This American Life (Unofficial)

Two stories of how to get money from strangers. In both stories, the money is made by people who make the strangers feel good about themselves and about their nation.

Humans have turned chicken and turkey into what we want them to be, which means that chickens and turkeys are a mirror of ourselves.

The story of Harold Washington, the greatest politician you've probably never heard of, and the white backlash that was set off when he became Chicago's first Black mayor.

Stories of outsiders who want to be insiders, and vice versa.

Stories of people who are haunted, not by ghosts or phantoms, but by other people.

Americans who love their guns, and the Americans who love them.

Stories of people engaged in a battle with nature — a battle they don't stand much chance of winning. Most of the show is Scott Carrier's story of trying for twelve years to chase down and catch an antelope by foot.

People stuck in the wrong decade, or simply carrying a lot of the props from another decade.

How bad is bad enough to count? To go to hell?

Can the secular world and the religious world understand each other? We ask that question while visiting Colorado Springs, Colorado, where Pastor Ted Haggard at the New Life Church has put in place a project to pray in front of the home of every person in the city, systematically, block by block and house by house. He's also helped organize a 24-hour, 365-day-a-year "prayer shield" over the city; all-night prayer vigils; and more.

The mob as portrayed in movies, and as it is in real life. And its hold over us.

An episode from our show's early days: Stories about what happens when strangers are kind — and when they're not.

What happens when people with one common interest gather in monstrous, fluorescent-lit halls for the weekend? Sometimes they drive each other crazy, sometimes they fall in love.

The darker side of the art world: petty jealousies, competitiveness, failure. And also what's so great about art.

An idiosyncratic first-person travelogue about race relations and tourism from radio producer Rich Robinson and television producer Josh Seftel. Their radio story is about a trip they took to the new South Africa. Rich Robinson is black. Josh Seftel is white. The interracial pair travel through the still mostly-segregated society and have very different opinions about what they see, especially when it comes to some distant relatives of Josh's in South Africa.

Stories of people trying to do exactly what the doctors say they can't — or shouldn't.

When you read other people's mail, you can't help but try to fill in between the lines. You try to decipher the stories of the people who wrote the letters. We hear four stories of people who read other people's mail, and what happens to them once they get caught up in these other lives.

How many of our parents move to some place — some dream house — with some vision of a new life in the new place, and move the family with them, hoping it works out for the kids. Three stories on this theme.

A show for July 4th weekend. We begin with perhaps the most moving, poetic inaugural speech in American history, and look at its legacy today. In his second inaugural address, Lincoln wondered aloud why God saw fit to send the slaughter of the Civil War to the United States. His conclusion: that slavery was a kind of original sin for the United States, for both North and South, and all Americans had to do penance for it.

Could it be more obvious? Stories in which someone's dream is someone else's nightmare. All of us get into these situations with strangers, with the people we love most, with our own parents, with our children.

Are people having experiences on the Internet they wouldn't have anywhere else? Several weeks ago, This American Life invited listeners to help answer that question.

Notes and stories about the Canadians among us. Are they in fact any different from red-blooded Americans? They claim they're not. Skeptical Americans put their position to the test.

Stories for the start of summer. We want summer to be this wonderful break, but so often it fails to deliver. We hear Ron Carlson's short story about a summer job delivering tanks of oxygen to the infirm, Scott Carrier takes a river vacation, and more.

People whose lives are organized around one thing.

Stories of people trying to get rich quick or otherwise make something for nothing. As everyone knows, there's no such thing as something for nothing. You always pay a price.

Stories of when things go wrong. Really wrong. When you leave the normal realm of human error, fumble, mishap, and mistake and enter the territory of really huge breakdowns. Fiascos. Things go so awry that normal social order collapses. This week's show is a philosophical inquiry in the nature of fiascos — perhaps the first ever.

Usually we talk about death as a tragedy, a mystery, a hard-to-comprehend fact of life. But in addition to all that, for all sorts of people it's also ... a job. This week, stories of undertakers, homicide detectives, slaughterhouse workers, enunculators, autopsy pathologists, exterminators, and others. Does their contact with death teach them something we should learn?

Stories about people who are not afraid of fire, though perhaps they should be.

Stories of small town life: the claustrophobia and freedom people feel in small towns, the yearning people feel in small towns. And three teenagers in one of the harshest urban environments explain how the public housing projects are like a small town.

Stories about the delivery business and the people in it. UPS men, bike messengers, FedEx dispatchers.

Stories of people changing their name — some to create a new identity, some to con people. Name changes are particularly American stories: they're the dream of starting over with a clean slate. They're Ellis Island and 12-step programs, the move westward and self help, Marilyn Monroe and Malcolm X and the Artist Formerly Known as Prince, all rolled up in one.

A few months ago, radio producer Sandy Tolan was supposed to do a documentary about strippers with an aspiring writer — and stripper — named Susan. A few days before they were to begin working together, Susan disappeared, presumed dead.

Stories, tributes, and attempts to understand the Chairman of the Board.

For Valentine's Day, stories about our parents falling in love. And troubles with their love. From Hilton Als, Scott Carrier, Julie Showalter, a magazine column called Men My Mother Dated and others. The idea for this show was inspired by Delmore Schwartz's classic 1937 work of American fiction about his parents' courtship: In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories.

Stories about the border between mental health and mental illness.

Stories of people who handle dead animals. Don't worry — it's not as gross as it sounds. In fact, not disgusting at all. A story by George Saunders about an animal control man who falls in unrequited love. A woman who studies illuminated manuscripts, whose pages look like paper but are in fact animals. And other stories.

Kevin Kelly was in Jerusalem. For reasons too complicated to go into here, he ended up sleeping on the spot where Jesus was supposedly crucified. After Kevin awoke, he got rid of all his possessions. He visited his parents and brothers and sisters for the last time. That, and other stories of starting life over, including a visit to a courtroom in Los Angeles where people go to change their names.

Stories about the animalness of animals, the irreducible ways in which they are not human.

Kitty Felde shows a side of the Yugoslav War Crimes Trials that hasn't been discussed anywhere: a portrait of Americans at the International Tribunal. And other stories.

Stories about the intersection of Christmas and retail, originally broadcast in 1996 when our show was only a year old. Including David Sedaris's story "Santaland Diaries," which first aired on NPR's Morning Edition in a much shorter version.

Though being gay no longer has much of a stigma in some parts of the country, being a sissy still does — even among gay men. In this show we have a number of surprising and unusual stories of sissies, their families, and why people still get so upset about them.

Four stories about people struggling at the fringes of our nation's media/music/infotainment industry.

In the midst of the five biggest poultry-consumption weeks of the year—the five weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, when Americans consume one-fourth of all the turkey they eat in a year—This American Life presents stories about turkeys, chickens, ducks, and fowl of all kinds.

Inspired by a spate of new Chicago stage adaptations of the Faust story, This American Life brings you stories of people who made a deal with the devil.

Three stories of people trying to forget the past and move on.

More stories of the election you can't hear anywhere else.

Stories from acclaimed storyteller Spalding Gray and others.

This week: A show for Halloween. Stories of things that are supposed to be scary, but aren't.

Simulated worlds, Civil War reenactments, wax museums, simulated coal mines, fake ethnic restaurants, an ersatz Medieval castle and other re-created worlds that thrive all across America.

Radio producer Scott Carrier quit his job at a low moment in his life. His wife left him and took the kids. And he got a job interviewing schizophrenics for some medical researchers. After doing it a while, he began to wonder if he was a schizophrenic himself. And more stories.