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This American Life Radio Links and Discussions Questions Born out of a car trip listening to "This American Life" on the radio, the idea to use these radio links arose from a desire to allow you to hear and feel, not just read, what people experience with issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and class. For each chapter, you will find one or more links to the radio shows, along with discussion questions created by Professor Norm Conti of Duquesne University. "This American Life" is a popular radio show with an unusual format. Each week, the hosts pick a theme and interview people who have some relation to that theme, with the end result of a powerful combination of pathos, humor, and overall learning. To hear the radio links, you must go to the links below to access the streaming MP3 files. Once you are on the Episode page these files can be played by clicking on the blue icon next to the show title Chapter 1: Taking a New Look at a Familiar World Chapter 1: Taking a New Look at a Familiar World 322: Shouting Across the Divide This program presents stories of the difficulties that arise in communications and relationships between Muslims and non-Muslims. The program includes the story of a family that came to America in the late 1990's. After September 11, 2001 their otherwise happy life in this country became subject to a high degree of prejudice and discrimination. It also includes the story of an advertising agency who works on a project to promote American values to the Muslim world for the State Department.
Chapter 2: Seeing and Thinking Sociologically 318: With Great Power This episode is focused on stories of power and responsibility. The first act is a story of a woman who possessed information that could free an innocent man from prison. The second act is the story of a mother and daughter in a family who wished for years they could do something to stop their neighbor from all kinds of shocking behavior. Suddenly they get the power to decisively change things forever and then they have to decide whether they will.
Chapter 3: Building Reality: The Social Construction of Knowledge 328: What I Learned from Television This program addresses the role of television in the lives of everyday people. It includes stories of how we watch television and what the images do to our understandings of the world around us. From a general sense of who we are and how we relate to others to such divergent topics as Thanksgiving and sexuality, the program explores the function of television in defining the world around us.
Chapter 4: Building Order: Culture and History 337: Man vs. History This program presents stories about people taking history into their own hands. In the first act, a man with no practical experience hatches a plan to curb the violence in Iraq. He thought he could get the Sunni resistance to sit down with Coalition forces to negotiate a cease-fire. So he hooked up with a member of the Iraqi parliament and headed to Baghdad and Amman, where, remarkably, doors opened to him.
Chapter 5: Building Identity: Socialization 109: Notes on Camp This program presents stories of summer camp. Camp kids explain how their non-camp friends and their non-camp loved ones have no idea why camp is the most important thing in their lives.
Chapter 6: Supporting Identity: The Presentation of Self 121: Twentieth Century Man One thing that makes our country different from most others is this idea that you can recreate yourself as someone you'd prefer to be: sell everything off, head out West, start a new life. But what happens if you're too good at it? Over the course of his life, Keith Aldrich was a child of the Depression in Oklahoma; a preacher-in-training in booming California; an aspiring Hollywood actor; in the 1950s, a self-styled Beat writer, and then a man in a gray flannel suit; in the 1960s, a member of the New York literati, and then a hippie; in the 1970s, a denizen of the suburbs with a partying life; and a born-again Christian when the Moral Majority helped put Ronald Reagan in office. The program is devoted to the story of Keith's life, as told by one of his nine children, Gillian Aldrich. Keith's life is not only a history of most of the major cultural shifts in the second half of the Twentieth Century. It's also a case study of the question, "What happens if you're too good at transforming yourself?"
Chapter 7: Building Social Relationships: Intimacy and Families 183: The Missing Parents Bureau In the first act of this program the reporter talks with single women who are planning to get pregnant with the help of a sperm bank and finds that they all wrestle with the question of how much they want to know about the fathers of their kids—and how much they want their kids to know. The second act is a collection of letters written by a woman who signs her name as "X" and are addressed to the father of her adolescent son. X has no idea where to send the letters, but she keeps writing. The third act is the story of a girl in an acting class that includes an exercises requiring her to develop a character with a troubled past, and then a real psychologist would come in for a session of character group therapy. The girl chose to take on the character of an orphan. In fact, she remembers that everyone else in her class did too. Twenty years later, she visits her old acting teacher and discovers that for some reason, kids today don't want to be orphans. The final act is the story of two men who adopt a child and the relationship they all have with the mother.
Chapter 8: Constructing Difference: Social Deviance 207: Special Ed This program is composed of stories about people who were told that they're different. Some of them were comfortable with it. Some didn't understand it. And some understood, but didn't like it. Act one is a series of interviews with three of the people involved in making the documentary How's Your News? , about a team of developmentally disabled people who travel across the country doing man-on-the-street interviews. The interviewer talks to two of the developmentally disabled reporters, Susan Harrington and Joe Simon, and to the film's non-disabled director, Arthur Bradford. Act two we hear from a mother and her son. By age seven, he'd had heart failure and been diagnosed as bipolar. And then—after a period as the world's youngest Stephen Hawking fan—he got better. In the third act a woman tells the story of her developmentally disabled brother Vincent, who one day quit his job and then quit everything else, mystifying everyone in his life.
