemesis, and not only ... |
From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. And each week on our show we choose a theme, invite writers and performers of all kinds to do stories on that theme. And, usually, somewhere near the top of the show, I tell you what the theme is and give you a little road map of what's coming up in the hour. B... |
He's brought out of the box and shackled to an eye bolt in the floor, with his back to the door. He's forbidden to face the natural light. Joe Margulies at the University of Chicago represents a few detainees at Guantanamo. And he says that to understand that thing about the natural light, you have to understand that t... |
Andy's grandfather ran the business. Then his father ran the business. They make mousetraps, Victor brand mousetraps with the big red V on them. But also glue traps, and electric traps, and those humane catch and release things. And traps that only professionals use. Andy's in charge of the part of the company that dev... |
From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Long ago, when our radio show was first on the air, we tried an experiment, two experiments, actually. We did two of our shows onstage in Chicago within six months of each other. In the first, at this small club called... |
Sitting in the chair operating a video camera, her feet do not even touch the ground. Her hair is braided in pigtails, Jasmine is just nine years old. On her video, first she interviews her mom, and then her mom interviews her. Do you know how much I love you? Yes. Do you know how proud I am of you? Yes. What do you wa... |
When Rosie was a kid, they had a dog named Fu, a Shih Tzu. And Rosie's mom swears that she knows the exact day the dog went bad. It came when she heard about a discount way to get a dog grooming. It was this grooming school. Her friend said that it didn't cost much, and they were very good. But my mother believes that ... |
From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. And to explain what we're doing on today's show, let's just begin with a little story. My parents said that we should have a dog. But didn't want to have a dog that was going to be all doggy. This is Alex Blumberg, one... |
From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. And let's head back in time-- back to when being on TV meant you sort of half-shouted every single thing you said. This is the primate laboratory at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. The year is 1960. In this laboratory, there are approximately 120 rhesus... |
Back when the movie Schindler's List came out, I was friends with these two missionaries. They worked with Chicago gang kids who they would meet in prison and try to bring to God. Anyway, one day I got a call from them. They just had seen Schindler's List, and they wanted to talk about it because, you know, call your J... |
Well, I hold in my hand a ghost story that comes from a publication that is not really known for its tales of the supernatural. I'm talking about the American Journal of Opthalmalogy, a medical journal. This is from a 1921 edition. And just in case your subscription lapsed during World War I, I'm just going to read fro... |
The trick to getting a politician's autograph, John Rossi tells me, is to try to do it before they go up to speak. If you wait till afterwards, they'll be mobbed. And sure enough, when he spots Pennsylvania's governor waiting to take his turn at a podium, Rossi darts up to him with a special gold pen he brought just fo... |
OK, here's a simple way to measure how violent things have gotten in Iraq. Calling around this week to five English-speaking Iraqis. Every one of them knew somebody who's died in the violence since the US invasion. A doctor in Baghdad, who's active in politics, told me he knows over 300 people who've died. A guy in Bab... |
Sometimes you set out walking briskly on the path to disaster, without even suspecting. Scott was 23, and he saw an ad in the paper looking for a German interpreter. He'd majored in German in college, lived for a year in Germany, speaking German. What could go wrong? The job was with the Detroit Visitor Information Bur... |
You probably remember when those Danish cartoons of the prophet Mohammed caused so much anger in the Muslim world. Violent protests over Europe and the Middle East, flags were burned, Danish products pulled off shelves. It's blasphemy to depict the prophet at all. Many American newspapers would not reprint the Danish c... |
Peter has been on the job for 20 years. He's got the uniform. He's got the office in the basement behind the laundry room. He's got the keys. That's a lot of crap on there, but hey. Let's just count them. Let's basically count them. Yeah. All right, so you got your 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. This is a keyring t... |
Michael had been in the business for over 35 years, and he never had a customer like this one. Michael designs and sells tombstones. And this customer, who we're not going to name for reasons that will become clear the further into the story I get-- we'll just call him Mr. X-- Mr. X is what they call in the funeral bus... |
