This American Life

People waking up to the fact that the world has suddenly changed.

• Prologue: Jackson Landers tells the story of a very strange decision he made one summer day.(6 minutes)
• Act One: Elena Kostyuchenko tells the story of how she was probably poisoned after reporting on Russian’s invasion of Ukraine, and how she kept not believing it was happening. Bela Shayevich translated this story from Russian and reads it for us.(21 minutes)
• Act Two: A recording of comedian Tig Notaro in the process of trying to catch up to the present and absolutely not being able to.(8 minutes)
• Act Three: Producer Zoe Chace with a political fable that she noticed playing out last week in North Carolina.(11 minutes)
• Act Four: Producer Tobin Low finds a group of people with a special relationship with the idea of catching up.(10 minutes)

Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org

The story of Reverend Carlton Pearson. He was a rising star in the evangelical movementwhen he cast aside the idea of hell and, with it, everything he'd worked for over his entire life.

• Carlton Pearson's church, Higher Dimensions, was once one of the biggest in the city, drawing crowds of 5,000 people every Sunday. But several years ago, scandal engulfed the reverend. He didn't have an affair. He didn't embezzle lots of money. His sin was something that to a lot of people is far worse: He stopped believing in hell. (2 minutes)
• Act One: Reporter Russell Cobb takes us through the remarkable and meteoric rise of Carlton Pearson from a young man to a Pentecostal Bishop: From the moment he first cast the devil out of his 17-year-old girlfriend, to the days when he had a close, personal relationship with Oral Roberts and had appearances on TV and at the White House. Just as Reverend Pearson's career peaked, with more than 5,000 members of his congregation coming every week, he started to think about hell, wondering if a loving God would really condemn most of the human race to burn and writhe in the fire of hell for eternity. (30 minutes)
• Act Two: Once he starts preaching his own revelation, Carlton Pearson's church falls apart. After all, when there's no hell (as the logic goes), you don't really need to believe in Jesus to be saved from it. What follows are the swift departures of his pastors, and an exodus from his congregation—which quickly dwindled to a few hundred people. Donations drop off too, but just as things start looking bleakest, new kinds of people, curious about his change in beliefs, start showing up on Sunday mornings. (23 minutes)

Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org

A series of phone calls to a man in Gaza named Yousef Hammash, between early December and now. He talks about what he and his family are experiencing, sometimes as they are experiencing it.

• Act One: Over the course of one week in December, Yousef tries to get his sisters to safety, in Rafah.(29 minutes)
• Act Two: Yousef is managing a camp of 60 people in Rafah, including his youngest sister, who is 8 months pregnant.Every day there’s talk that Israel will launch a ground assault in Rafah.Yousef and his sister make a plan for her to give birth safely, but it doesn’t go according to plan. And all 60 people in the family are looking to Yousef to tell them where they should go next and how to stay safe. (27 minutes)

Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org

Your mother and I have something we want to talk with you about.

• Prologue: A family sits down to discuss one thing. But then the true purpose of the meeting emerges.(9 ½ minutes)
• Act One: For one kibbutz-dwelling family in Israel, the decision of where to land after the October 7th attacks goes back and forth… and back… and forth. (28 minutes)
• Act One: For one kibbutz-dwelling family in Israel, the decision of where to land after the October 7th attacks goes back and forth… and back… and forth. (28 minutes)
• Act Two: An excerpt from “Belles Lettres,"a short story by Nafissa Thompson-Spiresfrom her book Heads of the Colored People,performed by actors Erika Alexander and Eisa Daviswith a cameo from our colleague Alvin Melathe. (14 minutes)

Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org

Every crime scene hides a story. In this week's show, we hear about crime scenes and the stories they tell.

• Medical Examiner D.J. Drakovic, in Pontiac Michigan, explains how every crime scene is like a novel. (5 minutes)
• Act One: Reporter Nancy Updike spends two days with Neal Smither, who cleans up crime scenes for a living,and comes away wanting to open his Los Angeles franchise, despite the gore — or maybe because ofit. (12 minutes)
• Act Two: Actor Matt Malloy reads a short story by Aimee Bender, from her book “The Girl in the FlammableSkirt," about what can be and cannot be recovered from a crime scene, or from anywhere. (12 minutes)
• Act Three: Sometimes criminals return to the scene of their misdeeds — to try to make things right, to try to undothe past.Katie Davis reports on her neighbor Bobby, who returned to the scene where he robbedpeople and conned people. This time, he came to coach little league. (22 minutes)

Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org

An investigation of when and why people ask loaded questions that are a proxy for something else.

