This American Life

I was delighted to discover that This American Life, the best radio show in the whole world (ever!), has finally moved into the modern internet with podcasts. In counterintuitive fashion, the latest show is available for downloading for a week, after which you can stream it for free, or purchase the MP3 file. (This must be a legacy of their former deal with the pay-only Audible.com.)

This American Life is a compendium of, yes, American stories hosted since its beginnings more than ten years ago by self-effacing Chicagoan Ira Glass. Each week is loosely tethered together with some sort of theme, but within that some of the stories are monologues, some fictional, some interviews, some straightforward reporting. It launched (or at least aided) the careers of comic geniuses David Sedaris and Sarah Vowell. But it’s also exposed corruption in suburban Chicago governments, and produced a piece about the story about price-fixing at ADM that became Kurt Eichenwald’s The Informant.

Just listen.