This American Life

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 pranks and stunts. There's one particular thing Jordan did that he did not want to talk to Ira about. (10 minutes)
• Act One: Harmon Leon is a writer and comedian whose cocktail party story abou...

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 the DIY criminal justice system his mom invented to deal with his bad behavior as a child. (20 minutes)
• Act Two: Producer Aviva DeKornfeld talks to Caveh Zahedi about a crime he may or ma...

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 more and more paranoid, until she realized she knew exactly who the thief was. (5 minutes)
• Act One: Ira’s conversation with Rachel Rosenthal continues. She tells the story of why it took h...

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 minutes)
• Act Two: Reporter Dana Ballout sifts through a very long list—the list of journalists killed in the Israel-Hamas War—and comes back with five small fragments of the lives of the pe...

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 poisoned after reporting on Russian’s invasion of Ukraine, and how she kept not believing it was happening. Bela Shayevich translated this story from Russian and reads it for us. (21 minutes)
• Ac...

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, Yousef tries to get his sisters to safety, in Rafah. (29 minutes)
• Act Two: Yousef is managing a camp of 60 people in Rafah, including his youngest sister, who is 8 months pregnant. Every day t...

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 of where to land after the October 7th attacks goes back and forth… and back… and forth. (28 minutes)
• Act One: For one kibbutz-dwelling family in Israel, the decision of where to land afte...

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 thinks people were really asking. (4 minutes)
• Act One: “What do you think about Beyoncé?” and other questions that are asked a lot, raised by people on first dates. (12 minutes)
• Act Two: When ...

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 Fogel talks about her friend Margaret Riley, who died earlier this week. (6 minutes)
• Act One: The story of a woman from Gaza City who ran out of words. Seventy-two days into the war, Youmna st...