Randall Bell's got a kind of weird job. He's an economist who specializes in damaged real estate of all kinds. And in practice what that means is that he is the guy that you call when a house becomes notorious for some reason and you have to figure out, how in the world are you going to sell it? For instance, he's cons... |
Bob Harris has won two cars and a lot of money playing Jeopardy on television. But he insists he's not that smart. What he is, he says, is somebody who decided when he was going to be on Jeopardy to take measures. I told my girlfriend at the time, hi. I'm rearranging the furniture now. And I need to make my house look ... |
There's really no way around some arguments. Maybe arguments just want to happen. One of the producers of our radio show, This American Life, was at this conference recently, and this guy named Eric Molinsky told her about this strangely and unexpectedly fierce argument that he had gotten into with a good friend of his... |
So what are we going to make of television anyway? I think the most interesting idea you hear about television right now is this idea that right now-- all of us-- we are living through the golden age of television, that this is the kind of golden age that people are going to look back on years from now, the way we look... |
First of all, is your last named pronounced Ivv-ins or Eye-vins? Eye-vins. And what's your correct title now? Astronaut. Like, on your business card, it says, "astronaut?" It actually does. That is the most glamorous thing I've ever heard. OK, here's a question. We've got 95 active-duty astronauts in our country, but t... |
Hi. It's Ira, recording this in 2006. This episode of our show, Episode 33, is one that actually never was broadcast nationally. We did a local broadcast of it in Chicago and always intended to go back to it and make it into a national version and never did. In fact, we don't even have a master copy of it, a digital re... |
So Robyn was the only woman working on this men's magazine, which, OK, is weird to start with. This magazine, you should picture Maxim or FHM, but not as classy. They would get a medium famous TV star, like Alyssa Milano, out into the desert and convince her to take off her top for a photo shoot, that kind of thing. So... |
So here's how a lawyer meets with his client when his client is a prisoner at Guantanamo. There's a little hut with a metal table. He's brought out of the box and shackled to an eye bolt in the floor with his back to the door. He's forbidden to face the natural light. Joe Margulies of the University of Chicago represen... |
OK America, there's a phone number that you can call in Kansas, and when they pick up the phone, they say--. Good afternoon, Center for Army Lessons Learned. May I help you? The Center for Army Lessons Learned. The first time you hear that name, it's hard to believe that it's real, and not one of those places like the ... |
From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. Mr. Goodman and I get these regularly. Sometimes people think we make them up. Vincent Homenick and his boss, Norman Goodman, have to enlist 1,800 jurors a day for the state courts of New York City. And they have heard every possible excuse, real and fake, for avoiding jury d... |
When I was in seventh grade, I was at my friend Dave [? Berowi's ?] house. And we went to the fridge for a snack. And he opens up the door to the fridge. And inside was a six pack of beer. And I had never seen beer in real life, in someone's house. Beer was just something from TV. You know, it was just like one of thos... |
Tim Jaccard is full of stories that from anybody else would not be believable. For instance, this girl, Katie Longendyke, who had no idea she was pregnant until the day she gave birth. She was actually taking birth control pills during the entire pregnancy and was unaware of it. So she was in what we refer to as denial... |
I'm Dal LaMagna. Ira Glass will be here in a minute. Just bear with me. I was heading to the Middle East, and there were friends of mine who had been there before and they gave me some tips. Salam aleikum. Salam aleikum. That's it. Alaikum salam. Alaikum salam. Aleikum salam. So do I say salam aleikum first? Depends. I... |
Adults don't understand anymore what it means to be a nerd. Have you noticed this? Nerd, somehow, has become a badge of honor. You meet all kinds of people who say, proudly, that they were nerds in high school. It's like anybody who had anything that made them feel different now says that they were a nerd. And that pop... |
From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. It's so embarrassing. I don't want to get upset. But like, he has a car. So the last time I saw him on purpose was just in the car in front of my house. I don't know. It's just bad. Bad like when you walk out of your house you think like, there his car was? Yeah. I still look... |
Sure, the Democrats are doing great in the polls this week, but to consider where they are as a party, consider please the case of Joe Cabazuela, a middle class guy, used to vote Democratic, lives in San Diego, in a state that the Democrats have to take if they're going to take the White House. And let's begin with thi... |
