Lessons from 863 episodes of This American Life | Hacker News Reader

Lessons from 863 episodes of This American Life

indarktrees.com

68 pointscryzinger68 comments

This American Life really does live up to its name - its a real slice of American culture / society on any given week. I imagine its going to be a wellspring of understanding our time for future anthropologists and historians.

Interesting in my nearly 60 years I have never heard of this program.

Give it a listen! It’s a real gem of a show

NPR has a wealth of great broadcasting in general.

It's not an NPR show, although the public radio stations that carry it usually carry NPR shows as well. It was Public Radio International, then Public Radio Exchange.

Sorry, sloppy on my part -- the NPR branding looms large ;-)

Easy mistake to make. They do indeed brand their shows very prominently, making it easy to miss the distributor for those non-NPR shows that only blurb it once at the beginning and once at the end.

Radiolab was one of my favorites..

I stopped following it after Krulwich left in 2015 but they have an excellent archive from back in the day (the 2010s were the best years imo):

https://radiolab.org/podcast

It truly is the best radio show I've heard. I've been listening on and off for over 20 years.

If you want some good episodes (do NOT read the summary on the linked pages - some contain spoilers).

The Ghost of Bobby Dunbar (https://www.thisamericanlife.org/352/the-ghost-of-bobby-dunb...) - about a kid in the first half of the 20th century who was abducted and then returned to his family - except to this day people debate whether the kid who was returned really was the kid who was abducted, and how his descendants have grappled with the issue.

When Patents Attack! (https://www.thisamericanlife.org/441/when-patents-attack) - an inside peek into how patent trolls work.

Petty Tyrant (https://www.thisamericanlife.org/419/petty-tyrant) - how a school maintenance employee rose to power by bullying. It's not so much the facts themselves but the masterful storytelling - especially near the end.

Dr Gilmer and Mr Hyde (https://www.thisamericanlife.org/492/dr-gilmer-and-mr-hyde) - about a doctor in a small town who everyone loved. He committed a heinous crime and ended up in prison. The story involves great investigative journalism on exploring why he committed the crime, and they unearthed very relevant details that were previously unknown (even to the criminal himself).

The last two episodes above were by Sarah Koenig, who you may know as the person behind Serial.

Serial is the best media in the world. Shit town is the best of serial. Seriously listen to it if you haven't. I once drove two hours past my destination because I didn't want to stop listening to it.

If you enjoy Serial, I highly recommend CBC's Come By Chance. It's a wonderful tale (the less you know the better) about a family mystery among small coastal villages in Newfoundland.

Also Rest Stop (https://www.thisamericanlife.org/388/rest-stop), where the crew spends 2 continuous days at a rest stop on the New York State Thruway, talking to both the employees and travelers.

129 Cars (https://www.thisamericanlife.org/513/129-cars), where the crew spends a month at a random Jeep dealership, as they try to hit their manufacturer-set quota.

Amusement Park (https://www.thisamericanlife.org/443/amusement-park), where they follow a bunch of teenage labor at Worlds of Fun in Kansas City, and their only slightly older boss. (Who is possibly the best boss in the history of bossing)

It only airs at certain times depending upon your local public radio station, usually on weekends so one would have to be almost a regular radio listener to catch it by accident - if you never listened to public radio at the air times on the weekends it would have been easy to miss it during its heyday. With the advent of podcasts it became more widely available but then there is a lot of competition in that media space.

I like the show but it's mostly a slice of American upper middle class who are reasonably well and educated. I don't think the writers can connect to working class people. In a sense it's the typical democrat voter

I don’t have any empirical evidence to refute you, but it connected with me as a 17 year old kid living in a mobile home in Mississippi. Almost 25 years later, and in a much different socioeconomic state, it still does.

Stories steeped in humanity aren’t biased - less confident about you to be honest.

What socioeconomic group did you become from which you are now viewing the material?

You’re already describing yourself as having some kind of secular redemption from that life.

I described myself being poor (“working class”) and not being poor any more, whatever you’re attempting to read between the lines beyond that isn’t there.

