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| RADIO | Broadcast July 4 - July 6 |
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Robert (pictured) had a bad reputation as a kid who didn't do his schoolwork and had little respect for adults. But his best friend, Lilly (holding picture), thought he was misunderstood. After Robert died, Lilly decided to step in and do for him what he could never do for himself: tell people how great he was. This and other stories of what happens when one person becomes a proxy for another, either by choice or by accident—including one by Davy Rothbart about the time he made a life-changing decision that wasn't really his to make. More...
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| RADIO | Broadcast June 27 - June 29 |
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Governments are always looking for ways to change behavior—stopping people from driving drunk, or encouraging them to recycle. This week, we have stories of social engineering on a smaller scale. In one story, a man convinces his friend to try something new, turn his back on a good paying salary and an apartment...and become homeless. More...
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Saturday, June 28, 2008
TAL T-shirt Design Contest
Every once in a while, listeners ask if we have a new This American Life t-shirt. And we tell them no. And then, well, maybe they feel sad. We assume it's just sad, and not something worse, like morose..or despondent. Truth is, it's been a while since we've had a shirt idea that we really like.
This is where you come in. That's right: we're holding a t-shirt design contest!
Create a This American Life t-shirt, and your art could end up on the backs (or fronts, depending on your design) of thousands of people. Because.... drum rolllll.... the shirt is going to be our thank-you gift during the next national pledge drive. Then later, after the drive, we'll make it available in our webstore.
Oh, and the winner will also get a cash prize of $1000. Okay, it won't be cash. It'll be a check.
The deadline will be in late July, and we'll post complete contest rules and submission instructions soon. In the meantime, start working up your design. We're excited to see what you come up with!
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Monday, June 2, 2008
Help Keep Our Podcast and Streaming Free
Hello, listeners.
It's been a year-and-a-half since we decided to offer our show as a free, weekly podcast, and that's been a crazy, whopping success. But because so many people—sometimes more than half a million—are downloading and streaming our show each week, the Internet bandwidth to distribute the program this way costs $152,000 per year. We want to keep offering This American Life for free. You want us to keep offering the show for free. Our home station, Chicago Public Radio, doesn't need to make money on our podcast, but they can't lose $152,000 a year on it, either.
We think we can cover the whole cost by coming to you, hopefully just twice a year, virtual hat in hand. If you listen regularly over the Internet, please pitch in a little cash. To all the people who gave six months ago, a sincere thank you, and please consider giving a small amount again. A dollar from every Internet listener would more than pay for everything, but of course not everyone's going to give, so consider a $5 donation. It'll cover you and a few other people for a year of listening. If you donate more than a few bucks, you can choose thank-you gifts—including some stuff you can't get anywhere else. One of the items is a CD of "The Giant Pool of Money," our incredibly popular, recent episode about the mortgage crisis, which many listeners wanted to purchase as a gift.
Our dream is that we'll get you and most of our Internet listeners to chip in at the $1 or $5 level, and that'll cover everything. We'd love to take care of this expense with a flood of little donations from the people who actually listen to our show this way. And of course, if you feel that getting an hour of our show every week is worth more to you than a dollar a year, we'd be grateful for anything else you'd care to contribute. We really want to keep the podcast free.
Thanks so much,
Ira Glass
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Monday, May 5, 2008
Let Us Know What You Thought of Our Cinema Event
 A big thanks to the more than 20,000 of you who turned out to your local movie theaters last Thursday night for This American Life - Live! No other radio show had ever tried a nationwide cinema simulcast, and we didn't really know what to expect. So we were thrilled that so many people came out, and even more thrilled to read the positive feedback on your blogs (thanks, Google Alerts!).
It was more technologically complex than anything we'd ever attempted—with shots from five HD cameras intercut live, video playback, Ira synching audio to visuals, and everything beamed onto 330 screens across the country. We're amazed that nothing exploded.
Oh, and remember when Ira read the wedding proposal from the guy in a theater in Peoria? She said yes.
We weren't able to send spies to every theater, so tell us what you thought of the show! Leave us comments on MySpace and Facebook, and add your photos to our Flickr pool (Tag 'em tal-live, and give us some details in the description, willya?)!
Thanks, again, to everyone who joined us on Thursday. You're awesome!
Pictured: The satellite truck that made the whole shebang possible. Photo by Seth Lind.
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