This American Life (Unofficial)

Stories from the heart of heartbreak.

Stories of what can happen when you go from being a private person to a public face.

Stories about people taking history into their own hands. We hear from two men in two different wars. One is trying to make a difference in the current war in Iraq. The other is with the CIA at the very end of the Cold War.

Stories about the pitfalls of trying to do the right thing.

When he was a teenager, Haider worked in the Iraqi Ministry of Information. He was specially trained to talk to visiting dignitaries and foreign reporters, and he loved his job. It was exciting, and he was treated like a celebrity.

Josh's mother and younger brother were a mess. His mother drank too much. His brother got arrested a lot. Josh hadn't lived with them since he was nine, and they didn't play much of a role in his daily life—until duty called, and they took over his life. Josh told the sequel to this story at our live show in 2014.

Four years into the Iraq War, what have we learned? Soldiers, civilians, Iraqis, and Americans talk—and sometimes yell—about what they've learned in the last few years...including how to stay alive and why the aftermath of a war can be the trickiest time of all.

For Easter weekend — and the end of Passover! — stories of people struggling to follow the Ten Commandments.

An updated version of our episode "Habeas Schmabeas," which won a 2006 Peabody Award. Listen to a special, uncut version.

Stories of people trying to recover from damage to their reputations—sometimes caused by others, sometimes self-inflicted.

Stories of sudden fame, quick riches, and the downside of the dream job.

Stories recorded during our 2007 live tour. Sarah Vowell, David Rakoff, Dan Savage, and other favorite contributors went on the road with us to New York, Boston, Minneapolis, Chicago, Seattle, and Los Angeles; and performed brand-new stories in front of sold-out audiences.

Stories of proxy fights, proxy arguments, and proxy situations of all kinds.

A man with social anxiety goes through a transformation on a TV game show, a young woman with high ideals has them dashed by a TV game show, and teams compete to solve some of the hardest puzzles in the world, for fun.

An old man in Brooklyn invites some homeless prostitutes into his house on a cold winter night. They never leave. Plus other stories about houses, such as the United States Congress, where the inhabitants don't always act as they should.

An American reporter in Iraq decides to rent a house in a residential Baghdad neighborhood rather than live in a hotel and be an easy target for insurgents. And an eleven-year-old boy figures out an ingenious way to see his dead father again. Big ideas gone amok.

The mysterious hold supers have on their buildings, or that their buildings have on them.

A Muslim woman persuades her husband that their family would be happier if they left the West Bank and moved to America. They do, and things are good...until September 11. After that, the elementary school their daughter goes to begins using a textbook that says Muslims want to kill Christians.

Stories of people who are in over their heads and trying to stay afloat.

Recently, the British medical journal The Lancet published an study which updated their estimate of the number of Iraqis who've died since the U.S. invasion. With that in mind, we revisit a show we did in 2005 about the earlier study published in Lancet estimating the number of Iraqi deaths. That study was mostly ignored in the U.S. Alex Blumberg revisits the original study and looks at the new on...

For the lead up to Halloween, scary stories that are all true. Zombie raccoons, haunted houses—real haunted houses!—and things that go "EEEEK!!!" in the night. Plus, a story by David Sedaris in which he walks among the dead.

People who end up with far more power than they bargained for, and everything that comes with it.

Can love be taught? A family uses a controversial therapy to train their son to love them. And other stories about the hard and sometimes painful work of loving other people.

True stories that follow the plotline of the old kid's song "The Cat Came Back." It's the simplest plot in the world: Something you thought was gone forever keeps returning, against all odds.

Original stories from David Sedaris, Jonathan Goldstein, and others, on two animals who don't even seem like they should know each other, much less appear on the same radio show.