My wife and I are standing at the door to our place, and we're arguing. A delivery guy has arrived with something, and it's early morning, and I hold the dog and I ask her to go to the door. And she doesn't want to go to the door because of the way that she's dressed. And I insist, no, no, no, no. It's fine. And we go ... |
From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I have a relative that's my aunt. She doesn't really know how to talk to kids. She's sort of-- My grandma. She doesn't know what to say to me. She's trying to talk to me, but usually she doesn't know what to say. The people on my dad... |
OK, this is one of those things that you probably have never heard, and then as soon as somebody tells you, you're like, right, of course. You know how murder figures into so much of American pop culture? On crime shows, and thrillers, and video games and all kinds of stuff. Well, if you knew somebody who actually got ... |
Some businesses and some businessmen just press things further than other people are willing to go. John Nash Pickle grew up poor on a farm in Mississippi, learned to work with steel, started his own company in 1972 with a few thousand dollars. And he did well. The John Pickle Company became a multimillion-dollar busin... |
Support for the This American Life podcast is provided by Anheuser-Busch, introducing Budweiser American Ale, with caramel malted barley and cascade hops from the Pacific Northwest. Learn more at budamericanale.com. And by audible.com, where you can download best-selling audio books, magazines, and radio shows, like th... |
From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. And to explain the idea behind this week's radio show, I need to tell you about this date that one of the producers of our show, Jane Feltes, went on recently. There was this guy who she talked to briefly after a rock show, and then ... |
They can laugh about it now, the Ohm family. It was Thanksgiving dinner, suburban Minneapolis, big spread, pumpkins on the table, 14 people, and it was 2002, a year after 9/11. We were all just talking about 9/11, just 9/11 anything. This is Alexis, the baby of the family. She and her parents came into our studio and t... |
From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Love, love, love, love, love. What do we talk about when we talk about love? Well since the 13th century, this is what we talk about. This very moment. Coup de foudre. Coup de foudre in French means the bolt of lightning, seeing so... |
So how many years were you an executioner in your job? That period lasted for maybe five or six years. That's a really long time. Oh it was a very long time. It was very, very depressing. Chris is a mild-mannered, decent guy who was an executioner in the sense that he fired over 1,500 people. He was working for a finan... |
Fifth grade. It was so long ago. Who can remember that far back? Two whole years. I remember all of, like, the old things. Like, we used to read the book Harry Potter. And we made curtains. Harry Potter curtains. And, like, they have new curtains now. And I look back at them, and I'm like-- I look at them and I'm like,... |
From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life-- I'm Ira Glass. It used to be if something was big news, it got turned into a song. This one's about a famous kidnapping that happened in 1912, the kidnapping of Bobby Dunbar, a four-year-old boy. For two years, the details of his disappearance, and the search for him, and ho... |
OK, this just in. People don't like to admit it when they mess up. It's true for little kids, true for adults, and maybe especially true for politicians. In just the last few weeks, President Trump has refused to apologize for calling for the deaths of the Central Park Five, even though somebody else admitted to that c... |
From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. I lie, probably, every weekend to my mom. So, about what kinds of things? Mostly drinking and what time I get home. Where I am. Who I'm with. This girl is a high school senior. And let's just identify her as living som... |
Tim wasn't always perfect at his job. A couple years ago, not long after he got the job, he heard about these two gang members who had gotten into a scuffle at a club. It began when one of them jumped in front of the other in a line of people who were going to have their pictures taken. And they got into a big fight. A... |
David says there are only two ways to see it. Either he succeeded in inviting the devil into a church camp in Wisconsin or he didn't. It was right around this time of year. David was 12. Back home in Sheboygan, he went to a religious school. It was pretty strict, fundamentalist. And one summer night around the campfire... |
From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira glass. Today our program comes to you from a club on Chicago's North Side, The Lunar Cabaret. And we're here to conduct a little radio experiment. Over the last two weeks here in Chicago, we have advertised, we have asked for people to come in here today with letters,... |
Back in 1994-- this is back in the days when people still delivered big news to each other by mail-- two women who barely knew each other, Martha Miller and Susan McDonald, got a letter from Martha's mom. Dear Martha and Sue, have you ever suspected or been told that we took home the baby that belonged to Kay and Bob M... |
