This American Life (Unofficial)

An ode to life's daily practices, and what you learn from doing a thing every single day.

What happens when your own community suddenly turns on you?

Stories about the power of blood.

How the pandemic has thrown college admissions process into a kind of slow-motion chaos. One of the biggest changes: most colleges have stopped requiring the SAT. For decades, there’s been a debate over whether schools should drop the test. What’s it mean that it finally happened?

This week, three men who came together to protest the murder of George Floyd. They were unified, loud, and impressive, but over time these three friends end up in three very different places.

Why we tell them, and what happens after we do.

Summoning up stuff that’s usually hidden down deep.

Things we’ve lost in the past year — since the first American coronavirus case — that we haven’t talked about so much. Gossip. The chance to make new friends. And much larger stuff.

There's always someone whose job it is to decide if you measure up.

People going to great lengths to throw a special Christmas for their families.

What the day-to-day business of saving the world looks like. We visit with one group of people who are trying to rescue us from something very large, and another group trying to rescue us from something very small.

To commemorate our show’s 25th year, we have a program about people who were born the year our show went on the air.

For Thanksgiving weekend, stories about food, and people who set out on very particular missions with food.

Stories of people changing their minds.

People grappling with an endless presidential election.

Ahead of the election, we have stories about people trying to live in the unreality that defines this moment. Election officials combat a contagion among their very own workers; people who've never owned guns suddenly go buy them; and two women who allege they were sexually assaulted by the president compare notes.

People finding themselves stuck in small spaces—an elevator, an attic, an orchestra pit—trying to make sense of their new surroundings.

People who are worried — or not worried enough! — about what's hurtling unstoppably towards them.

A doctor who breaks the law might go to jail like anybody else. But who decides if that doctor gets to keep their medical license? On today’s show, the not-often-talked-about realm of licensing boards, and the disturbing decisions they sometimes make.

Stories of people who are tied together, but imagine radically different futures. In one case, a movie star and her ex-husband plot against Kim Jong-Il. In another, a woman stalks her doppelgänger. And sometimes, one bed is the basis for an entire relationship, even for a man who almost never sees the person who shares his bed.

At a time when going to the movies is mostly out of the question, we bring the movies to you.

Sarah Vowell and her twin sister Amy headed out on the road to retrace the Trail of Tears – the route their Cherokee ancestors took when expelled from their own land – and reflected on the question, what are we supposed to do with the mix of good and bad that is this country?

Teachers, students and parents around the country have been bracing themselves all spring and summer long for the start of this unprecedented school year. This week, it's here.

It’s the last few weeks of summer, so we’re going to the beach! This week, stories from the surf and sand.

From the moment we wake up in the morning there are a trillion rules — big and little — governing our lives. But sometimes, we encounter one we just can't abide by. In a pitched moment of rule-questioning, a show about rules and the people who break them.

Years ago, producer Chana Joffe-Walt started reporting on one school in New York. She thought the story was about segregation and inequality in public schools. But the more she looked into it, the more she realized she was witnessing something else. She was seeing the inordinate power of white parents at this school. This is the first episode of Chana’s new mini-series: Nice White Parents.

In space, in the ocean, by ourselves, or with others—we’re all just figuring out how to be apart.

As China's new national security law tightens its control over Hong Kong, we return to our episode about last fall's anti-government protests and check in to see how people are responding.

Michigan has passed its Covid-19 peak, and the state has started opening up. But it’s still been intensely difficult for the staff in the ICU at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. We've embedded with them over the past few months, and tracked how this pandemic has changed them and their city.

An exhaustingly familiar story. Maybe it’ll have a different ending this time, but maybe not. We hear what different people said and did one weekend in reaction to the killing of George Floyd.

In this moment of sorrow, protest, and rage in the wake of George Floyd’s death, we offer this as a break from the dreadful present: our show about Afrofuturism. It’s a way of looking at Black culture that’s fantastic and hopeful, which feels especially urgent during a time without a lot of optimism. Featuring the song "The Deep" by clppng.

Lissa Yellow Bird searches for missing people. Cold cases, mostly. People no one else is looking for. It’s not her job, but a lot of Native Americans go missing and their cases remain unsolved, so families often ask Lissa for help. But then, Lissa’s own niece goes missing.

While sports of all kinds have been put on pause, we bring you favorite stories from back when people were still on football fields, boxing rings, and basketball courts.

Last week, our episode "The Out Crowd" won the very first Pulitzer Prize ever awarded to a radio show. This is the episode that won, with some updates on the stories. Hear what the Trump administration’s "Remain in Mexico" policy actually means, on the ground, at the Mexican border.

During a time when a lot of us feel like we are living in a holding pattern, stories of people feeling stuck.

Words can seem so puny and ineffective sometimes. On this show, we have stories in which ordinary people make last ditch efforts to get through to their loved ones, using a combination of small talk and not-so-small talk.

Desperate to know what happened to his family, a man obsessively decodes the only information about them he can get. That, and other stories of people looking into the void for answers.

Sometimes a sketch of a thing needs filling in for its true significance to be known.

We leave the normal realm of human error and enter the territory of huge breakdowns.

The coronavirus has now fully arrived in the United States. This week, stories of people trying to rise to that challenge, in some pretty extreme situations.

This week, as the staff creates the episode from their apartments and houses, with our host in quarantine, in this moment when everyone’s reaching out to the people they love, we put together a collection of family stories, with some timely stuff at the top.

Things do not seem fine at all, but it’s hard to say why.

People squirming in a world where everything is rated and reviewed.

People looking everywhere to find a place—any place—where, for once, they don't have to be the odd man out.

We return to our story about Abdi Nor from 2015, with some big news about his life today. When we first broadcast the story, Abdi was a Somali refugee living in Kenya desperately trying – against long odds – to get to the United States. Then he got the luckiest break of his life: he won a lottery that puts him on a short list for a U.S. visa. But before he could cash in his golden ticket, the police started raiding his neighborhood, targeting refugees.

In these dark, combative times, we attempt the most radical counterprogramming we could imagine: a show made up entirely of stories about delight.

Other universes that are just like our own, but with one small difference.

For the holidays, stories of families finally addressing the thorny thing they’ve never really talked about.

There's a lot that can be gained from unearthing the past -- learning about oneself, learning about others. But, it doesn't always go how you'd expect.

Reports from the frontlines of the Trump administration's "Remain in Mexico" asylum policy. We hear from asylum seekers waiting across the border in Mexico, in a makeshift refugee camp, and from the officers who sent them there to wait in the first place. This episode won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for audio reporting, the first ever given for audio journalism.