This American Life news stories on Newser

Mike Daisey's Really Sorry —for Real This Time

Polly Davis Doig — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 17:57:17 CDT

Mike Daisey, the writer/performer at the heart of a controversy over the Apple exposé that proved riddled with what he later termed "theater," is now contrite for his fabrications, reports the LA Times . The man behind the one-man-show The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, apologized on his blog,...

NPR Lays Off 7% of Staff, Cuts 2 Shows

Ambreen Ali — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 18:10:01 CST

NPR will take two shows off the air and lay off 64 employees—7% of its workforce—to close an unexpected $23 million budget shortfall. Shows getting the ax are "Day to Day" and "News and Notes," both of which sought to diversify NPR's audience. The layoffs are the first...

Choose Your Own Adventure, This American Life Style

Will McCahill — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 08:50:23 CDT

This American Life , providing "a valuable census of liberal America's cultural consciousness since 1996," comes in for a little ribbing from Walker Boyd in Radar . Boyd spoofs Ira Glass's radio and TV narratives with a Mad Libs-type story generator. Now "your dreams of Ira narrating some touching yet inoffensive slice...

Magic of 'This American Life' Returns to Small Screen

Kate Rockwood — Sun, 04 May 2008 11:57:03 CDT

The stories on the small-screen version of “This American Life” start out small—a husband’s protest over the oppressive American trend of lawn-mowing, a young man living with spinal muscular atrophy—and become something universal, both dark and light, even a little magical, writes Heather Havrilesky on Salon.com. On...

Quirk Is the New Kitsch (Sigh)

Thu, 16 Aug 2007 17:13:41 CDT

Quirk is the “ruling sensibility” of today’s culture—random narrative, “mannered ingenuousness”—and it’s become exhausting, writes the Atlantic 's Michael Hirschorn. “This American Life” has been the standard-bearer, but the quirk it purveys hasn't held up well in expanding from radio to TV.

'LIFE' GOES ON

NewsDude — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 20:43:30 CDT

Stevenson Swanson wonders how and weather Chicago Public Radio god Ira Glass can really do a television show and, even more daring, a show for the premium cable only network, Showtime.