Reruns

#226 - 6 December 2002

Stories of people stuck in their own personal reruns—moments or episodes that they revisit over and over again. You can watch an animated version of Robert Krulwich's Jackie O story from this episode.

Home Movies

#225 - 8 November 2002

Home movies are often all the same—kids on the beach, people getting married, birthday parties—so why do we make and watch so many of them? Maybe it's because the story they show and the story they tell are different. In this show, we bring you five stories that all start with a fairly typical home movie but go on to tell a unique story.

Middlemen

#224 - 25 October 2002

In this week's show, we celebrate the oft-beleaguered and misrepresented middleman. "Cut out the middleman! Death to the middleman!" the angry hordes cry. Not us. We say, "Hi, middleman. Here are three splendid acts to toast your subtle virtues."

Classifieds

#223 - 11 October 2002

In this show we take the classifieds from one Sunday edition of the Chicago Sun-Times and one edition of the local alternative weekly Chicago Reader, and fill a program with stories that come from the ads. Through the jobs offered, the missed connections, the crap that people sell each other and the musicians' ads we get a portrait of a whole city.

Suckers

#222 - 27 September 2002

Some people have a rather dark worldview that divides people into two groups: Suckers and non-suckers. We hear their stories.

Fake I.D.

#221 - 20 September 2002

Stories of people traveling under fake papers, false identities, not for power or personal gain, but for their own deeper personal reasons.

Testosterone

#220 - 30 August 2002

Stories of people getting more testosterone and coming to regret it. And of people losing it and coming to appreciate life without it. The pros and cons of the hormone of desire.

High Speed Chase

#219 - 16 August 2002

Stories of innocent people fleeing from dangerous men in cars who shoot at them. Unlike in the movies, the pursuers aren't foreign agents or rogue CIA agents, but drunk off-duty policemen and small-town teenagers. Real-ife high-speed chases: who gets chased...and who does the chasing.

Act V

#218 - 9 August 2002

We devote this entire episode to one story: Over the course of six months, reporter and TAL contributor Jack Hitt followed a group of inmates at a high-security prison as they rehearsed and staged a production of the last act—Act V—of Hamlet.

Give It to Them

#217 - 2 August 2002

It's been two years since the Mideast peace process collapsed, two years in which each side has done terrible things to the other side. We wanted to understand what that has done to people living in Israel and the West Bank, and to see if anyone is feeling hope.