This American Life (Unofficial)

Stories of people's last words before death. Their one last shot at figuring things out, summing things up. One last moment of asserting the fact of our existence, at the moment of our annihilation.

What happens when you suddenly strike it rich. And the power money has over our lives, for good and bad.

Germs, and how they make us leave the world of rational thinking.

I thought this was supposed to be easy. Tales from the simple life.

Five ways of mapping the world. One story about people who make maps the traditional way — by drawing things we can see. And other stories about people who map the world using smell, sound, touch, and taste. The world redrawn by the five senses.

People who love summer camp say that non-camp people simply don't understand what's so amazing about it. We attempt to bridge this gap of misunderstanding between camp people and non-camp people.

Two stories of children lying to themselves and others. A woman who'd been diagnosed with cystic fibrosis talks about the lies she told herself as a child. And Dan Gediman tells the story of how he was cast in the public TV show Zoom, which aired from 1972 to 1979, at the age of ten. Then he was cut from the cast before the show ever went on the air. So for years, he lied about it. He let friends...

Writer Sarah Vowell and her twin sister re-trace the "Trail of Tears" — the route their Cherokee ancestors took when expelled from their own land by President Andrew Jackson. On the way, Sarah and her sister visit the land they would have grown up in had the Cherokees not been expelled, Andrew Jackson's home, and the land in Oklahoma where the Cherokee nation settled (and where Sarah and her siste...

For this Father's Day, stories in which fathers and their kids sit down and try to have an honest moment together. And stories about fathers who aren't close with their kids.

Two stories of people who try to cross the color line — and why it's still so hard. We hear the story of a failed interracial marriage and the story of a teenager from a poor inner city neighborhood (Cedric Jennings, pictured) who ends up at an Ivy League University — and how he barely survives there.

What's frustrating about music lessons, what's miraculous about them, and what they actually teach us. This show was recorded in front of a live audience at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, with help from KQED-FM, during the 1998 Public Radio Conference in San Francisco.

An NPR reporter leaves her three-year-old son and heads to Omaha—for cancer treatment—a last chance to save her life. After years of covering stories about medicine, Rebecca Perl enters the hospital as a patient. She moves from the world of healthy people into the world of sick ones. What she sees and what she learns.

With so many songs, movies, and books about the joy of the open road, it's hard to take just a normal road trip without huge expectations.

The story of Niagara Falls, a town that started with something huge—the falls—and built nothing lasting from it. During this hour, a special edition of our show: Stories about Niagara Falls, half of them from documentary producer Alix Spiegel, who went to the Falls and interviewed people living there; and half from playwright David Kodeski, who grew up in the town of Niagara Falls.

For the 100th episode of This American Life, a radio show about the pleasures of radio. About what makes radio so great, and what makes it so terrible.

Variations on what it means to be a girl and what it means to be a woman.

Stories about what it means to be a person who throws the first punch, and how hard it is to give up.

An assault on the idea of wackiness. And then, an appreciation of wackiness, and an analysis of wackiness in American culture. Thirteen ways to describe wackiness.

People who left their private lives and were seized by some huge historical moment.

How should we react to people who are in non-monogamous relationships? What should we think of these struggles with monogamy?

What happens during a "how-to," and what our how-to's say about us. Most how-to's promise that you'll not only learn skills, you'll be transformed.

Stories about couples that all take place decades after that moment their eyes first meet.

Stories about those moments when someone tries to tell you a little bit more about themselves than you'd really rather know.

Stories of people trying to escape the box of their own lives, and create new lives.

Stories of who we are on the phone, of things we learn on the phone, and of things that happen on the phone that don't happen anywhere else.