This American Life is a weekly public radio show, heard by 2.2 million people on more than 500 stations. Another 2.5 million people download the weekly podcast. It is hosted by Ira Glass, produced in collaboration with Chicago Public Media, delivered to stations by PRX The Public Radio Exchange, and has won all of the major broadcasting awards.

This week, as the staff creates the episode from their apartments and houses, with our host in quarantine, in this moment when everyone’s reaching out to the people they love, we put together a collection of family stories, with some timely stuff at the top.


697: Alone Together

The coronavirus has now fully arrived in the United States. This week, stories of people trying to rise to that challenge, in some pretty extreme situations.


698: The Test

Stories of when things go wrong. Really wrong. When you leave the normal realm of human error, fumble, mishap, and mistake and enter the territory of really huge breakdowns. Fiascos. Things go so awry that normal social order collapses.


699: Fiasco!

Sometimes a sketch of a thing needs filling in for its true significance to be known.


700: Embiggening

Desperate to know what happened to his family, a man obsessively decodes the only information about them he can get. That, and other stories of people looking into the void for answers.


701: Black Box

Words can seem so puny and ineffective sometimes. On this show, we have stories in which ordinary people make last ditch efforts to get through to their loved ones, using a combination of small talk and not-so-small talk.


702: One Last Thing Before I Go

During a time when a lot of us feel like we are living in a holding pattern, stories of people feeling stuck.


703: Stuck!

Last week, our episode "The Out Crowd" won the very first Pulitzer Prize ever awarded to a radio show. This is the episode that won, with some updates on the stories. Hear what the Trump administration’s "Remain in Mexico" policy actually means, on the ground, at the Mexican border.


704: Our Pulitzer-Winning Episode

While sports of all kinds have been put on pause, we bring you favorite stories from back when people were still on football fields, boxing rings, and basketball courts.


705: Time Out

In this moment of sorrow, protest, and rage in the wake of George Floyd’s death, we offer this as a break from the dreadful present: our show about Afrofuturism. It’s a way of looking at Black culture that’s fantastic and hopeful, which feels especially urgent during a time without a lot of optimism. Featuring the song "The Deep" by clppng.


707: We Are in the Future

An exhaustingly familiar story. Maybe it’ll have a different ending this time, but maybe not. We hear what different people said and did one weekend in reaction to the killing of George Floyd.


708: Here, Again

In the wake of George Floyd’s killing, people everywhere are demanding that police departments change not just their rules, but the culture inside that leads to these deaths. But those things are notoriously hard to change. As a case study, here's the story of a fire department that gets a new boss who starts a war with his own firefighters, to change their macho, racist culture. They fight back hard.


684: Burn It Down

Michigan has passed its Covid-19 peak, and the state has started opening up. But it’s still been intensely difficult for the staff in the ICU at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. We've embedded with them over the past few months, and tracked how this pandemic has changed them and their city.


709: The Reprieve

As China's new national security law tightens its control over Hong Kong, we return to our episode about last fall's anti-government protests and check in to see how people are responding.


710: Umbrellas Down

In space, in the ocean, by ourselves, or with others—we’re all just figuring out how to be apart.


711: How to Be Alone

This week, we celebrate pre-coronavirus summertime fun: at amusement parks! Ira Glass takes us behind the scenes at Worlds of Fun in Kansas City, where the young staff – coached by a funny, fun-loving boss just a little older than they are – truly seem to love their jobs.  


443: Amusement Park

Years ago, producer Chana Joffe-Walt started reporting on one school in New York. She thought the story was about segregation and inequality in public schools. But the more she looked into it, the more she realized she was witnessing something else. She was seeing the inordinate power of white parents at this school. This is the first episode of Chana’s new mini-series: Nice White Parents. 


712: Nice White Parents

From the moment we wake up in the morning there are a trillion rules — big and little — governing our lives. But sometimes, we encounter one we just can't abide by. In a pitched moment of rule-questioning, a show about rules and the people who break them. 


713: Made to Be Broken

It’s the last few weeks of summer, so we’re going to the beach! This week, stories from the surf and sand.


714: Day at the Beach

When you’re the only one who can see something, sometimes it feels like you’re in on a special secret. The hard part is getting anyone to believe your secret is real. This week, people trying to show others what they see—including a woman with muscular dystrophy who believes she has the same condition as an Olympic athlete.


577: Something Only I Can See

Teachers, students and parents around the country have been bracing themselves all spring and summer long for the start of this unprecedented school year. This week, it's here.


715: Long-Awaited Asteroid Finally Hits Earth

For the holiday weekend, a roadtrip through history. In this moment when Americans are tearing down monuments and rethinking how to address the shameful parts of America’s past, we return to a story from the early days of our radio show that took that on, in a vivid and complicated way. Sarah Vowell and her twin sister Amy headed out on the road to retrace the Trail of Tears – the route their Cherokee ancestors took when expelled from their own land – and reflected on the question, what are we supposed to do with the mix of good and bad that is this country?


