This American Life – Détails, épisodes et analyse

Ira Glass has news to share about some things happening here at This American Life.

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A couple devises a strategy to get their daughter's killer prosecuted and to get attention for other Native families. 

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• Prologue: Mika Westwolf was killed in a hit-and-run on a Montana highway. Her parents thought the driver might get away with it. The driver was white. Mika was a citizen of the Blackfeet Nation. (1 minute)
• Act One: Mika’s parents, Carissa Heavy Runner and Kevin Howard, share recordings of their interactions with law enforcement. (8 minutes)
• Act Two: Carissa and Kevin take matters into their own hands. (20 minutes)
• Act Three: The county prosecutor explains why he let Mika’s killer out of jail. Will Carissa and Kevin's efforts pay off? Sierra follows them to court. (33 minutes)

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People immersed in chaos try to solve for what it all adds up to.

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• Prologue: A scientist who is used to organizing data starts tracking scientific meetings that seem to exist only on paper—meetings that might decide the fate of years of research. The NIH website shows one reality; the empty conference rooms tell another story. She graphs the chaos. (9 minutes)
• Act One: American doctors returning from Gaza compare notes and start to see a pattern. (28 minutes)
• Act Two: A woman watches her partner get taken in handcuffs with no explanation. Days later, she spots him in the most unexpected place. The coordinates of her life suddenly don't make sense as she navigates the bewildering map of the US immigration system. (23 minutes)

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A show about people who are suddenly confronted with who they are.

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• Prologue: Guest host Aviva DeKornfeld tells Ira Glass about breaking into a community pool as a kid, and the split-second decision that has haunted her ever since. (4 minutes)
• Act One: Some people are great in a crisis. Others, not so much. Does that mean anything about who we really are? Tobin Low investigates. (10 minutes)
• Act Two: Aviva DeKornfeld has the story of Leisha Hailey, who was certain she had the next million-dollar idea. (11 minutes)
• Act Three: Comedian Mike Birbiglia talks about the questions his daughter asks him and how trying to answer them showed him surprising reflections of himself.  (15 minutes)
• Act Four: David Kestenbaum tells the story of the suspicious disappearance of multiple shoes and a woman determined to explain it. (8 minutes)

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Conversations across a divide: People who are outside a war zone check in with family, friends, and strangers inside.

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• Prologue: The Hammash family’s group chat unfolds over texts, starting before the war. (8 minutes)
• Act One: When Yousef Hammash left Gaza a year ago, his sisters decided to stay behind. We hear about the toll that separation has taken on Yousef and the sister he’s closest to, Aseel. (30 minutes)
• Act Two: Mohammed Mhawish, a reporter who left Gaza a year ago with his family, talks to a young woman in Gaza about how she manages her hunger. Israel blockaded all food from Gaza for more than two months. (15 minutes)
• Coda: Chana gives a short update about Banias, a 9-year-old girl in Gaza she's been speaking with for months. (4 minutes)

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On his first day in office, President Trump decided to freeze all U.S. foreign aid. Soon after, his administration effectively dissolved USAID—the federal agency that delivers billions in food, medicine, and other aid worldwide. Many of its programs have been canceled. Now, as USAID officially winds down, we try to assess its impact. What was good? What was not so good? We meet people around the world wrestling with these questions and trying to navigate this chaotic moment.

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• Prologue: Just one box of a specially enriched peanut butter paste can save the life of a severely malnourished child. So why have 500,000 of those boxes been stuck in warehouses in Rhode Island? (13 minutes)
• Act One: USAID was founded in 1961. Since then, it has spent hundreds of billions of dollars all over the world. What did that get us? Producer David Kestenbaum talked with Joshua Craze and John Norris about that. (12 minutes)
• Act Two: Two Americans moved to Eswatini when that country was the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic. With support from USAID, they built a clinic and started serving HIV+ patients. Now that US support for their clinic has ended, they are wondering if what they did was entirely a good thing. (27 minutes)
• Act Three: When USAID suddenly stopped all foreign assistance without warning or a transition plan, it sent people all over the world scrambling. Especially those relying on daily medicine provided by USAID. Producer Ike Sriskandarajah spoke to two families in Kenya who were trying to figure it out. (8 minutes)

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One call to a very unusual hotline and everything that followed.

