849: The Narrator
This American Life
12/15/24
•58m
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Banias is an 8-year-old kid living in Gaza. And she has a story to tell — many stories, in fact.
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- Prologue: While on the phone with reporter Maram Hamaid in Gaza, producer Chana Joffe-Walt gets interrupted by Maram’s daughter––Banias, eight, who grabs the phone from her mother and starts telling us about her life. The narrator arrives. (8 minutes)
- Part One: Banias, an 8-year-old in Gaza, tells us about her life––her friends, the games she plays, the things she cares about. Everything but the war going on around her. (25 minutes)
- Part Two: Banias talks about the war. (20 minutes)
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Previous Episode
815: How I Learned to Shave
December 1, 2024
•60m
Things our dads taught us, whether they intended to or not.
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- Prologue: Ira talks about the time his dad taught him to shave, and how unusual that was. (5 minutes)
- Act One: When Jackie read the obits for the man who had invented the famous Trapper Keeper notebook, she was very surprised. As far as she knew, the inventor was very much alive. It was her dad. Not the guy in the obit. (15 minutes)
- Act Two: A father and son find themselves in a very traditional relationship. Until the end. (21 minutes)
- Act Three: Simon Rich reads his short story "History Report," in which a father explains the sex robots of the future. And other things as well. (14 minutes)
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Next Episode
198: How to Win Friends and Influence People
January 5, 2025
•58m
People climbing to be number one. How do they do it? What is the fundamental difference between us and them?
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- Prologue: Ira Glass talks with Paul Feig, who, as a sixth-grader, read the Dale Carnegie classic How to Win Friends and Influence People at the urging of his father. He found that afterward, he had a bleaker understanding of human nature—and even fewer friends than when he started. (9 minutes)
- Act One: David Sedaris has this instructive tale of how, as a boy, with the help of his dad, he tried to bridge the chasm that divides the popular kid from the unpopular — with the sorts of results that perhaps you might anticipate. (14 minutes)
- Act Two: After the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, U.S. diplomats had to start working the phones to assemble a coalition of nations to combat this new threat. Some of the calls, you get the feeling, were not the easiest to make. Writer and performer Tami Sagher imagines what those calls were like. (6 minutes)
- Act Three: To prove this simple point—a familiar one to readers of any women's magazines—we have this true story of moral instruction, told by Luke Burbank in Seattle, about a guy he met on a plane dressed in a hand-sewn Superman costume. (13 minutes)
- Act Four: Jonathan Goldstein with a story about what it's like to date Lois Lane when she's on the rebound from Superman. (13 minutes)
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