Ira Glass, in an interview with Marc Maron:
There’s this thing that Keith, my mentor, used to say, where he says, “A story, if it’s working, is always an answer to the question, ‘How should I live my life?’”
What an interesting lens.
It’s about surprise and humour. It’s a bit of Storytelling 101 (event leads to event leads to event leads to universal truth). But it’s mostly about craft, and if you tell stories, it’s totally worth 32 minutes of your time. From 2007, here’s Ira Glass at the Gel Conference:
Present again is Ira’s familiar “taking the tools of journalism and applying them to people whom you wouldn’t normally apply them to” mantra.
Particularly interesting is the explanation for why TAL doesn’t have billboards (or “bills”):
One of the differences between our show and the other shows on the public radio is that the other shows will start their show with a list of what’s coming up on the program, which I feel is a sort of singularly uninteresting way to start something. Actually, on our show we would just start the action going. Like, I feel that if we could draw you into the dream of it, you’ll be inside it before you can even think about why you’re inside it or what it is. And it’s far more irresistible.
You can watch the whole video at the Gel site, or if you’re feeling thieve-y, you can just download the FLV file.
Via the latest This American Life newsletter, some very, very funny pledge drive spots from Ira Glass. Click to listen:
Though they’re funny, I don’t think these as effective as Ira’s twice-yearly, straight-up, arithmetic-based podcast promos.
Once upon a time, you could download old episodes of This American Life by grabbing MP3 file locations from the M3U files posted on their website. The MP3 files lived here:
http://audio.wbez.org/tal/SHOWNUMBER.mp3
But that stopped working.
These days, though you can still listen to TAL archives, downloading them has become a bit trickier because the shows are hidden behind a flash player. But, that flash player is still pointing to an actual downloadable MP3, and Christopher Soghoian has figured out where they live:
http://audio.thisamericanlife.org/jomamashouse/ismymamashouse/SHOWNUMBER.mp3
Come on… that directory structure is pretty hilarious.
Replace SHOWNUMBER with the episode number (338 for example), and you’re good to go.
If you download and enjoy This American Life, you really should donate.