When I'm Not Reading

I'm having a love affair with my iPod. A couple of years ago, my hubby bought me an 80 gig iPod and I promptly loaded all of my music on it from his computer. We ditched all of our CDs and now have our music on another iPod attached to our stereo and all the music is backed up on his hard drive. But that's not the only thing I have on the old iPod, no not quite.

Over the last few years, I've become a huge fan of the radio storytelling program on NPR called "This American Life." Hosted by Ira Glass since 1995, the show is also available on iTunes as a FREE podcast if you subscribe. Past episodes appear as reruns from time-to-time, or can be purchased from iTunes 99 cents--a bargain at twice the price, in my opinion. I have about 140 episodes of the 363 produced as of this date, and while most have been free podcast downloads, I have been known to zip over to iTunes and drop $5 on a few new-to-me shows when I'm about to take a trip or if I'm in the mood for something new.

Twice a year, I donate to WBEZ in Chicago to help support the FREE podcast so everyone can enjoy TAL and this year I got a thank-you gift DVD of the first season of the This American Life television show on Showtime. Can't wait to jump into that!

Why am I addicted? Give it a listen for yourself and see. You can listen to most episodes FREE via your computer from the website. I've been known to lie in bed when I should be sleeping stifling guffaws at some of the tales being told like #323: The Super--especially Act. I by Jack Hitt. On the other hand, I've been moved to tears by some like #322: Shouting Across the Divide--Act. I, Serry and her husband, Muslims, move back to the USA because they feel it is a safer place to raise their children--then Sept. 11 happens.

Here is a quote from the TAL web page describing the show:

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.

So, here's my piece of advice for the day--if you've not listened to This American Life, do it. You won't be sorry. I guarantee it.

P.S. You don't have to be American to love this show because people are people the world over, in spite of what some politicians might tell you.