Chapter 9: The Structure of Society: Organizations, Social Institutions, and Globalization 215: Ask An Expert Act One of this program reports on the "Recovered Memory" movement. In the early 1990s people across America turned to experts in psychology for help and many people were told that the source of their problems could be traced to traumatic events they could not even remember, to memories that had to be recovered through special techniques. In the last ten years, this whole approach to psychology has fallen out of favor. So what happened that so many experts came to believe in a treatment that turned out to make many of their patients worse, not better and what happened when the patients and therapists figured all this out?
Chapter 10: The Architecture of Stratification: Social Class and Inequality 331: Habeas Schmabeas 2007 The right of habeas corpus has been a part of our country's legal tradition longer than we've actually been a country. It means that our government has to explain why it's holding a person in custody. But now, the War on Terror has nixed many of the rules we used to think of as fundamental. At Guantanamo Bay, our government initially claimed that prisoners should not be covered by habeas—or even by the Geneva Conventions—because they're the most fearsome enemies we have. But is that true? Is it a camp full of terrorists, or a camp full of our mistakes? In Act one, Jack Hitt explains how President Bush's War on Terror changed the rules for prisoners of war and how it is that under those rules, it'd be possible that someone whose classified file declares that they pose no threat to the United States could still be locked up indefinitely—potentially forever!—at Guantanamo. Act two explains that Habeas corpus began in England. And recently, 175 members of the British parliament filed a "friend of the court" brief in one of the U.S. Supreme Court cases on habeas and Guantanamo—apparently, the first time in Supreme Court history that's happened. In their brief, the members of Parliament warn about the danger of suspending habeas: "During the British Civil War, the British created their own version of Guantanamo Bay and dispatched undesirable prisoners to garrisons off the mainland, beyond the reach of habeas corpus relief." In London, reporter Jon Ronson, goes in search of what happened. Act three explains that though more than 200 prisoners from the U.S. facility at Guantanamo Bay have been released, few of them have ever been interviewed on radio or on television in America. Jack Hitt conducts rare and surprising interviews with two former Guantanamo detainees about life in Guantanamo.
Chapter 11: The Architecture of Inequality: Race and Ethnicity 72: Trek This program is an idiosyncratic first-person travelogue about race relations and tourism in the new South Africa. The interracial producers of the program travel through the still mostly-segregated society and have very different opinions about what they see, especially when it comes to some distant relatives of the white correspondent's in South Africa.
Chapter 12: The Architecture of Inequality: Sex and Gender 15: Dawn In this program a writer goes on a search for a mysterious neighbor from his childhood in Charleston, South Carolina, and stumbles onto an epic story of the Old South, the New South, gender confusion, Chihuahuas, and changing values in American journalism. This program documents his quest to find out the truth about the man who lived down the street from him 30 years ago in South Carolina: Gordon Langley Hall, a.k.a. Dawn Langley Hall Simmons. Gordon was rumored to have had one of the first sex change operations in America, then to have married a black man, then to have borne the black man's child. It was said he had a full coming-out party for his Chihuahua. It was said he had voodoo powers. The reporter sets out to find what was true and what was rumor about Gordon Langley Hall, and stumbles onto a sprawling story about changing culture morés in America.
Chapter 13: The Global Dynamics of Population: Demographic Trends 179: Cicero This program tells the story of a town that time forgot, or more accurately, a town that tried to forget the times. It's the story of what at one time was one of most notoriously racist and corrupt suburbs in America. In the 1960s, Cicero residents reacted so violently to threats of integration that officials told Martin Luther King, Jr.'s supporters that marching there would be a suicide mission. Today, two-thirds of the population is Mexican-American, but the political machine from decades past still holds power. A parable of racial politics in America, of white Americans not wanting change, not wanting to let in the outside world, and what happens when they have no choice.
Chapter 14: Architects of Change: Reconstructing Society 336: Who Can You Save? Act one focuses on the hypothetical scenario that there's a group of five people standing on a train track, and you're on a train coming toward them. You can save the whole group by pulling a lever and switching to another track, but the catch is that you'll kill another person who's standing on that other track. Do you pull the lever? According to a Harvard scientist, who posed this question to hundreds of thousands of people on the Internet, nine out of 10 people say yes, they would pull the lever. But then, the questions get harder—and the answers much more confusing. It turns out that different parts of our brains make different moral decisions. Act two is about the, moment when the U.S. government sent out a call for volunteers—regular, non-military people—to go to Iraq and help rebuild the country, Randy Frescoln signed up. He believed in the cause of the war and in the promise of its mission. He had experience setting up agriculture projects overseas, so was sent to the Sunni Triangle to try to reconstruct the broken economy there. But three months into his yearlong assignment, he comes to a horrible realization: the people he's trying to help hate him. In Act three, Brady Udall tells the story of the time he helped a stranger get his car out of a ditch. In exchange, the man promises to help him any time, for any reason—legal or not. Brady carries the man's card in his wallet; he's reassured that he has such a powerful guy in his corner. Many years later, Brady finally looks him up.
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