845: A Small Thing That Gives Me a Tiny Shred of Hope
This American Life
11/03/24
•61m
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A wee flame, flickering in the dark.
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- Prologue: Who’s trying to bridge the gap between Blue America and Red America? Ira gets a glimpse of one guy who might be able to do just that. (3 minutes)
- Act One: A politically divided couple searches for a news source they both can trust. (26 minutes)
- Act Two: "June" is making a tactical decision about her vote this election. (13 minutes)
- Act Three: Frank Filocomo thinks people care too much about politics when it comes to dating. His dates don’t necessarily agree. (10 minutes)
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Previous Episode
660: Hoaxing Yourself
October 27, 2024
•58m
People who tell a lie and then believe the lie more than anyone else.
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- Prologue: Sean Cole explains why he decided that he would speak with a British accent—morning, noon and night—from the age of fourteen until he was sixteen, and how he believed the lie that he was British must be true. (3 minutes)
- Act One: The story of two young people who, in their search to figure out who they were, pretended to be people they weren't. Both were from small towns; both took on false identities. For two years in high school, producer Sean Cole spoke with a British accent. As a freshman in college, Joel Lovell told lies about his own diet and about his parents. (15 minutes)
- Act Two: The story of a con man, one of the most successful salesmen in a long-running multimillion-dollar telemarketing scam, who finally got caught when he was conned himself. Producer Nancy Updike talks about the case with Dale Sekovich, Federal Trade Commission investigator. (16 minutes)
- Act Three: Shalom Auslander reads his true story, "The Blessing Bee." It's about the time when, as a third-grader at an Orthodox Jewish school, Shalom saw his chance to both make his mom proud, and push his drunken father out of the picture. Part of his scheme involved winning the school's bee on the complicated Hebrew blessings you say before eating certain foods. The other part of the scheme: Sinning. (19 minutes)
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Next Episode
846: This Is the Cake We Baked
November 10, 2024
•62m
With Donald Trump’s victory this week, many people looked at the election results and thought, yeah, this is the country I thought it was. For some people, that was a hopeful thing. For others, kind of the opposite. This week, we talked with people who helped make it happen and some who are looking to what’s next.
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- Prologue: Ira talks with Zoe Chace about watching Trump’s victory from an ecstatic room in Michigan. Then he checks in with a DC cop who was injured at the Capitol on January 6. (7 minutes)
- Act One: Trump has claimed that he will be able to deport between 15 and 20 million people. But neither he nor his team have spelled out exactly how they’d do it. Producer Nadia Reiman looked into what mass deportation could actually look like on the ground if and when it comes to pass. (17 minutes)
- Act Two: Trump won record numbers of Latino voters this year. Ike Sriskandarajah spent the day with a guy in Pennsylvania who's been working to bring Latino voters to Trump for years. (15 minutes)
- Act Three: Ira talks with two of Trump’s “political enemies” about their post-election plans. (8 minutes)
- Act Four: Ten different states had abortion rights measures on their ballots this election. Producer Miki Meek got curious about a particular kind of political ad that aired in many of those states and called up a few of the women whose stories were featured in them. (9 minutes)
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