You claimed this very specific entertainment has universal appeal, and I’m just not sure that’s true.

You framed your own experience as the show would.

I framed my experience in contrast to the parent’s assertion, and no, I did not make any claim about universality. Be sure that not everyone loves this or any show all you want.

You’re continuing to project some sort of nonsense gotcha logic onto a straw man that doesn’t exist.

> Stories steeped in humanity aren’t biased - less confident about you to be honest.

The thing that's unique about This American Life is that the star of each episode is usually someone just doing their usual job, or going through a situation.

If someone can't empathize with that, it says more about them than the show.

Well, for any future archaeologists reading this, please know that This American Life was a great show that was made for a specific audience, by a specific set of creators, and it absolutely did not represent the breadth of life in America at the turn of the 21st century. This was a common mistake: thinking a rather small niche was universal because it's what you see. It led to a lot of surprises.

Just to push to have you expand your counterpoint, what other views of American life would you want to see that they haven’t covered?

I'm not on the political right, but it's plain that they don't give it equal time.

I don't expect the audience cares very much about this, though, which is sort of to OPs implied point. We've reached a place where each side of the political spectrum is not only happily ignorant of the other side's good points, but in fact, fearful of even having the discussion. If you go too far afield from the party line, you will be punished, and public radio (along with non-public radio, cable, broadcast news, and most other forms of legacy media) is a shrinking market, unwilling to alienate the core audience.

(The shorthand term for this is "audience capture", and IMO, This American Life has a death grip on a very particular sort of audience, which even if you set partisan politics aside, is representative only of itself.)

They do talk to conservatives a lot though. Many recent episodes interviewed Trump voters and sent reporters to Republican rallies to hear those "good points" from the source...

Yeah, I didn't say they never cover them. They do it -- to their credit -- and I'd even go so far as to say that they're one of the more balanced programs on public radio.

But they're still far from actually balanced. As a frequent listener, I'd characterize their overall coverage of conservatives as "a bemused, curious foreign tourist".

To be fair, it's getting more difficult to find erudite, well-spoken enunciation of mainstream conservative views these days.

Mostly because the people who would be able to do that have "chosen" to retire.

Balanced does not mean nor should mean "actively making them look better and hiding ugly parts".

No, it means "balanced". You shouldn't hide the ugly parts, but you should report on the good arguments of the opposition -- as well as the ugly parts of your own team. Both the left and the right have good arguments and bad arguments, and if you don't believe that, you're misinformed.

Partisans would much rather that they only hear about the ugly parts of the opposition, and never hear about the ugly parts of their own tribe.

The spouses of MAGA husbands sounded like abuse victims or hostages in that one episode.

> I'm not on the political right, but it's plain that they don't give it equal time.

OP said it's a "slice", not a "statistically accurate representation". I think his intent was to say "They cover everything", not "They cover everything in due proportion".

And, BTW, I've yet to find any show (news or entertainment) that is even close to being statistically accurate representation of society. Such shows will not survive - not enough people will listen.

See my reply to the sibling comment. I don't know what a "statistically accurate representation of society" would be, nor do I hold that up as my standard here.

> Such shows will not survive - not enough people will listen.

Well yes, exactly. TAL has an editorial voice, it's clear what that voice is (even if it's difficult to describe in conventional political terms), but it's not inaccurate to say that the voice is left of center. Moreover, it must be, because that is the market for the show.

This is a good counterpoint that I hadn’t considered, honestly.

That even if a show is apolitical (or mostly apolitical like TAL), it will inherently have some political bias because the creators are inherently biased.

This will create a “niche” for the show, whether it’s intentional or not. Thanks for expanding my perspective on this.

Reminds me of a recent quote from a scientist interviewed by the NYT, who said that science is inherently political, because the system and people it’s built on are political.

Its not just about the creators bias. Any communication needs to be interpreted by sender and reciever and when that interpretation differs, communication starts to fail.

Recievers of such messages might see it as political when you speak about covid/masks, climate change, etc. no matter how hard you try to be unbiased. Unfortunately, anything can be a political symbol and you can either choose to accept their bias and avoid the symbol to stay "apolitical" or accept the "niche" you have been put into.

