This American Life

It is a peculiar feeling to know with certainty that something big is about to happen to you. This week, we watch people go right up to the edge of inevitable change.

Three people, and one animal, who know the path their lives will take until, suddenly, they don’t.

The pandemic broke school. Can we ever go back?

What goes on while mom and dad are away, that mom and dad never find out about. Including the story of two teenagers who decide to invent children to babysit, as an excuse to get out of their own house.

Stories about Vladimir Putin. Did he come to power in 1999 by killing hundreds of innocent Russians? How’s he really seen in his home country? This show is a mix of old and new stories we’ve done about him.

The casino game everyone thinks they can beat.

A woman wakes up and discovers her backyard has disappeared, and other stories from places slowly coming apart.

A while back, one of our producers Brian Reed was in England giving a speech about the podcast he'd hosted, S-Town. A journalism student approached him, asking for advice about a story he wanted to look into – something that’d been big news in Britain, something he’d thought about for years. Brian and the student, Hamza Syed, decided to team up to try and solve the mystery at the heart of that story. The original idea was to put this on our show, but it got too big. Too many twists and...

Last week's story continues, about a Michigan couple who walked into a police officer's house and made a disturbing discovery. This week: the police officer suffers the consequences and so does the couple.

Rob and Reyna Mathis make an unsettling discovery in the home of a local police officer. Soon, their whole city is asking questions about who the officer really is and what he's been doing.

A doctor named Benjamin Gilmer gets a job at a rural clinic in North Carolina. He’s replaced another doctor named Gilmer – Dr. Vince Gilmer – who went to prison after killing his own father. But the more Benjamin’s patients tell him about the other Dr. Gilmer, the more confused he becomes. Everyone loved Vince Gilmer. So Benjamin starts digging around, trying to understand how a good man can seemingly turn bad. Sarah Koenig reports.

Think back to two summers ago, the summer of 2020, when a series of violent, highly-publicized killings of Black Americans sparked outrage and a national movement to eradicate racism and its evils. That movement gave way to a newer, reactionary one, a backlash that is playing out in schools and school board meetings across America. Host Emanuele Berry shares stories about Black people who got tangled up in this current backlash in both extreme and very personal ways.

People use machines to find people they lost.

Stories about the intersection of Christmas and retail, originally broadcast in 1996 when our show was only a year old. Including David Sedaris's story "Santaland Diaries," which first aired on NPR's Morning Edition in a much shorter version.

We take the stately laws of physics—laws which mathematicians and scientists have spent centuries discovering and verifying—and apply them to the realm of human relationships, to see if they shed useful light on our daily lives.

People earnestly doing what they're told, and absolutely not getting what they were promised.

In 2006, a new convert showed up at a mosque in Orange County, California. Known as Farouk al-Aziz, the convert was actually an FBI informant named Craig Monteilh. That informant’s infiltration of the mosque is at the heart of FBI v Fazaga, a case heard at the Supreme Court last month. We return to our episode from 2012, which tells the story behind it.

This bird-focused week, stories about birds and the hearts they sway, the havoc they wreak, the lives they change.

People who tell a lie and then believe the lie more than anyone else.

Getting the point across — or trying to, anyway.