This American Life

489: No Coincidence, No Story!

This American Life — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0400

We asked listeners to send us their best coincidence stories, and we got more than 1,300 submissions! There were so many good ones that we decided to make a whole show about them. From a chance encounter at a bus station to a romantic dollar bill to a baffling apparition in a college shower stall.

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(00:00:00) Prologue: Hannah Jacoby tells the story of when she and her best friend Lindsey bonded over those toy soldiers with the parachutes, called (really) Poopatroopers — and how the little jumpers perfectly bookended their high-school years. And guest host Sarah Koenig explains the very interesting trends we discovered in our listeners' coincidences. (9 minutes)

(00:09:23) Act One: A surprising number of coincidences involve grandmothers. One grandma has so many coincidences happen to her that it drives her granddaughter, 16-year-old Juliana Bontrager, to try to beat her at her own coincidence game. We also hear from Blake Oliver about a very strange appearance his grandma once made. (9 minutes)

(00:19:31) Act Two: When it comes to love, coincidences tend to loom extra-large. Stephen Lee tells about the time his parents first met his fiance’s parents, and his future mother-in-law dropped a coincidence bomb. And we hear how a dollar bill ended up clinching a marriage, after floating around Chicago for years. (10 minutes)

(00:28:22) Act Three: Ryan Rozar told us about a confounding coincidence that was visited on him in college. We didn’t think it was a coincidence at all, so we set out to prove him wrong. (8 minutes)

(00:37:39) Act Four: More stories of dazzling coincidences: an old boyfriend is conjured in Morocco, a jazz singer seems to rise from the dead, and three boys believe they’ve seen a corpse. Plus stories of errant fathers, lost and found. (13 minutes)

(00:49:57) Act Five: Kerry Weeks tells about the time he lost a pocketknife and turned to the galaxy for help. (7 minutes)

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427: Original Recipe

This American Life — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0400

We discover what we believe might be the original recipe for Coca-Cola…and share it with you! When this episode first aired in 2011, it made international headlines. This, and another story about telling copies from originals.

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(00:00:00) Act One: The formula for Coca-Cola is one of the most jealously guarded trade secrets in the world. So we were surprised to find a 1979 newspaper article that might contain Coke's original recipe. We were even more surprised to find reasons to believe the recipe is real. (26 minutes)

(00:26:23) Act Two: Jake Halpern tells this story about document expert John Reznikoff, who came into possession of some materials which — if authentic — would change history. Then, things got complicated (32 minutes)

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899: Reaching Out

This American Life — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0400

Sayre Quevedo’s invented a way to do a podcast that feels completely new. He’s been recording nearly all his conversations for years, and the result is something that captures a person’s life in a raw and complicated way that’s rarely heard. His new show Reaching Out also documents his mutually judge-y relationship with his twin brother as they set out to find their long-lost birth father.

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(00:00:00) Prologue: Ira Glass introduces Reaching Out, a podcast that feels like it invented something completely new — an ambitious way of capturing a life in a way we'd never heard before. (1 minute)

(00:02:39) Part One: Sayre Quevedo and his brother start the search for their birth father, and they discover that this whole time he’s been a few minutes away from where Sayre lives. (20 minutes)

(00:21:49) Part Two: The twins try reaching out in a variety of ways before taking more direct action. Sayre tries to continue life as normal. (12 minutes)

(00:34:50) Part Three: Sayre and Connor go in person to face their dad. (24 minutes)

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898: An Argument

This American Life — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 20:00:00 -0400

Nikole Hannah-Jones made an argument 10 years ago in The New York Times Magazine that became famous. She wrote about choosing a public school for her daughter, Najya, in one of the most racially and economically segregated school systems in the country: New York City. Nikole chose a regular public school, one that most wealthy and middle-class parents wouldn’t consider, and she challenged other parents to do the same. She revisits that argument, and that choice, in a series of conversations with producer Chana Joffe-Walt and with her daughter, Najya, who’s now 16 and has her own very different views.