716: Trail of Tears

At a time when going to the movies is mostly out of the question, we bring the movies to you.


717: Audience of One

Stories about mysteries that exist in relationships we thought couldn't possibly surprise us, the strangeness of putting our wants on the line with someone who may not share them at all, and how much we're willing to risk for someone we may never see again.


587: The Perils of Intimacy

In this moment when our country is so deeply divided, we have stories of people who are tied together, but imagine radically different futures. In one case, a movie star and her ex-husband plot against Kim Jong-Il. In another, a woman stalks her doppelgänger. And sometimes, one bed is the basis for an entire relationship, even for a man who almost never sees the person who shares his bed.


718: Same Bed, Different Dreams

A doctor who breaks the law might go to jail like anybody else. But who decides if that doctor gets to keep their medical license? On today’s show, the not-often-talked-about realm of licensing boards, and the disturbing decisions they sometimes make. 


719: Trust Me I’m a Doctor

People tossing words out into the world impulsively, to ignite and burn over decades.


668: The Long Fuse

Stories about people who are worried — or not worried enough! — about what's hurtling unstoppably towards them.


720: The Moment After This Moment

Stories of people who find themselves stuck in small spaces—an elevator, an attic, an orchestra pit—trying to make sense of their new surroundings. 


721: The Walls Close In

Ahead of the election, we have stories about people trying to live in the unreality that defines this moment. Election officials combat a contagion among their very own workers; people who've never owned guns suddenly go buy them; and two women who allege they were sexually assaulted by the president compare notes.


722: The Unreality of Now

People grappling with an endless presidential election.


723: Squeaker

Stories of people changing their minds.


724: Personal Recount

For our 25th Anniversary, a favorite episode from 2018. The one thing you know for sure when you're watching a romantic comedy is that it's going to turn out okay in the end. When you're living one? Not so much.

Rom-Com

For our 25th Anniversary, a favorite episode from 2015. There’s a program that brings together kids from two schools. One school is public and in the country’s poorest congressional district. The other is private and costs $43,000/year. They are three miles apart. The hope is that kids connect, but some of the public school kids just can’t get over the divide. We hear what happens when you get to see the other side and it looks a lot better.

Three Miles

For our 25th Anniversary, a favorite episode from 2013. We spend a month at a Jeep dealership on Long Island as they try to make their monthly sales goal: 129 cars. If they make it, they'll get a huge bonus from the manufacturer, possibly as high as $85,000 — enough to put them in the black for the month. If they don't make it, it'll be the second month in a row. So they pull out all the stops.

129 Cars

For our 25th Anniversary, a favorite episode from 2008. On a summer day in 1951, two baby girls were born in a hospital in small-town Wisconsin. The infants were accidentally switched, and went home with the wrong families. One of the mothers realized the mistake but chose to keep quiet. Until the day, more than 40 years later, when she decided to tell both daughters what happened. How the truth changed two families' lives—and how it didn't.

Switched at Birth

For our 25th Anniversary, a favorite episode from 2007. Writer Starlee Kine on what makes the perfect break-up song and whether really sad music can actually make you feel better. Plus, an eight-year-old author of a book about divorce, and other stories from the heart of heartbreak.

Break-Up

For our 25th Anniversary, a favorite episode from 2000. We document one day in a Chicago diner called the Golden Apple, starting at 5 a.m. and going until 5 a.m. the next morning. We hear from the waitress who has worked the graveyard shift for over two decades, the regular customers who come every day, the couples working out their problems, assorted drunks, and, of course, cops.

24 Hours at the Golden Apple

For our 25th Anniversary, a favorite episode from 2000. Many Americans have dreamy and romantic ideas about Paris, notions which probably trace back to the 1920s vision of Paris created by the expatriate Americans there. But what's it actually like in Paris if you're an American, without rose-colored glasses?

Americans In Paris

What if someone told you about a type of therapy that could help you work through unhealed trauma in just ten sessions? Some people knock through it in two weeks. Jaime Lowe tried the therapy—and recorded it.


682: Ten Sessions

For Thanksgiving weekend, stories about food, and people who set out on very particular missions with food. 


725: Turkey in a Face Mask

Just a few years before he got the internship at NPR that started him in radio, our host Ira Glass had another career. He performed magic at children's birthday parties. A powerful sense of embarrassment has prevented him from ever doing an episode on the subject, but when he learned that producer David Kestenbaum was also a kid conjurer, they decided to dive in together.


619: The Magic Show

To commemorate our show’s 25th year, we have a program about people who were born the year our show went on the air.


726: Twenty-Five

What the day-to-day business of saving the world looks like. We visit with one group of people who are trying to rescue us from something very large, and another group trying to rescue us from something very small.


727: Boulder v. Hill

This holiday season, we bring you a show filled with stories of people going to great lengths to throw a special Christmas for their families.