As early as I remember, I was afraid to go to sleep. This began when I was six. My uncle Lenny went off to Vietnam. And that opened up this chapter in my life where I was obsessed with death. I was scared that uncle Lenny was going to be killed. But more than that, his absence underscored the fact that some day, no mat... |
From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. We went through a long stretch of time with a lot of open wounds on our hands, so-- and I do remember a lot of times after a game we'd have practice the next morning and we would have to figure out a way to get our glo... |
In every low-income neighborhood in every city in the United States, there are people trying to make things better. Ministers, teachers, social workers. If you have one of those jobs, sometimes the best way to get through each day is to think small. Get this one parent off drugs. Get this one kid through the school yea... |
Well, it's This American Life from WBEZ Chicago, distributed by Public Radio International. And I'm recording this on Friday afternoon, October 3. It's a little after 3:00, just a couple of hours after the House of Representatives voted in favor of bailing out Wall Street. And I'm standing in Union Square in New York C... |
Andy's grandfather ran the business, then his father ran the business. They make mousetraps. Victor brand mousetraps with a big red V on them. But also glue traps and electric traps and those humane catch-and-release things and traps that only professionals use. Andy's in charge of the part of the company that develops... |
Thank you, Senator Arlen Specter. Just a great guy. Why are we all here? To support Senator John McCain and Governor Palin. Hello, Pennsylvania. John McCain spends a lot of time in Pennsylvania these days. Last week, he hit Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, Moon Township, and Bensalem. The week before, he was in Montgomery Count... |
I want to play you this moment that happened to get captured on tape. But to fully appreciate this moment, you need a little background. This was recorded in Hoboken, New Jersey. And Hoboken is this old city on the water with these tiny, narrow streets. And because of the way the streets are laid out, parking is just a... |
From WBEZ in Chicago, it's This American Life distributed by Public Radio International. I suppose it's not enough this time of year that we eat millions of turkeys. Someone also went to the trouble to make up a song about turkeys getting the supernatural power to play baseball. We know they love Thanksgiving. Why woul... |
Maupassant didn't care much for the Eiffel Tower. And he didn't care for the food at the restaurant in the Eiffel Tower. But he ate lunch at the restaurant in the Eiffel Tower all the time. "It is the only place in Paris," he used to say, "where I don't have to see it." That is exactly how I feel about my job. I come i... |
5:30 in the afternoon, in the food court at a table near Sbarro's, Nick and Cheyenne and Natalie are just hanging around killing time, waiting to go to a movie when their buddy Chase shows up and explains the Sydney situation. Sydney is my friend at the mall who ditched me for her boyfriend. Chase had come to the mall ... |
This was not the most important speech Barack Obama gave in November. It didn't get much press coverage. In fact, it wasn't even important enough for Barack Obama to show up in person to deliver. He pre-taped a video. But for the people who saw this speech, it was a big, big deal. This was at the opening session of an ... |
When Dave got his job at the homeless shelter, it was one of the lowest level jobs they had. And he didn't think of advancing up the ladder because he really liked his job. He liked talking with the residents. He helped make meals, did bed checks, rented movies for movie night, got urine samples for drug testing. One g... |
OK, so a couple of physicists walk into a bar. Just kidding. They're not at a bar. They're at a school. Scientists in training. I'm sure this story seems strange to you, but to me, it was just-- you know, this was just like another day in the physics world. David Kestenbaum used to live in physics world. These days he ... |
The news has gotten kind of confusing. I don't know if I'm allowed to admit that as a person who talks here on the public radio. It's confusing to me, especially all this stuff about the trouble the banks are in. You know, you turn on The Today Show at random. And you can find yourself watching something like this. As ... |
OK, I've been happily gabbing away with Harold Wilshinsky for maybe 15 minutes when he suddenly came out with this warning. You start an insurance man talking, you're out of luck. This seemed to refer to a body of folk wisdom about the ways of insurance men that I had never heard of, but I kept my mouth shut about that... |
There is a mini-industry inside journalism right now, one of the few parts of the journalism business that's actually thriving, I think. A reporter's finding unusual signs of the recession all over the place. But that did not prepare me to hear about this side of the recession from a dentist, [UNINTELLIGIBLE], outside ... |
