Why you should delve into This American Life podcast’s repository of fascinating stories, 20 years later

Hosted by Ira Glass since 1995, This American Life is a catalogue of stories from ‘nobody who’s famous’ … we recommend starting with the episode ‘The Long Fuse’

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This American Life podcast. Photo: Courtesy of This American Life

Suji Owen

Published: 8:15am, 26 Aug 2024

I seem to spend my life recommending national treasure podcasts to people of other nationalities because even in this gloried age of globalisation, too many podcast listeners stop at their own shores when it comes to looking for new shows. This means I meet people who have never heard of This American Life (TAL), much less the voice of consummate radio storyteller Ira Glass. But then I get to see their podcast world turn upside down as they realise what they have been missing out on, which more than makes up for it.

Started in 1995 as an hour-long radio programme in the Chicago area, delving into stories Glass described as being about “nobody who’s famous, nothing you’ve ever heard of, nothing in the news”, TAL soon went national and became the first radio programme to win a Pulitzer. It became globally available as a free podcast in 2006 via its website although it does charge for back-catalogue episodes if you want to access them via a preferred podcast platform.

Nearly two decades and thousands of stories later, so many have stuck in my mind and in the collective audio memory. Much-loved episodes include “129 Cars”, which follows car salesmen at a dealership trying to make their monthly quota, and “Switched at Birth”, which takes up the story 43 years after the fact and asks the question of who knew what from day one. “The Feather Heist” is a bizarre story about a man who steals rare birds from Britain’s Natural History Museum for the sole purpose of making fly-fishing tackle. The episode I have chosen to accompany the food pods is “The Long Fuse”. Act I is about a shock discovery in MSG history but Acts II (about a baby-making race) and III (a gentlemen’s agreement during a cycling race) are even more compelling long-fuse stories.