This American Life (Unofficial)

Stories of people who are lost, histories that are lost, and things that are lost. This show was recorded onstage in front of audiences on a five-city tour in May 2003. The cities: Boston, Washington DC, Portland Oregon, Denver and Chicago. Featuring house band OK Go.

Stories of what can and cannot be translated. A short, non-athletic, bespectacled East Asian studies major who couldn't make his high school basketball team finds himself in the NBA as the personal translator for the first-ever Chinese pro basketball superstar, Yao Ming. Plus, a Palestinian man teaches Hebrew classes in the Gaza strip to Palestinians eager to learn news from the other side of the...

Sure, John Kerry got in trouble for using the phrase, but we have no fear. Because we know that regime change, like charity, begins at home. This week: Stories of regime change in everyday life—people switching jobs, people switching families, businesses dying and new ones starting in their place.

Stories from a contradictory recession.

Stories from the beginnings of the war in Iraq, and how it compares with wars in our country's past.

Does talking about it really help? Stories where it does, and stories where it doesn't, including a man who tried to battle his fears by listing them. He ended up with a list 138 items long.

People starting over—sometimes because they want to, other times because they have to.

It's been said that truth is the first casualty of war. In this week's show, we try to get the real stories from three very different wars.

Stories of people trying to save the world one person at a time, and stories of sudden truths delivered by complete strangers.

In January 2002, the President of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, spoke at Georgetown University. There he urged Afghan-Americans, especially young ones, to move back to Afghanistan.

Stories of some of the secrets our government keeps: of imprisonment, deportation, and spying, and how those secrets affect us.

Two stories about love, and what people mean when they use the word love. Or, looked at differently, two modern-day reinterpretations of the Frog Prince story. One concerns a pretty man falling in love with an unlikely woman. And an unlikely woman falling in love with a pretty bird.

Stories about why we should go to war versus stories of why we shouldn't.

Stories of people stuck in their own personal reruns—moments or episodes that they revisit over and over again.

Home movies are often all the same—kids on the beach, people getting married, birthday parties—so why do we make and watch so many of them? Maybe it's because the story they show and the story they tell are different. In this show, we bring you five stories that all start with a fairly typical home movie but go on to tell a unique story.

In this week's show, we celebrate the oft-beleaguered and misrepresented middleman. "Cut out the middleman! Death to the middleman!" the angry hordes cry. Not us. We say, "Hi, middleman. Here are three splendid acts to toast your subtle virtues."

In this show we take the classifieds from one Sunday edition of the Chicago Sun-Times and one edition of the local alternative weekly Chicago Reader, and fill a program with stories that come from the ads. Through the jobs offered, the missed connections, the crap that people sell each other and the musicians' ads we get a portrait of a whole city.

Some people have a rather dark worldview that divides people into two groups: Suckers and non-suckers. We hear their stories.

Stories of people traveling under fake papers, false identities, not for power or personal gain, but for their own deeper personal reasons.

Stories of people getting more testosterone and coming to regret it. And of people losing it and coming to appreciate life without it. The pros and cons of the hormone of desire. And we get our testosterone measured, as a staff.

Stories of innocent people fleeing from dangerous men in cars who shoot at them. Unlike in the movies, the pursuers aren't foreign agents or rogue CIA agents, but drunk off-duty policemen and small-town teenagers. Real-ife high-speed chases: who gets chased...and who does the chasing.

A group of inmates at a high-security prison rehearse and stage a production of the last act—Act V—of Hamlet.

It's been two years since the Mideast peace process collapsed, two years in which each side has done terrible things to the other side. We wanted to understand what that has done to people living in Israel and the West Bank, and to see if anyone is feeling hope.

Stories of people who go to great lengths to give people what they want, and how they're rewarded sometimes, misguided other times.

Stories about people who turned to the experts and got horrible advice. One story is about people who went to therapists who made them sicker. Another is about how the hosts of Car Talk inadvertently (or perhaps intentionally) destroyed a car belonging to one of their own employees.