This American Life

Podcasting truly is a weakness of mine. I have downloaded way more podcasts than I will ever be able to listen to, but I have a terrible time convincing myself to erase them from my hard drive. Sampling various podcasts has been a wonderful experience though, and it makes me sad for the poor, forgotten genre of the radio show. They used to be the big thing for people to listen to, but ever since the television was invented, they have slowly been dying off.

A good example of a podcast that really makes me appreciate the genre is the podcast of This American Life. This American Life is produced in Chicago and distributed as part of the NPR network. It is a weekly, hour-long program which tells the types of story that you never hear about in the mainstream news. It tells stories and gives biographies of individuals who don't seek to have their story told and usually gain little attention in life outside of their daily hustle and bustle.

I have only listened to two episodes, but already I am addicted to this podcast. The first episode was about the developmentally disabled. They told the story of a group that teaches the mentally handicapped how to be journalists and takes them on a cross-country road trip interviewing anyone they could find. They also told the story of a small child with multiple personality disorder that alternated between being the sweetest child you could find and a little devil, wanton for destruction. The way they conducted their interviews and played archival recordings for you painted very vivid pictures of these peoples' lives, and they made you think very hard about your own in the process.

The first episode really wet my appetite for another, and the second episode did not let me down. It was titled Man versus History and told another two stories about incredible individuals. One of them was about an ordinary citizen who traveled to Iraq on his own time and money and met with local leaders trying to broke a peace between Coalition and Resistance forces. He had no experience in diplomacy or policy-making, he was just a concerned citizen doing what he could to help his nation. The second story was even better than the first. It was about a CIA operative working undercover in Cold War Czechoslovakia. He becomes the interest of a woman in a bar one night and he quickly discovers that she is a Czech secret service worker for the Communist party. Their respective agencies play them against one another trying to gather useful intelligence while they are forced to confront the fact that there may be something actually happening between them besides well-scripted scenarios of their personal lives being played out on hidden infrared cameras and tape recorders. It was a very moving story and it had me hooked all the way through the end in a way that television rarely gets to me.

I don't know what it is about Cold War spy love stories. Barring James Bond, I think they are some of the coolest stories told because of their many social, emotional, and psychological facets. It makes me hope that the Cold War era spy will become as wonderfully romanticized as the quintessential pirate, ninja, robot, dinosaur, or some combination thereof.

You really should try to listen to this show at least once. It is incredibly good, and it would be well worth your time.