From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass, and the theme of today's show is, This I Used to Believe. And I have to admit this is just a knockoff of this series that's been running on NPR News called, This I Believe, which in turn, actually is a knockoff of the ... |
From PRI, Public Radio International. From PRI, Public Radio International. From PRI, Public Radio International. Public Radio-- Public-- Radio International. --Radio International. One more time. It's not enough, some guys say, to have the right boots and the right 19th century authenticated gun and the right uniform ... |
A couple years ago I interviewed this cop about something that happened to him when he was still a rookie on the force. He and his partner had gotten called out to this suburban house to do something about this squirrel that was running around the attic of the house. And by the time they were done an hour after that, t... |
When Madison Nguyen was elected to the San Jose City Council, she was just 30 and was a really big deal. There is a huge Vietnamese community in San Jose, but no Vietnamese had ever made it to the city council. The Vietnamese-American community was just beside themselves with having the very first Vietnamese-American e... |
Pino Audia teaches in the business school at Dartmouth, and he researches, among other things, the question: How do entrepreneurs get created? And somebody noticed that his students and many of his colleagues actually have an opinion about this. They believe entrepreneurs make themselves. You know, you bravely head off... |
The prosecutor from a district attorney's office in Boston recently told one of the producers or our radio show that from what he's seen, criminals do not take the fall for each other. He said, nobody willingly goes to prison for a crime to help a buddy. There's too much at stake, he said. The circumstances would have ... |
There's an old saying that a lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client. And not many lawyers actually try it, but people like you and me apparently do, lots of us non-lawyers. The number's actually kind of shocking. In New York State alone, 1.8 million people represent themselves in court in a typical year.... |
The way that I always heard the story was that Van Halen had something in the contract that they used when they toured that said that everywhere that they went-- in every city, in every dressing room on their tour-- there had to be a bowl of M&Ms, and that the brown M&Ms had to be removed. It's kind of a well-known sto... |
OK. I think we all can agree, this sounds really, really bad. Four guys from Newburgh, New York plant explosives at a synagogue and a Jewish community center in the Bronx. And they're arrested-- this is three months ago, they were arrested in May. They also, it turns out, had plans to fire Stinger surface-to-air missil... |
Some kids are at a rest stop parking lot in the middle of August, waiting to get back in the car-- Logan, William, and Kieran. A reporter approaches them. I couldn't help but notice that there's three of you guys. So the first question that pops into my head is, who's going to have to ride in the middle? Unfortunately,... |
From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life distributed by Public Radio International. We had both been dating the same person, and she had been dating him for a while, and then broken it off. And then I had met him, and so he and I were dating. And then he started talking about her. Oh, Julie, she's just this fantastic... |
Every Monday, John, and Thax, and Ericka get together at John's apartment to watch Dark Shadows. You know, Dark Shadows, surely you've heard of it. It was the most popular thing in the whole world, at one point. No. It was. John used to watch four or five hours of Dark Shadows every day, back in January when he was une... |
So, Adam, where are we? I recorded this at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Lower Manhattan. It's a black tie dinner. This was about a year and a half ago. And you, by the way, are part of the Planet Money team of economics reporters who did stories here on our program and on the NPR news shows. That's right. I was there for ... |
I was in the kitchen cooking some food for my dog, which I don't say with pride. I don't even approve of people cooking for their dogs, but he's got health problems and without boring you with a lot of details, there's no getting around it. And I was listening to Marketplace, which is actually the point of this story I... |
Here's how it works. You're a doctor, you help some patient, and you want to get paid for it. So you have to choose a code that describes what you did to put on the insurance form. And it's an arcane language of its own, with tens of thousands of codes. And just make things more confusing, every insurance company inter... |
This spring, sometime after South Carolina governor Mark Sanford publicly confessed that his soulmate was a woman in Argentina who was not his wife, which was just after the Elizabeth Edwards book tour where she talked about the child that her husband allegedly had with a woman who was not her, which was, of course, ri... |
