This American Life (Unofficial)

Three stories, three people, and three sets of maps. Stories of people trying to figure out where they are in the world in the most literal and least literal ways possible. We explore what it's like to be lost—how we all struggle in that moment not to give ourselves over to fear but try to enjoy it.

We think of crime as a kind of monolithic, menacing presence. But there are many kinds of crimes and many kinds of criminals. Through our crimes, we express who we are. Today we hear of three different criminals and three different kinds of crimes.

Stories about what happens when we don't do something. It turns out that not falling in love, not doing our jobs, not spending time with our families is every bit as vivid and complicated an experience as doing something.

Consider for a moment all the art forms that began in America: jazz, the blues, musical theater, rock n' roll, phonograph recordings, television, motion pictures, video games. But the art form in which America leads the world—more than any other—is the art of selling. In this show: case examples to prove the point.

For Father's Day, stories about fathers going out of their way to protect their kids, and kids going out of their way to protect their fathers.

Stories in which young people take matters into their own hands: Students who become political activists, students who pull pranks, violent students. Broadcast for the tenth anniversary of the crackdown at Tiananmen Square.

Stories of people going home to places they've never been before.

A program taped before live audiences in Seattle (thanks to public radio station KUOW) and at HBO's U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen. A taxonomy of different kinds of advice—and stories that illustrate why advice is so rarely taken.

There's a tourist monument called Four Corners, where Arizona, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico meet. In this episode, we try to tell the story of life in America through portraits of life on four different corners, in four different states across the nation.

This entire show is devoted to just one story. A former pimp tells how he and three childhood friends became pimps in the 1970s in Oakland, California. He explains all the elaborate "rules of the game" among pimps and prostitutes of that era. He didn't have the stomach for the violence of pimping, and failed as a pimp because of that. Tamar Brott reports.

Stories of people trying to do good: Why they often fail and why they occasionally succeed.

Stories of the end of the world. More people believe it's more imminent than you probably realize.

Stories of people moving to this country: what they see and hear about America that those of us who were born here don't necessarily see.

Stories of people who choose not to live every moment to the fullest or smell the roses, and instead choose to withdraw from life, to make themselves numb.

For Valentine's Day, stories of impossible love and heartbreak.

One thing that makes our country different from most others is this idea that you can re-create yourself as someone you'd prefer to be...sell everything off, head out west, start a new life. But what happens if you're too good at it? At throwing everything out and starting over?

Three stories of people pretending to be something they're not, and what happens to them.

With the number of prisoners in the United States rising rapidly, we present stories of their lives and the lives of their families and children.

Stories about seeing and being seen. Taped before a live audience in Town Hall in New York City in December 1998, this was a co-production with WNYC New York, featuring live music by the pop band They Might Be Giants and the This American Life Orchestra.

The family table is stage on which many family dramas are played out. We hear three stories, of three families, at three meals.

For Thanksgiving, the time of year when poultry consumption is highest, it's our annual program about turkeys, chickens, and fowl of all types.

Stories of the first day on the job, the first day in a relationship, the first day in school. On the first day, any first day, we're expected to live by the rules and customs of the culture we're entering, but we don't know those rules and customs just yet. These are stories of people trying to make the transition—and the difficulty of making the transition—in a new place, from outsider to insider.

Stories of people's last words before death. Their one last shot at figuring things out, summing things up. One last moment of asserting the fact of our existence, at the moment of our annihilation.

What happens when you suddenly strike it rich. And the power money has over our lives, for good and bad.

Germs, and how they make us leave the world of rational thinking.

I thought this was supposed to be easy. Tales from the simple life.

Five ways of mapping the world. One story about people who make maps the traditional way — by drawing things we can see. And other stories about people who map the world using smell, sound, touch, and taste. The world redrawn by the five senses.

People who love summer camp say that non-camp people simply don't understand what's so amazing about it. We attempt to bridge this gap of misunderstanding between camp people and non-camp people.

Two stories of children lying to themselves and others. A woman who'd been diagnosed with cystic fibrosis talks about the lies she told herself as a child. And Dan Gediman tells the story of how he was cast in the public TV show Zoom, which aired from 1972 to 1979, at the age of ten. Then he was cut from the cast before the show ever went on the air. So for years, he lied about it. He let friends believe he was on Zoom.

Writer Sarah Vowell and her twin sister re-trace the "Trail of Tears" — the route their Cherokee ancestors took when expelled from their own land by President Andrew Jackson. On the way, Sarah and her sister visit the land they would have grown up in had the Cherokees not been expelled, Andrew Jackson's home, and the land in Oklahoma where the Cherokee nation settled (and where Sarah and her sister were born). They reflect on their own American-ness and Cherokee-ness, and on the more difficult question: What's history good for, anyway?

For this Father's Day, stories in which fathers and their kids sit down and try to have an honest moment together. And stories about fathers who aren't close with their kids.

Two stories of people who try to cross the color line — and why it's still so hard. We hear the story of a failed interracial marriage and the story of a teenager from a poor inner city neighborhood (Cedric Jennings, pictured) who ends up at an Ivy League University — and how he barely survives there.

What's frustrating about music lessons, what's miraculous about them, and what they actually teach us. This show was recorded in front of a live audience at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, with help from KQED-FM, during the 1998 Public Radio Conference in San Francisco.

An NPR reporter leaves her three-year-old son and heads to Omaha—for cancer treatment—a last chance to save her life. After years of covering stories about medicine, Rebecca Perl enters the hospital as a patient. She moves from the world of healthy people into the world of sick ones. What she sees and what she learns.

With so many songs, movies, and books about the joy of the open road, it's hard to take just a normal road trip without huge expectations.

The story of Niagara Falls, a town that started with something huge—the falls—and built nothing lasting from it. During this hour, a special edition of our show: Stories about Niagara Falls, half of them from documentary producer Alix Spiegel, who went to the Falls and interviewed people living there; and half from playwright David Kodeski, who grew up in the town of Niagara Falls.

For the 100th episode of This American Life, a radio show about the pleasures of radio. About what makes radio so great, and what makes it so terrible.

Variations on what it means to be a girl and what it means to be a woman.

Stories about what it means to be a person who throws the first punch, and how hard it is to give up.

An assault on the idea of wackiness. And then, an appreciation of wackiness, and an analysis of wackiness in American culture. Thirteen ways to describe wackiness.

People who left their private lives and were seized by some huge historical moment.

How should we react to people who are in non-monogamous relationships? What should we think of these struggles with monogamy?

What happens during a "how-to," and what our how-to's say about us. Most how-to's promise that you'll not only learn skills, you'll be transformed.

Stories about couples that all take place decades after that moment their eyes first meet.

Stories about those moments when someone tries to tell you a little bit more about themselves than you'd really rather know.

Stories of people trying to escape the box of their own lives, and create new lives.

Stories of who we are on the phone, of things we learn on the phone, and of things that happen on the phone that don't happen anywhere else.

Stories about people who are destined to fight: brothers and sisters.

Numbers lie. Numbers cover over complicated feelings and ambiguous situations. In this week's show, stories of people trying to use numbers to describe things that should not be quantified.

Stories from David Sedaris's book of Christmas stories, Holidays on Ice, read onstage by David, Julia Sweeney and actor Matt Malloy.