"99% of climatologist agree on ... yet, joining us, guru shananda, opposing it with equal air time" is a noble but net-negative attempt to address that bias.

> That even if a show is apolitical (or mostly apolitical like TAL), it will inherently have some political bias because the creators are inherently biased.

I agree, but I'd extend with one other observation: a show can be rigorously unbiased in its coverage of any particular topic, but extremely biased in the decision of what to cover. The "editorial whitespace" is almost invisible, but perhaps more important than what gets covered. If you never cover the good points of the other side, its easier to make them look like uneducated extremists.

For example, while writing one of the other comments on this thread I wondered what a "TAL for conservatives" would look like, and it started to become interesting. While I'm sure that a great many people on the right would initially react harshly to the stereotypical affectations of TAL (tinkly emo music, emotional narratives, soft speech, etc.), you could easily imagine a show where you borrowed this style, and applied it to stories about families losing their multi-generation business to overregulation, bureaucratic interactions with big government, veterans affairs, etc. It could even be quite powerful, because there's clearly a human story that drives all forms of political belief.

TAL touches on some of this, but I bet there's more than enough content to fill a TAL-sized niche on the right.

Different program but on same network, Planet Money often covers economics from the perspective of neoliberalism or establishment in short digestible episodes.

I love hearing good points from opponents. I live on this earth to learn and those are some of the better learning moments.

Meh, what was actually missing in media was accurate representation of political right goals.

Their good points are repeated all the time and their bad ppints are sanewashed. Their really bad points are ignored and you are called names when you accursately deacribe them. Until actually get their way at which point we blame the democrats for not opposing them strongly enough or for being supposed cause of backslash.

But, media and shows are afraid to show conservatives truthfully or in truly critical way.

I think TAL is pretty good about this, particularly when it comes to showing the actual fallout from various policies being implemented. And it's not strictly partisan (one of the stories I linked to in my writeup is about sex workers who were harmed by SESTA-FOSTA, which had plenty of Democratic support) or strictly negative, but obviously a lot of... serious and controversial policies have been implemented in the past few years so those get a fair bit of airtime.

In any case I think the "going and talking to real people" storytelling method is hard to beat. Just a couple weeks ago they did some stories about the immediate impacts of USAID cuts. And their episode about the "remain in Mexico" policy for asylum-seekers won the first-ever Pulitzer prize for radio reporting!

I'm just happy this article doesn't start with "So I fed all 863 episodes of TAL into ChatGPT and here's what I discovered..."

That’s what I expected too.

> On a purely topical level, it was also neat to revisit the last three decades of news and politics and pop culture more or less in reverse.

It’s a fictional drama but it’s really interesting to watch ‘Law & Order’ episodes from the 90s and throughout the years.

You can kind of witness the erosion of civil liberties over the seasons and as someone who experienced it in real life, it’s pretty wild to see (at least in a fictional universe) how the police state (this is probably a misnomer, but I fail to find the proper wording in this moment) is enabled to supersede civil liberties in the interests of ‘security’ and law enforcement.

Ripped from the headlines

In particular, the TV Series "24" was a blatant piece of "War Against Terrorism" propaganda.

The only other show that even comes close for me is The Moth. It's a much different format, but the story telling is consistently high quality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moth

Ira Glass’ take on the creative process [1] really resonated with me in the context of creating software or otherwise.

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GHrmKL2XKcE

I used to listen every week.

As I got older, the content got less interesting.

I think Ira is a hoopty frood; however, Ira lost touch with "American Life" like 20 years ago.

A telling sign of this is how they started just generically advertising the show - listeners must be down ...

> I think Ira is a hoopty frood

If you reference Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it’s “hoopy frood” without the ‘t’ :)

Necessary correction! You’ve saved us from the embarrassment of being demoted to marginally perilous (Earthlings prefer being mostly harmless, of course).

I wouldn’t say they prefer it. It was kinda insulting.

I’ve often wondered what This American Life would have been if it were British.