Back when Cliff worked as a room service waiter at Holiday Inn, so many guests ordered in pizza delivery to avoid the lousy room service. But sometimes the food and beverage manager, who was this tightly-wound guy and immigrant from Algeria, would stake out the lobby and try to catch the pizza delivery guys and kick th... |
When I was in my 20s, I worked as a temp typist on the overnight shift. And it was one of my favorite jobs I ever had. I showed up at work at midnight. Downtown was completely dark. Nobody on the streets at all. And I'd take the elevator to the, you know, 20th floor or whatever it was. And it would be all lit up and bu... |
OK, Sarah. So it's ten to 1:00 on a Friday night in November, and we're sitting on your porch. And it seems pretty quiet. It's not that bad. One of the producers of our radio show, Sarah Koenig, moved to a college town because her husband got a job teaching there. And by day, her neighborhood is like a college town tha... |
From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. It was like taking kids out to the jungles of Vietnam and dropping them off, knowing they were going to be shot at. It was as if winning was a foreign thing to them. It's as if it had been bred into them that they could never, ever w... |
Last resort letters aren't exactly a secret, but most of us haven't heard of them. Journalist Ron Rosenbaum came across them because he's got a Google alert that brings him any news story with the phrase "World War III" in it. He's written about nuclear war on and off for decades. And news came across the Google about ... |
The thing about Hawaii is that before you go all anybody will say to you is, it's paradise. This is literally the word that people use. You tell a friend, I'm going to Hawaii, and then it's like you watch the word enter their brain. And the sensate thinking part of them goes away, and their eyes start to glaze. And the... |
From PRI, Public Radio International. From PRI, Public Radio International. From PRI, Public Radio International. Public Radio. Public Radio International. Here's the dream, expressed as concisely, I think, as anybody ever has expressed it. I hold in my hand a handwritten sign that was photocopied and pasted up around ... |
From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Hello? Hey, dad? Hi. Let me pick this up on another phone. I can barely hear you. About a year ago, this thing happened to me when I took the train down to visit my dad in Baltimore. And when this thing happened, he sa... |
Dave was in his late 20s, and it would not be accurate to say that he was living at home with his parents, but only because half the time he was staying at his sister's house. He was playing in a band, doing some writing, not making much money, and his parents were worried. And one day he was hanging out with his mom. ... |
Luke was eleven when his family moved from the normal, boring suburbs to what amounted to, basically, the coolest place on earth. His dad got this job as the manager of this tourist park called the Butterfly Farm. --that had domes filled with rainforest and exotic birds and butterflies and a miniature train track and p... |
Here's the story the way we usually like it. There's this guy. And he's behind enemy lines. Maybe he's dropped in there in the middle of the night. Maybe he sneaks under barbwire at the border. Whatever. He's there. He's been there awhile. Months. Years maybe. He's in disguise. Working on our behalf. Nobody suspects. N... |
A friend of mine ran her own small business. It was just her and this guy, the bookkeeper. And she loved the bookkeeper. The bookkeeper did the billing. He kept the accounts. He saw that vendors were paid on time. He did basically all the stuff that, to my friend, was just kind of drudgery. She used to say that she did... |
If you grew up in a big city, you may have heard the urban legend alligators in the sewers. They got there when people brought back baby alligators from vacations in Florida and flushed them down the toilets. That's the kind of thing that, once you turn 12, you don't believe in anymore. Well, New York Times, February 1... |
From WBEZ Chicago, It's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. There's this bridge that's part of Chicago's Lake Shore Drive that crosses the Chicago River. You can see this bridge from the offices of WBEZ. It's really close. But unless you're really looking for it, you would miss the hole that ... |
From WBEZ Chicago it's This American Life, and distributed by Public Radio International, I'm Ira Glass. The voices that you are hearing is some children. What are they doing? They are just walking. Nothing else. This week I talked to a Haitian journalist, Romuald Felix, over his cell phone as he recorded himself walki... |
Probably the strangest thing about the K&R business-- K&R, that's Kidnap and Ransom-- is that it's a business at all, that there are enough kidnappings in the world that a whole industry issues kidnap insurance and there's responders who will help your family through the kidnapping and ransom process. And it's also wor... |
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