This American Life (Unofficial)

Stories about people who are destined to fight: brothers and sisters.

Numbers lie. Numbers cover over complicated feelings and ambiguous situations. In this week's show, stories of people trying to use numbers to describe things that should not be quantified.

Stories from David Sedaris's book of Christmas stories, Holidays on Ice, read onstage by David, Julia Sweeney and actor Matt Malloy.

Two stories of how to get money from strangers. In both stories, the money is made by people who make the strangers feel good about themselves and about their nation.

Humans have turned chicken and turkey into what we want them to be, which means that chickens and turkeys are a mirror of ourselves.

The story of Harold Washington, the greatest politician you've probably never heard of, and the white backlash that was set off when he became Chicago's first Black mayor.

Stories of outsiders who want to be insiders, and vice versa.

Stories of people who are haunted, not by ghosts or phantoms, but by other people.

Americans who love their guns, and the Americans who love them.

Stories of people engaged in a battle with nature — a battle they don't stand much chance of winning. Most of the show is Scott Carrier's story of trying for twelve years to chase down and catch an antelope by foot.

People stuck in the wrong decade, or simply carrying a lot of the props from another decade.

How bad is bad enough to count? To go to hell?

Can the secular world and the religious world understand each other? We ask that question while visiting Colorado Springs, Colorado, where Pastor Ted Haggard at the New Life Church has put in place a project to pray in front of the home of every person in the city, systematically, block by block and house by house. He's also helped organize a 24-hour, 365-day-a-year "prayer shield" over the city;...

The mob as portrayed in movies, and as it is in real life. And its hold over us.

An episode from our show's early days: Stories about what happens when strangers are kind — and when they're not.

What happens when people with one common interest gather in monstrous, fluorescent-lit halls for the weekend? Sometimes they drive each other crazy, sometimes they fall in love.

The darker side of the art world: petty jealousies, competitiveness, failure. And also what's so great about art.

An idiosyncratic first-person travelogue about race relations and tourism from radio producer Rich Robinson and television producer Josh Seftel. Their radio story is about a trip they took to the new South Africa. Rich Robinson is black. Josh Seftel is white. The interracial pair travel through the still mostly-segregated society and have very different opinions about what they see, especially whe...

Stories of people trying to do exactly what the doctors say they can't — or shouldn't.

When you read other people's mail, you can't help but try to fill in between the lines. You try to decipher the stories of the people who wrote the letters. We hear four stories of people who read other people's mail, and what happens to them once they get caught up in these other lives.

How many of our parents move to some place — some dream house — with some vision of a new life in the new place, and move the family with them, hoping it works out for the kids. Three stories on this theme.

A show for July 4th weekend. We begin with perhaps the most moving, poetic inaugural speech in American history, and look at its legacy today. In his second inaugural address, Lincoln wondered aloud why God saw fit to send the slaughter of the Civil War to the United States. His conclusion: that slavery was a kind of original sin for the United States, for both North and South, and all Americans h...

Could it be more obvious? Stories in which someone's dream is someone else's nightmare. All of us get into these situations with strangers, with the people we love most, with our own parents, with our children.

Are people having experiences on the Internet they wouldn't have anywhere else? Several weeks ago, This American Life invited listeners to help answer that question.

Notes and stories about the Canadians among us. Are they in fact any different from red-blooded Americans? They claim they're not. Skeptical Americans put their position to the test.