It can be hard to know the right moment for something to happen.Prologue: When Jordan was going into his senior year of high school in small town Utah, he and his buddies all lived together in a house, daring each other into Jackass-style pran

828: Minor Crimes Division

17 days ago 59m 29s

People taking it upon themselves to solve the tiny, overlooked crimes of the world.Prologue: Host Ira Glass bikes around Manhattan with Gersh Kuntzman, in search of illegal license plates. (11 minutes)Act One: Writer Michael Harriot reexamines

587: The Perils of Intimacy

24 days ago 1h 2m

Mysteries that exist in relationships we thought couldn't possibly surprise us.Prologue: Ira talks to Rachel Rosenthal, who spent years trying to figure out who had stolen her identity. She was closing bank account after bank account, getting

827: All the King's Horses

Mar 24th, 2024 1h 1m

The things we break and the ones we can't fix.Prologue: Ira tells the stories of three things that broke–two of them in his own family. (8 minutes)Act One: A teenage whiz kid invents a new toy for Milton Bradley. Then the trouble starts. (28 m

826: Unprepared for What Has Already Happened

Mar 17th, 2024 1h 3m

People waking up to the fact that the world has suddenly changed.Prologue: Jackson Landers tells the story of a very strange decision he made one summer day. (6 minutes)Act One: Elena Kostyuchenko tells the story of how she was probably poison

825: Yousef

Mar 3rd, 2024 1h 5m

A series of phone calls to a man in Gaza named Yousef Hammash, between early December and now. He talks about what he and his family are experiencing, sometimes as they are experiencing it.Act One: Over the course of one week in December, Yous

824: Family Meeting

Feb 25th, 2024 57m 31s

Your mother and I have something we want to talk with you about.Prologue: A family sits down to discuss one thing. But then the true purpose of the meeting emerges. (9 ½ minutes)Act One: For one kibbutz-dwelling family in Israel, the decision

791: Math or Magic?

Feb 11th, 2024 57m 38s

When it comes to finding love, there seems to be two schools of thought on the best way to go about it. One says, wait for that lightning-strike magic. The other says, make a calculation and choose the best option available. Who has it right?P

823: The Question Trap

Feb 4th, 2024 56m 36s

An investigation of when and why people ask loaded questions that are a proxy for something else.Prologue: Host Ira Glass talks with producer Tobin Low about the question he got asked after he and his husband moved in together, and what he thi

822: The Words to Say It

Jan 28th, 2024 58m 1s

What it means to have words—and to lose them.Prologue: Sometimes we don’t want to say what’s going on because putting it into words would make it real. At other times, words don’t seem to capture the weight of what we want to say. Susanna Foge

821: Embrace the Suck

Jan 21st, 2024 58m 50s

People finding themselves in situations that are worse than they thought and deciding to really go with it.Prologue: A Boston woman takes her dog for a walk and suddenly finds herself in a terrible situation she never anticipated. The strange

567: What’s Going On In There?

1 Jan 14th, 2024 1h

Often we see someone’s situation from the outside and think we know exactly what’s going on. This week, we get inside and find out just how much more interesting the reality of it is.A mysterious tunnel is found in a forest in Toronto. Public

205: Plan B

1 Jan 7th, 2024 1h

There's the thing you plan to do, and then there's the thing you end up doing.Ira summarizes the results of an informal poll of about a hundred people, about whether they were living their Plan A or Plan B and recounts a moment from a short st

241: 20 Acts in 60 Minutes

Dec 31st, 2023 58m 24s

Instead of the usual "each week we choose a theme, and bring you 3 or 4 stories on that theme" business, we throw all that away and bring you 20 stories—yes, 20—in 60 minutes.Ira Glass introduces the idea of doing 20 stories in one hour.Act On

820: It Wouldn’t Be Make-Believe If You’d Believe In Me

Dec 24th, 2023 1h 2m

A major political party in a major swing state bets on a new leader: a total political outsider. How does that work out for them?Prologue: In 2022, Michigan Republicans ran anti-establishment candidates who claimed the last presidential electi

819: Special Bonus Podcast — Yousef’s Week

Dec 22nd, 2023 41m 21s

A series of conversations with a man in Gaza over the course of one week.Act One: One of our producers, Chana Joffe-Walt, had a series of conversations with a man in Gaza over the course of one week. They're so immediate – and particular to th

818: Stand Clear of the Closing Doors

Dec 17th, 2023 1h 17m

In the last year and a half, New York City has scrambled to try and provide shelter and services to over 150,000 migrants. We take a look at how that’s going.Prologue: In the middle of the night, host Ira Glass meets a woman on a mission at Po

786: It's a Game Show!

Dec 10th, 2023 1h 6m

Something we’ve never done before: true stories told in the form of a game show.Prologue: Jiayang Fan has this theory that because she's spent so much time thinking about her own accent when she speaks English, she believes that when she hears

817: The Cavalry Is Not Coming

Dec 3rd, 2023 1h

When you realize that help is not on the way, what do you do next?Prologue: Saddam Sayyaleh’s job right now is trying to get trucks filled with aid into Gaza and he knows it’s nowhere close to what’s actually needed. (10 minutes)Act One: Tim R

816: Poultry Slam

Nov 26th, 2023 56m 42s

During the highest turkey consumption period of the year, we bring you a This American Life tradition: stories of turkeys, chickens, geese, ducks, fowl of all kinds—real and imagined—and their mysterious hold over us.Prologue: Ira Glass talks

815: How I Learned to Shave

1 Nov 19th, 2023 1h

Things our dads taught us, whether they intended to or not.Prologue: Ira talks about the time his dad taught him to shave, and how unusual that was. (5 minutes)Act One: When Jackie read the obits for the man who had invented the famous Trapper

814: Parents Are People

Nov 12th, 2023 1h 3m

What happens when you realize the people in charge don’t have the answers.Prologue: Guest Host Chana Joffe-Walt asks her kids when they first encountered adult fallibility. (8 minutes)Act One: A middle schooler really wants to trust the adults

813: Is That What I Look Like?

1 Nov 5th, 2023 55m 30s

You've been seeing yourself, getting to know what you look like, your whole life. So why does it often take an outsider to see things about you that are obvious, and set you straight?Prologue: Guest host Nancy Updike talks about learning somet

319: And the Call Was Coming from the Basement

Oct 29th, 2023 58m 10s

For the lead up to Halloween, scary stories that are all true. Zombie raccoons, haunted houses—real haunted houses!—and things that go "EEEEK!!!" in the night. Plus, a story by David Sedaris in which he walks among the dead.Ira and Albert Donn

812: The Bear at the End of the Tunnel

Oct 22nd, 2023 1h 5m

People who have a good, long time to think about what they’re doing, look hard at what’s ahead of them, and decide to keep moving forward anyway.Prologue: Brothers Wes and Jeff spent a winter tagging black bears in Bryce Canyon National Park.