838: Letters! Actual Letters!
This American Life
08/10/25
•58m
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When the best—and perhaps only—way to say something is to write it down.
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- Prologue: Ira goes out with a letter carrier, ‘Grace,’ as she delivers mail on her route. He learns about the people who bring us our mail and also how people treat their mail. (11 minutes)
- Act One: Writing a letter decades after an event that shaped her life was the only way that Nicole Piasecki could make some sense of it. (18 minutes)
- Act Two: Yorkshire, 1866. A farmer overcomes his timidity and writes a very important letter to a local beauty. (3 minutes)
- Act Three: When senior editor David Kestenbaum was still a rookie reporter, he wrote an email to a legend. Then he waited...and waited...for a reply. (6 minutes)
- Act Four: A woman writes an unusual letter on behalf of her husband. (1 minute)
- Act Five: Producer Zoe Chace compares the letters a person gets and the letters they wish they got. (12 minutes)
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Previous Episode
839: Meet Me at the Fair
August 3, 2025
•63m
Iowa has three million people and a million come to their State Fair, each with their own goals and dreams for the fair. We hang out with some of them, to see if they get what they hoped for.
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- Prologue: A big bull, a giant slide, and cowboys on horseback shooting balloons are just a few sights you can take in at the Iowa State Fair. Some people come for the spectacle, and some are the spectacle. (8 minutes)
- Act One: Bailey Leavitt comes from a family of carnies. For her, one of the most thrilling things she looks for at the fair is someone who is really good at luring people into spending money at their stand. She takes Ira on an insider’s search for “an agent.” (16 minutes)
- Act 2: Motley Crue pledged never to play the fairgrounds. Then they did. We wondered what that had been like for them. They agreed to an interview, but then they flinched. (1 minute)
- Act Two: What life lessons can kids learn at the 4-H rabbit competition? A lot. (11 minutes)
- Act Three: The Iowa State Fair awarded coveted slots to just nine new food vendors this year. All of them are run by people who already own restaurants or who’ve done other big fairs. All except for an unlikely newcomer: Biscuit Bar. (19 minutes)
- Act Four: As the ferris wheel goes dark and the fair is closing down, one game is racing to meet their quota. Ira watches until the end. (3 minutes)
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Next Episode
831: Lists!!!
August 17, 2025
•64m
How they organize the chaos of the world, for good and for bad.
- Prologue: Ira interviews David Wallechinsky, who wrote a wildly popular book in the 1970s called The Book of Lists, full of trivia and research, gathered into lists like "18 Brains" and "What They Weighed." The book sold millions of copies and had four sequels and a brief spin-off TV show. The list books were like the internet, before the internet. (12 minutes)
- Act One: John Fecile talks to his brother, Pat, about a list their other brother made before he died. They each have different ideas about what the list means and how they feel about it. (14 minutes)
- Act 2: A brief visit with Bobby, who keeps a list in his phone of all the dogs in his neighborhood and their names to save him from the awkwardness of not knowing the name of someone’s dog – because people get upset if you don’t remember their dog’s name. (3 minutes)
- Act Two: Reporter M. Gessen talks to Russians living in America and elsewhere about the lists the Russian government has put them on in the last few years. M. Gessen is also on one of these lists. Each list has its own complex rules and potential consequences for the people on the lists and for their family members who live in Russia. (28 minutes)
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