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(00:00:00) Prologue: Chana talks with Nikole about what they both remember from being young parents just starting to think about schools for their children. (9 minutes)

(00:10:41) Act One: Nikole talks with Chana about Najya’s elementary school and the problems her family navigated there. (15 minutes)

(00:25:57) Act Two: Chana talks with Najya about her memories of elementary and middle school and how she felt about her mom’s choices. (9 minutes)

(00:31:40) Act Three: Nikole and Najya talk about what changed when Najya pushed back against her mom’s choices for elementary and middle school and got to choose her own high school. (10 minutes)

(00:42:08) Act Four: Nikole and Najya talk with each other about the different choices they made and the questions they still have for each other. (9 minutes)

(00:51:06) Act Five: Nikole fact-checks her memory against her old emails with Najya’s elementary school and has a painful revelation. (7 minutes)

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897: Intergenerational Space Travel

This American Life — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 20:00:00 -0400

People braving the true final frontier — the gap between people born at slightly different times.

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(00:00:00) Prologue: Last fall, some NPR podcasts started getting mysterious comments on Spotify. They made no sense to the staff reading them – until someone from a younger generation cracked the code. (11 minutes)

(00:12:00) Act One: When Courtney Maum was eighteen, her mother married a guy she despised. At their wedding, Courtney read a poem she wrote – a pretty dark poem! – which made her mother furious. More than 30 years later, they finally talk about it. (27 minutes)

(00:41:53) Act Two: When Ike Sriskandarajah was a teenager in Madison, Wisconsin, he thought he had the greatest job. He worked at the movie theater, wore a cummerbund, and snuck friends in through the back door! It was magical. That was more than 20 years ago. Is it still as great as he remembers? Ike goes back to find out. (8 minutes)

(00:50:27) Act Three: Every morning, Myra Flynn finds herself in a standoff with her daughter over her hair. Recently, to understand why these hair sessions are so fraught, Myra started recording them. What she heard sent her on a quest to get answers from her own mother. (11 minutes)

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896: I Know What You Need

This American Life — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 20:00:00 -0400

Moments when it seems obvious what to do for someone else, so of course you jump in and try to help — and what happens after that.

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(00:00:00) Prologue: Devon Taylor tells host Ira Glass about a time she confronted people who stole $100 from her. (12 minutes)

(00:12:01) Act One: We get to an age when we find ourselves taking care of our parents, whether they want us to or not. Writer Kristen Roupenian wrote this piece of fiction based on something real that happened to a family she knows. (20 minutes)

(00:33:37) Act Two: Two chatbots, stuck in a loop, each trying to help the other. Will they ever break free? (20 minutes)

(00:55:48) Act Three: In Utah, some communities have been fighting measles outbreaks for 14 months. These are some of the longest-running outbreaks in the country. But one of our producers, Miki Meek, heard about how school nurses in a town called Vernal helped end its outbreak in just six weeks. Miki finds out how they did it. (9 minutes)

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895: Label Maker!

This American Life — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 20:00:00 -0400

Labels are powerful. They can distill you down to a single word. They can get stuck on you without your permission. And sometimes, when they get taken away, they can upend your entire life. On this episode: labels and the havoc they wreak.

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(00:00:00) Prologue: Sara and Ethan have been dating for 10 months. They see each other at least once a week, text pretty much every day, and have been there for each other through hard times. But they refuse to have the “what are we?” conversation. So what gives? Guest host Tobin Low looks into it. (5 minutes)

(00:05:14) Act One: Last week, when Temporary Protected Status, also known as TPS, was cut off for Haitian immigrants, some 300,000 people had their lives upended. Marie, a Certified Nursing Assistant in Boston, was one of them. Producer Chana Joffe-Walt spent time last week with Marie as she tried to figure out exactly when her very last day on the job would be. (21 minutes)

(00:27:57) Act Two: Comedian Janet McNamara was walking off stage 15 years ago when the club owner asked, “Hey, have you ever been tested for autism?” No one had ever asked her this before, so Janet decided to look into it. (17 minutes)

(00:44:01) Act Three: When you get down to it, labels are just our way of pointing out what we think is remarkable about other people. That’s Alfred Jung Lee’s argument. He’s been thinking a lot about how we describe each other, especially as he tries to describe his wife, who passed away from cancer. (10 minutes)

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894: I Couldn't Help but Notice

This American Life — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 20:00:00 -0400

People dealing with new, glaring, massive changes happening right where they live.