728: Lights, Camera, Christmas!

In these dark, combative times, we attempt the most radical counterprogramming we could imagine: a show made up entirely of stories about delight.


692: The Show of Delights

There's always someone whose job it is to decide if you measure up.


729: Making the Cut

People looking everywhere to find a place—any place—where, for once, they don't have to be the odd man out.


694: Get Back to Where You Once Belonged

Things we’ve lost in the past year — since the first American coronavirus case — that we haven’t talked about so much. Gossip. The chance to make new friends. And much larger stuff.


730: The Empty Chair

We asked listeners to send us their best coincidence stories, and we got more than 1,300 submissions! There were so many good ones we decided to make a whole show about them. From a chance encounter at a bus station to a romantic dollar bill to a baffling apparition in a college shower stall. 


489: No Coincidence, No Story!

Stories from the upside-down world where conspiracy theorists dwell.


670: Beware the Jabberwock

Stories of people summoning up stuff that’s usually hidden down deep.


731: What Lies Beneath

Why we tell them, and what happens after we do.


732: Secrets

A boy who can’t dribble gets a coach, a new best friend, and something to believe in.


635: Chip in My Brain

This week, three men who came together to protest the murder of George Floyd. They were unified, loud, and impressive, but over time these three friends end up in three very different places.


733: Warriors in the Garden

People squirming in a world where everything is rated and reviewed.


695: Everyone's a Critic

How the pandemic has thrown college admissions process into a kind of slow-motion chaos. One of the biggest changes: most colleges have stopped requiring the SAT. For decades, there’s been a debate over whether schools should drop the test. What’s it mean that it finally happened?


734: The Campus Tour Has Been Cancelled

Adults telling kids who they are, and kids wondering — are they right?


676: Here’s Looking at You, Kid

People put in positions they’re completely unqualified to handle, but who try to make it work anyway. Including one story of a tough group of soldiers who attempt to save lives through the power of show tunes.


549: Amateur Hour

735: Bloody Feelings

Other universes that are just like our own, but with one small difference.


691: Gardens of Branching Paths

What happens when your own community suddenly turns on you?


736: The Herd

People who try simple mind games on others and find themselves in way over their heads.


588: Mind Games

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


233: Starting From Scratch

An ode to life's daily practices, and what you learn from doing a thing every single day.


737: The Daily

Lissa Yellow Bird searches for missing people. Cold cases, mostly. People no one else is looking for. It’s not her job, but a lot of Native Americans go missing and their cases remain unsolved, so families often ask Lissa for help. But then, Lissa’s own niece goes missing. 


706: A Mess to Be Reckoned With

So many of us, we don’t want to think about death. We avoid grieving when we lose someone, distract ourselves, look away. In this episode, at a moment when so many families are mourning, we have stories of people figuring out how they’ll grieve, and doing a pretty good job of it.


738: Good Grief!

Remember conventions, before the pandemic? 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.


74: Conventions

Sisters build worlds together, worlds that are just for them. Stories about the bonds between sisters and how they get broken and fixed—or not.


739: Sisters

A bank robber on an undercover mission. A teenage girl with the powers of a tiger. A vigilante seeking vengeance in Ciudad Juarez. All have secret identities. But not all of them chose those identities for themselves.


506: Secret Identity

Most of us go from day to day just coasting on the status quo. If it ain’t broke, why fix it—right? But when routines just get too mundane or systems stop making sense, sometimes you just have to hold your breath and jump. People who leap from their lives, their comfort zones, even through time.


539: The Leap

Solving problems using very extreme measures.


740: There. I Fixed It.

Words mean things, but some words are especially meaningful.


741: The Weight of Words

We heard about a test that could determine if someone was a psychopath. So, naturally, our staff decided to take it. 


436: The Psychopath Test

742: The Thing I'm Getting Over

Bad neighbors. What can you do about them?


743: Don't You Be My Neighbor

We human beings think we run the world, that we’ve got things under control. Then an animal shows up, and things don’t go as planned. This week, seals, wolves, and a moose drop in and show us who isn't boss.


582: When the Beasts Come Marching In

The pandemic forced jobs to change, but then the workers changed, too.


744: Essential

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


218: Act V

People trying to escape all kinds of seemingly impossible situations.


745: Getting Out

We made you a mixtape. Don't make a big deal out of it or anything.


746: This Is Just Some Songs

Who thought that would be good for a kid?


747: Suitable for Children

What happens when one family goes all in on fighting climate change.


748: The End of the World as We Know It

People caught in limbo, using ingenuity and guile to try to get themselves out.


553: Stuck in the Middle

An hour devoted to embarrassing stories. They’re not always just little moments – funny, daily stuff that we laugh about later. Some can change you for the rest of your life.


749: My Bad

Personal recordings one person made for just one other person, including what some have called the greatest phone message ever.
