This American Life (Unofficial)

What is this thing? This thing called love, that is. For answers, we explore the romance novel industry, a $1.5 billion empire run almost entirely by and for women. Plus, relearning the rules of romance from the other side of the gender line. And Sarah Vowell tells the story of the Greatest Romance of the 20th Century.

Stories of very unusual pen pals, including a ten-year-old girl from Michigan who befriends Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega. A show from 2003 that we’re bringing back with news this week of Noriega’s death.

What is it about them, our mean friends? They treat us poorly, they don't call us back, they cancel plans at the last minute, and yet we keep coming back for more. Popular bullies exist in business, politics — everywhere. How do they stay so popular?

In real life, we usually never get to invent ingenious solutions, like the guy in the old TV series MacGyver. Today, four real stories in which real people invent amazingly clever solutions to their problems.

Stories about what the passage of time can do to someone. When each story starts, the world's aligned one way. Years pass—or sometimes just months—and everything's different.

Living behind enemy lines among the enemy, it's sometimes hard to remember why you're fighting in the first place.

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.

Stories of people putting themselves in charge in very unlikely, unpromising circumstances.

Stories of people who are lost, histories that are lost, and things that are lost. This show was recorded onstage in front of audiences on a five-city tour in May 2003. The cities: Boston, Washington DC, Portland Oregon, Denver and Chicago. Featuring house band OK Go.

Stories of what can and cannot be translated. A short, non-athletic, bespectacled East Asian studies major who couldn't make his high school basketball team finds himself in the NBA as the personal translator for the first-ever Chinese pro basketball superstar, Yao Ming. Plus, a Palestinian man teaches Hebrew classes in the Gaza strip to Palestinians eager to learn news from the other side of the checkpoint.

Sure, John Kerry got in trouble for using the phrase, but we have no fear. Because we know that regime change, like charity, begins at home. This week: Stories of regime change in everyday life—people switching jobs, people switching families, businesses dying and new ones starting in their place.

Stories from a contradictory recession.

Stories from the beginnings of the war in Iraq, and how it compares with wars in our country's past.

Does talking about it really help? Stories where it does, and stories where it doesn't, including a man who tried to battle his fears by listing them. He ended up with a list 138 items long.

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

It's been said that truth is the first casualty of war. In this week's show, we try to get the real stories from three very different wars.

Stories of people trying to save the world one person at a time, and stories of sudden truths delivered by complete strangers.

In January 2002, the President of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, spoke at Georgetown University. There he urged Afghan-Americans, especially young ones, to move back to Afghanistan.

Stories of some of the secrets our government keeps: of imprisonment, deportation, and spying, and how those secrets affect us.

Two stories about love, and what people mean when they use the word love. Or, looked at differently, two modern-day reinterpretations of the Frog Prince story. One concerns a pretty man falling in love with an unlikely woman. And an unlikely woman falling in love with a pretty bird.

Stories about why we should go to war versus stories of why we shouldn't.

Stories of people stuck in their own personal reruns—moments or episodes that they revisit over and over again.

Home movies are often all the same—kids on the beach, people getting married, birthday parties—so why do we make and watch so many of them? Maybe it's because the story they show and the story they tell are different. In this show, we bring you five stories that all start with a fairly typical home movie but go on to tell a unique story.

In this week's show, we celebrate the oft-beleaguered and misrepresented middleman. "Cut out the middleman! Death to the middleman!" the angry hordes cry. Not us. We say, "Hi, middleman. Here are three splendid acts to toast your subtle virtues."

In this show we take the classifieds from one Sunday edition of the Chicago Sun-Times and one edition of the local alternative weekly Chicago Reader, and fill a program with stories that come from the ads. Through the jobs offered, the missed connections, the crap that people sell each other and the musicians' ads we get a portrait of a whole city.

Some people have a rather dark worldview that divides people into two groups: Suckers and non-suckers. We hear their stories.

Stories of people traveling under fake papers, false identities, not for power or personal gain, but for their own deeper personal reasons.

Stories of people getting more testosterone and coming to regret it. And of people losing it and coming to appreciate life without it. The pros and cons of the hormone of desire. And we get our testosterone measured, as a staff.

Stories of innocent people fleeing from dangerous men in cars who shoot at them. Unlike in the movies, the pursuers aren't foreign agents or rogue CIA agents, but drunk off-duty policemen and small-town teenagers. Real-ife high-speed chases: who gets chased...and who does the chasing.

A group of inmates at a high-security prison rehearse and stage a production of the last act—Act V—of Hamlet.

It's been two years since the Mideast peace process collapsed, two years in which each side has done terrible things to the other side. We wanted to understand what that has done to people living in Israel and the West Bank, and to see if anyone is feeling hope.

Stories of people who go to great lengths to give people what they want, and how they're rewarded sometimes, misguided other times.

Stories about people who turned to the experts and got horrible advice. One story is about people who went to therapists who made them sicker. Another is about how the hosts of Car Talk inadvertently (or perhaps intentionally) destroyed a car belonging to one of their own employees.

We take the stately laws of physics—laws which mathematicians and scientists have spent centuries discovering and verifying—and apply them to the realm of human relationships, to see if they shed useful light on our daily lives.

Stories of people who are trying to convince you that the Devil is there, whispering in your ear...and stories of people who try to deny he's there, against some very heavy evidence.

Stories about what happens when a new guy comes on the scene, and changes the way everyone who was already there relates to each other.

Stories about what happens when you name names. When you turn someone over to the authorities, it can set into motion lots of huge, unintended consequences. A reporter turns over an interviewee to the FBI. A group of teachers turn in their principal. A director turns in his Communist colleagues to the United States Congress.

After a decade in which DNA evidence has freed over 100 people nationwide, it's become clear that DNA evidence isn't just proving wrongdoing by criminals, it's proving wrongdoing by police and prosecutors. In this show, we look at what DNA has revealed to us: how police get innocent people to confess to crimes they didn't commit and how they get witnesses to pin crimes on innocent people.

Two stories that are worst case scenarios for any parent. In each story, when you take apart what happened and how it happened, it's hard to see how anyone could've prevented things from going bad.

Stories of high drama from America's workplaces — surprising, emotional places full of the greed, jealousy, and ambition of real politics.

Stories about people who were told that they're different. Some of them were comfortable with it. Some didn't understand it. And some understood, but didn't like it.

Life aboard the USS John C. Stennis, an aircraft carrier that was stationed in the Arabian Sea and supported bombing missions over Afghanistan. Only a few dozen people on board actually fly jets. It takes the rest of the crew — over 5,000 people — to keep them in the air. This American Life producers visited the Stennis in 2002, about six weeks into its deployment. The hour is devoted to this one story.

There's the thing you plan to do, and then there's the thing you end up doing.

The story of how the American Psychiatric Association decided in 1973 that homosexuality was no longer a mental illness.

Personal recordings one person made for just one other person, including what some have called the greatest phone message ever.

Stories of faith: losing it, talking about it, constructing it, and working within it.

In a time of war, when we're all feeling a heightened sense of "us" and "them," we wanted to take up the problem of "them." Some people need a good "them." Other people tend to see all "thems" as more like us. And so we bring you three stories of people misperceiving the them-miness of them.

Of all the wars to win, perhaps the propaganda war is the hardest. In this show, we bring you stories of propaganda wars past and present, by those who fought them and those who survived them.

The true story of an abandoned house, discovered by a young boy in the 1970s, and the mysterious family who disappeared without a trace.