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(00:00:00) Prologue: Rick Cole, a city councilmember in Pasadena, CA, talks to Ira about how he responded to a surprise nighttime military exercise in his neighborhood this June – complete with helicopters, gunfire, and flash bangs. (5 minutes)

(00:05:30) Act One: A doctor trained as a midwife tells the eye-popping story of how she and others came together to save a baby during a birth that suddenly went wrong, in a part of rural Maine where the local labor and delivery unit had closed less than a month before. (26 minutes)

(00:34:56) Act Two: Producer Valerie Kipnis never felt inside the jokes and stories her family would tell about growing up in the Soviet Union, until she saw this year's Oscar-winning documentary, Mr. Nobody Against Putin. The film follows the changes unfolding in one school as Russia rolled out a nationwide propaganda push after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Valerie interviewed the young teacher at the center of the documentary and learned things that never made it into the film. (21 minutes)

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893: Testosterone

This American Life — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 20:00:00 -0400

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered everyone over 30 in the military to have their testosterone tested. That inspired us to rerun this classic episode where everyone at This American Life tested their testosterone and compared results. It did not lead to workplace harmony.

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(00:00:00) Prologue: Host Ira Glass talks with producer Alex Blumberg, who explains that he wanted to do this show because of his conflicted relationship with his own testosterone. He tells Ira that the reasons go back to a girl in his 8th-grade homeroom. We also hear from a man who stopped producing testosterone due to a medical treatment, and found his entire personality was altered. (10 minutes)

(00:10:45) Act One: What’s it like to get injected with testosterone? When Griffin Hansbury transitioned, he got massive shots of it and was surprised at the effect it had on him. (17 minutes)

(00:27:56) Act Two: The men and women on staff at This American Life decide to get their testosterone levels tested to see who has the most and least, and whether personality traits actually match hormone levels. (13 minutes)

(00:40:16) Act Three: What happens when a man suddenly loses all of his testosterone? We return to Alex Blumberg’s interview from the top of the show with a man who that happened to. He says life without testosterone is life without desire. By that he doesn’t mean sexual desire. He means any desire. (6 minutes)

(00:46:47) Act Four: Novelist Miriam Toews interviews her 15-year-old son, someone at an age when boys experience a jolt of ten or twenty times the testosterone they had as children, about all the things she doesn’t understand about what he’s going through. (11 minutes)

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892: Trapped on a Bus

This American Life — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 20:00:00 -0400

People on journeys they did not intend — or agree to.

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(00:00:00) Prologue: A woman on a nighttime bus ride wakes up to discover the bus driver is taking the passengers somewhere none of them want to go. (8 minutes)

(00:08:11) Act One: Ayman Oghanna was reporting in Syria when he got a surprising call from home: one of his neighbors had been arrested for spying. (13 minutes)

(00:21:18) Act Two: Eileen Sosin Martínez describes life in Havana right now, where blackouts have become so constant that it’s nearly impossible to make ice and garbage trucks don’t collect the trash regularly. (11 minutes)

(00:33:33) Act Three: A beloved tree in England, more than 100 years old, is mysteriously cut down overnight, leaving the country bereft and enraged and out for justice. (15 minutes)

(00:49:31) Act Four: When she was 16, Leticia flew from Sao Paolo, where she lived, to Germany. She was seated next to an older woman who did something so surprising during the flight that Leticia still tells people about it today. (9 minutes)

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Ira (Reluctantly) Gives a Graduation Speech

This American Life — Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 -0400

Ira always hated commencement speeches. Then he felt like he had to give this one.

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New Lore Drop

This American Life — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0500

People discovering information about their own lives that they did not know and suddenly everything looks very different.

An Update from Ira

This American Life — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 00:00:00 -0400

Ira Glass shares some news about This American Life

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Bonus: Nancy's Deep Cuts

This American Life — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 00:00:00 -0400

Ira Glass talks with longtime producer Nancy Updike about the most personal stories they have put on the radio. This is a sample of the bonus episodes we regularly release to our This American Life Partners.

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A Big Announcement

This American Life — Wed, 16 Oct 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Ira Glass has news to share about some things happening here at This American Life.

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