This American Life

People starting over—sometimes because they want to, other times because they have to.

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• Prologue: Host Ira Glass talks to Jorge Just, who thought he'd started over successfully. He'd moved to New York, found an apartment that everyone told him was a great deal, things were looking good. Then a reality television show visited his building. (8 minutes...

Since October 7th, while the world has focused its attention on Gaza, the Israeli government has tightened the screws on the three million Palestinians in the West Bank in all sorts of dramatic ways. We travel to the West Bank to see these changes in person.

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• Prologue: Ira joins Hamed on his Monday commute. He has to navigate a constantly changing s...

How they organize the chaos of the world, for good and for bad.

• Prologue: Ira interviews David Wallechinsky, who wrote a wildly popular book in the 1970s called The Book of Lists, full of trivia and research, gathered into lists like "18 Brains" and "What They Weighed." The book sold millions of copies and had four sequels and a brief spin-off TV show. The list books were like the internet, before the internet. (12 minutes)
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The story of the most commonly performed surgery, and what goes wrong with it – terribly wrong – 100,000 times a year in the United States. We’re excited to bring you the first episode of The Retrievals, Season 2, the new show from longtime This American Life producer and editor Susan Burton. It’s from Serial Productions and The New York Times.

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• Pro...

People on a mission to achieve their goals before their window of opportunity closes.

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• Prologue: Guest host Emmanuel Dzotsi goes to a packed sports bar in Brooklyn for his favorite soccer team’s biggest game in years. (6 minutes)
• Act One: Connie Wang tells the story of a championship window she didn't realize she was in — until it was too late. (14 m...

On his first day in office, President Trump decided to freeze all U.S. foreign aid. Soon after, his administration effectively dissolved USAID—the federal agency that delivers billions in food, medicine, and other aid worldwide. Many of its programs have been canceled. Now, as USAID officially winds down, we try to assess its impact. What was good? What was not so good? We meet people around the world wrestling with these questions...

Conversations across a divide: People who are outside a war zone check in with family, friends, and strangers inside.

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• Prologue: The Hammash family’s group chat unfolds over texts, starting before the war. (8 minutes)
• Act One: When Yousef Hammash left Gaza a year ago, his sisters decided to stay behind. We hear about the toll that separation has take...

A show about people who are suddenly confronted with who they are.

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• Prologue: Guest host Aviva DeKornfeld tells Ira Glass about breaking into a community pool as a kid, and the split-second decision that has haunted her ever since. (4 minutes)
• Act One: Some people are great in a crisis. Others, not so much. Does that mean anything about who we reall...

People immersed in chaos try to solve for what it all adds up to.

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• Prologue: A scientist who is used to organizing data starts tracking scientific meetings that seem to exist only on paper—meetings that might decide the fate of years of research. The NIH website shows one reality; the empty conference rooms tell another story. She graphs the chaos. ...