869: Harold
This American Life
10/05/25
•62m
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When Zohran Mamdani won the primary race for New York mayor, the Democratic establishment's lukewarm response echoed the treatment of another charismatic, unconventional candidate decades earlier. This week, we bring you the story of Harold Washington, the greatest politician you've probably never heard of, and the backlash that ensued when he became Chicago's first Black mayor.
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- Prologue: As New York City’s Democratic establishment attempts to resist the candidacy of Zohran Mamdani, we look back at another mayoral candidate who upset the established political machine. (7 minutes)
- Act One: A history of the brief mayoral career of Harold Washington and its lessons for Black and white America, as told by people close to him. (39 minutes)
- Act Two: Ira revisits interviews with Chicago voters from the 1997 and 2007 rebroadcasts of this episode. In 1997, ten years after Harold Washington’s death, not much had changed in Chicago. By 2007, attitudes had begun to shift slowly, and another Black politician from Chicago was on the rise — Barack Obama. Ira also speaks to David Axelrod, an advisor to both Harold Washington and Barack Obama. (10 minutes)
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Previous Episode
286: Mind Games
September 28, 2025
•60m
Stories of people who try simple mind games on others, and then find themselves way in over their heads.
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- Prologue: Host Ira Glass interviews Lori Gottlieb about the time she sent a letter to a writer in a magazine, a letter packed with white lies. (5 minutes)
- Act One: Lori Gottlieb's story continues. One complication led to another, and before long, the writer seemed to be lying to her. Or maybe he wasn't. It was hard to tell. Years later, she still isn't sure what happened. (8 minutes)
- Act Two: A group called Improv Everywhere decides that an unknown band, Ghosts of Pasha, playing their first ever tour in New York, ought to think they're a smash hit. So they study the band's music and then crowd the performance, pretending to be hard-core fans. Improv Everywhere just wants to make the band happy—to give them the best day of their lives. But the band doesn't see it that way. Nor does another subject of one of Improv Everywhere's "missions." (31 minutes)
- Act Three: Scott Carrier and his family live in the same Salt Lake City neighborhood as Elizabeth Smart, the fourteen-year-old whose 2002 kidnapping made international news. Though Smart's picture was plastered everywhere throughout Salt Lake City and thousands of volunteers searched for her, her captors brazenly brought her back to the very neighborhood from which she'd been taken. They walked freely through the streets with her in broad daylight, yet no one recognized her. Scott talks with his neighbors and his son Milo—who had attended grade school with Smart—about what was going through their minds that prevented them from seeing what was right there in plain sight. (12 minutes)
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Next Episode
870: My Other Self
October 12, 2025
•61m
What happens when people create alternate versions of themselves and release them into the wild?
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- Prologue: Host Ira Glass talks about a recent experience being interviewed and the realization that he was being asked about another version of himself. (4 minutes)
- Act One: Reporter Evan Ratliff creates an AI version of himself and then sets it loose on the world. This story was adapted from Evan's podcast, Shell Game. (43 minutes)
- Act Two: Emmanuel Dzotsi explores the phenomenon of people lying on first dates to project a better version of themselves. Plus, he gets into a very personal example from his own life. (8 minutes)
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