“Each week, we bring you stories of life in Britain. Not extraordinary life. Not even particularly interesting life. Just… life. Grey, tea-soaked, mildly apologetic life. Today’s theme: Standing Quietly in Queues While Contemplating Death and Crisps.”

They even joked about it in one episode (Bim below is British)

Ira: By the way, a very un-British way to organize her life, Bim says, to embrace delight wholeheartedly and un-self-consciously.

Bim: Fundamentally, I'm fighting against every urge in me, which is like, don't. Don't do that. Because I'm still British. I can't help that. So I'm always just thinking to myself, just going like, oh, is that too much? I feel very much like somebody's disapproving nanny. Stop that. That's too much emotion. You know, there's a reason why our national sound is a tut. [TUTS] Stop it.

It's an admonishment. It's like, stop it, you know? There used to be a talk show, and the theme song was a little child singing in this very sing-songy voice-- (SINGING) it'll never work. It'll never work. And that is how I feel about most things.

Ira Glass: That would never be a show here.

> I never listen to podcasts at anything other than 1x playback speed, so I at least deserve brownie points for that.

Not to start a flame war, but I personally consider it extremely poor taste to listen to high quality content on a faster speed. For something thrown together like a recorded lecture then it makes sense. But for an episode of This American Life? Please take a look in the mirror and ask yourself why.

I'll bite. In the limitations of my mortal life with it's predestined total allocated time for recorded media there's an infinite amount of high quality content. Savoring an expensive meal is just a way to get maximum value out of it but with endless cheap amounts why not devour it to my hearts content? Quality over quantity but what choice does one make when it's both?

Many of these stories have a small narrative arc with very direct emotions it means to invoke. A feeling of nostalgia, of happiness, of sadness, or of anxiety to name a few. Even at a faster speed it will make me think and make me laugh. It's not a work of profound art that I need to stop and contemplate. It's not a comedian's joke with precise timing.

In the end it is just audio entertainment. Episodic entertainment not freed from the shackles of churn, or the temptation to fabricate results for a good story. There's not much grand detail for my ears to wander and focus on the way my eyes would wander over paint on a canvas or a room filed with light and sound.

Love TAL. Been trying copy and learn from Ira Glass, and his many producers forever.

Some episodes hit so hard they can change how you think about something.

There is a fun graphic novel about how TAL and other narrative radio shows are made. I forget it's name, buts its great.

They also briefly had a TV show that I liked and spun off serial and many other shows and introduced me and the world to David Sedaris.

As an occasional listener to TAL I’m wondering how you feel about RadioLab, particularly the older series with Robert and Jad. I’ve always felt RadioLab and TAL fit within the same cabinet in my mind

Those 2 shows and 99% invisible cover my curiosities.

I haven't listened to radiolab in a while but I loved it. Some said it was too busy, but it was pretty immersive and told good science stories.

No discussion is complete without mentioning Car Talk.

For your existential life quandaries and occasional advice of a mechanical nature. ('Don't trust my brother!')

I know this American life is good and when I listen to it I almost always think it was worthwhile. However... his voice. It's just so hard for me to listen to him for some reason.

Same thing with Hidden Brain. Impactful episodes that can change your life but the guy's voice puts you to sleep so it's like taking an upper and a downer at the same time.

really missed a chance to write this up into "three acts."

"Act I: ..."

I considered it but thought it might be too obnoxious/gimmicky for readers who aren't already familiar with the show, lol.

Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. He spent his July 4th weekend setting the record for baking the world’s largest deep dish pizza, and as he tells it, having it for dinner was no small feat:

> It feels impossible to isolate anything bite-sized out of all that.

Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

Oh that's good... And apt considering deep dish is Chicago style!

Https warning on that site

Works fine for me?

>Not Before: Fri, 20 Jun 2025 00:04:33 GMT

>Not After: Thu, 18 Sep 2025 00:04:32 GMT

>Thumbprint: 19:6E:D2:41:D7:FA:90:93:CE:CA:2F:8A:AB:65:F5:FC:98:05:AE:B9

Reply on news.ycombinator.com