• Prologue: Host Ira Glass talks with producer Tobin Low about the question he got asked after he and his boyfriend moved in together, and what he thinks people were really asking.(4minutes)
• Act One: “What do you think about Beyoncé?” and other questions that are asked a lot, raised by people on first dates. (12minutes)
• Act Two: When a common, seemingly innocuous question goes wildly off the rails.(13 minutes)
• Act Three: Why are people asking me if my mother recognizes me, when it’s totally beside the point?(14 minutes)
• Act Four: Schools ask their students the strangest essay questions sometimes. The experience of tutoring anxious teenagers through how to answer them requires a balladier, singing his lived experience to a crowd as though it were the Middle Ages.(10 minutes)

Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org

What it means to have words—and to lose them.

• Prologue: Sometimes we don’t want to say what’s going on because putting it into words would make it real. At other times, words don’t seem to capture the weight of what we want to say. Susanna Fogel talks about her friend Margaret Riley, who died earlier this week.(6minutes)
• Act One: The story of a woman from Gaza City who ran out of words. Seventy-two days into the war, Youmna stopped talking.(27 minutes)
• Act Two: For years there was a word that Val’s mother did not want to use. Val sets out to figure out why.(22 minutes)

Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org

People finding themselves in situations that are worse than they thought and deciding to really go with it.

• Prologue: A Boston woman takes her dog for a walk and suddenly finds herself in a terrible situation she never anticipated. The strange thing is, it helps her.(9 minutes)
• Act One: Two college friends try to stop Donald Trump’s primary season momentum by convincing New Hampshire voters to vote against everything they care about. Producer Zoe Chace follows along. (22 minutes)
• Act Two: When producer Ike Sriskandarajah tries to sleep-train his baby, a neighbor decides to call the police. Later, Ike thinks, "I can work with that."(9 minutes)
• Act Three: A story by producer Boen Wang about how to get through a summer of bad days.(9 minutes)

Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org

Often we see someone’s situation from the outside and think we know exactly what’s going on. This week, we get inside and find out just how much more interesting the reality of it is.

• A mysterious tunnel is found in a forest in Toronto. Public speculation is all over the place and totally wrong. Nick Kohler tells Ira the story behind the tunnel. (10 minutes)
• Act One: A teenager reports what it is like to be inside an abusive relationship with an older man. (29 minutes)
• Act Two: Larry speaks English. His dad speaks Chinese. They grew up in the same house but Larry could never speak to his dad. After 20 years, with the help of filmmaker Bianca Giaever, he and his dad have their first conversation. (16 minutes)

Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org

There's the thing you plan to do, and then there's the thing you end up doing.

• Ira summarizes the results of an informal poll of about a hundred people, about whether they wereliving their Plan A or Plan B and recounts a moment from a short story by author Ron Carlson.(2 minutes)
• Act One: John Hodgman first encountered Cuervo Man on a press junket to Cuervo Nation, a small islandowned by Jose Cuervo Tequila. Cuervo Man was wearing nothing but a Speedo, wraparoundshades, and a red cape. Occasionally he’d stick a toilet plunger on his bald head. John wasfascinated and eventually got to know Cuervo Man, whose real name was Ryan. Though theCuervo act was Ryan’s Plan B, it had a special power that John couldn't help but envy. (19 minutes)
• Act Two: Starlee Kine was becoming friends with a woman named Robin when they started to encounteran obstacle, a common obstacle people run into when the become friends as adults. So Robininvented a Plan B to solve the problem.(6 minutes)
• Act Three: Ira talks with Barry Keenan, who was living a lot of people’s plan A in the early 60’s. He was rich,he was successful. But when he lost all his money and got hooked on painkillers, he switched to aPlan B to make money. He decided to kidnap the 19-year-old Frank Sinatra Jr.(11 minutes)
• Act Four: Jonathan Goldstein took a telemarketing job as a kind of temporary Plan B, never suspecting thatit would be a ten year chapter in his life. (10 minutes)
• Act Five: J. Robert Lennon reads an excerpt from his short story "The Accursed Items," in which hedemonstrates that even objects can fulfill a fate different from the one for which they wereintended.Even inanimate objects can have a plan B. (6 minutes)

Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org