852: Pivot Point

This American Life

01/19/25

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58m

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People living in that in-between moment before everything changes.

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Prologue: Kirk Johnson tells Ira about a strange choice he made during his family’s evacuation from the Sunset Fire in Los Angeles. (5 minutes)
Act One: Editor Nancy Updike tries to make sense of this current moment by talking to a master of dark comedy, Armando Ianucci. (19 minutes)
Act Two: As President Trump prepares to return to the Oval Office, producer Valerie Kipnis talks to Ukrainian soldiers on the front line who wonder about what his administration could mean for them. (14 minutes)
Act Three: Editor Susan Burton reflects on the ramp-up to an era that comes for so many of us. (9 minutes)
Act Four: In the wake of the Eaton Fire in Altadena, California, producer Miki Meek talks to a woman on a very particular mission. (6 minutes)

Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org

January 5, 2025

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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)

Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org

January 26, 2025

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57m

An investigation of when and why people ask loaded questions that are a proxy for something else.

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Prologue: Host Ira Glass talks with producer Tobin Low about the question he got asked after he and his husband moved in together, and what he thinks people were really asking. (4 minutes)
Act One: “What do you think about Beyoncé?” and other questions raised by people on first dates. (12 minutes)
Act Two: When a common, seemingly innocuous question goes wildly off the rails. (13 minutes)
Act Three: Why are people asking me if my mother recognizes me, when it’s totally beside the point? (14 minutes)
Act Four: Schools ask their students the strangest essay questions sometimes. The experience of tutoring anxious teenagers through how to answer them requires a balladier, singing their lived experience to a crowd as though it were the Middle Ages. (10 minutes)

Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org

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