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• Prologue: Ira talks about a priest who set up what may have been the first hotline in the United States. It was just him, answering a phone, trying to help strangers who called. (2 minutes)
• Act One: The Never Use Alone hotline was set up so that drug users can call if they are say, using heroin by themselves. Someone will stay on the line with them in case they overdose. We hear the recording of one call, from a woman named Kimber. (13 minutes)
• Act Two: An EMT learns he was connected to the call, in more ways than he realized. (16 minutes)
• Act Three: Jessie, who took the call, explains how she discovered the hotline. She keeps in touch with Kimber. Until one day, Kimber disappears. (16 minutes)
• Act Four: We learn what happened to Kimber after she called the line. (10 minutes)

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Our most ambitious live show ever! We pulled together a massive team of theater pros at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Opera House—nearly 50 singers, actors, dancers and musicians. The result? Journalism turned into a Broadway musical, into opera. Mike Birbiglia, Sasheer Zamata, Stephin Merritt, Josh Hamilton, Lindsay Mendez, Lin-Manuel Miranda and others.

• Carin Gilfry explains how she once accidentally locked herself in a hotel closet, and because today’s show is being broadcast from an opera house stage, Ira is able to take the story to a place he never usually can. (18 minutes)
• Act One: Lin-Manuel Miranda turns a piece of reporting we broadcast in 2012, into a 14-minute Broadway mini-musical, created by people who normally work on Broadway. (18 minutes)
• Act Two: Comedian Mike Birbiglia, his wife, and his cat take a trip together and meet some parasitic zombie mice. (10 minutes)
• Act Three: Joshuah Bearman tells a story that’s a sequel to his memorable episode about his mother and half-brother David. It’s done onstage as a play that’s structured like a radio documentary, with Josh Hamilton playing Joshuah, and James Ransone playing his brother. (17 minutes)
• Act Four: Comedian Sasheer Zamata stages a radio play, complete with sound effects and comedians Nicole Byer, Chris Gethard, and Frank Garcia Hejl. It’s a true story about a recent bus accident. (9 minutes)

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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.

• It’s mid-October, 2013. Freddie Hoyt tries to rally his sales staff to sell 129 cars and trucks by the end of the month. Freddie’s the General Manager at Town and Country Jeep Chrysler Dodge Ram in Levittown, NY, on Long Island. Problem is, the customers are not cooperating. (7 1/2 minutes)
• Act One: How we found this car dealer. (2 minutes)
• Act Two: A quick primer of who’s who, and how the place works. (6 minutes)
• Act Three: Salesman Bob Tantillo has the fewest sales of anyone at Town and Country this month. Robyn Semien spoke to him. (4 minutes)
• Act Four: Salesman Jason Mascia has the most sales of anyone this month, as usual. Sean Cole spent a week with him watching how he does it. (8 minutes)
• Act Five: The next-to-last day of the month. Deals fall apart, but not all of them. (10 minutes)
• Act Six: The last day of the month begins. They have to sell nine cars by the end of the day. "God help us," Freddie says. (2 minutes)
• Act Seven: Joe Monti’s real name is Joe Montalbano. But when he started in the car business, he didn't want to lose a sale because a customer couldn’t keep his name straight so he simplified it for the job. He's one of the managers of the used cars department at Town and Country. Sarah Koenig reports on what it'll mean if he doesn’t make this month’s goal. (7 minutes)
• Act Eight: The last day of the month continues and the truism is accurate: some people get great deals because it’s the end of the month and they have to hit their goal. When you look at the numbers, the average car they sell in the last two days actually loses money. (4 minutes)
• Act Nine: Salesman Manny Rosales keeps to himself in the showroom, with his own sales philosophy. He explained it to Brian Reed. (7 minutes)
• Act Ten: The last day of the month ends. (8 minutes)

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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.

• Prologue: Jack Hitt tells the story of a small town production of Peter Pan in which the flying apparatus smacks the actors into the furniture, and Captain Hook's hook flies off his arm and hits an old woman in the stomach. By the end of the evening, firemen have arrived and all the normal boundaries between audience and actors have completely dissolved. (4 minutes)
• Act One: Jack Hitt's Peter Pan story continues. Jack is the author of several books, including Bunch of Amateurs. (19 minutes)
• Act Two: A medieval village, a 1900-pound brass kettle, marauding visigoths, and a plan to drench invaders with boiling oil that goes awry. From Ron Carlson's book, The Hotel Eden: Stories, read by actor Jeff Dorchen. Ron Carlson's newest book is Return To Oakpine. (9 minutes)
• Act Three: The first day on the job inevitably means mistakes, mishaps, and sometimes... fiascos. A true story, told by a former rookie cop. (13 minutes)
• Act Four: Journalist Margy Rochlin on her first big assigment to do a celebrity interview. It was 1982. The interviewee was Moon Unit Zappa, who'd just released "Valley Girl" with her father Frank. She'd only been interviewed once. Midway through the interview: fiasco! Margy chokes on some coffee, which pumps out of her nose. Moon's mother administers the Heimlich Maneuver. And after that, everyone's so relaxed that Margy gets an interview that becomes her first syndicated article and a big scoop for her paper. When a fiasco destroys social boundaries, it can bring people together. (7 minutes)

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