tpaine posted:

animedad posted:

my favorite npr was the one where they profiled the mentally ill goon that tried to go to libya and fight against (?) qaddafi. it was also the only good npr. close thread.

my favorite npr was also the one about you.

gyrofry posted:

This episode of caahh taahlk wos brought to you by: Raytheon and Archer Daniels Midland. ADM: Supahmaahhket to the World

this this this

plus the tech stories, oh my god the social media and tech stories about how someone in waaahhshington is using ipads for some boring "novel" purpose or something

discipline posted:

I'm glad that as mod you've finally found the courage to make threads

ya now that u can't punish me as a poor replacement for flirting.

Superabound posted:

the exceeding rarity of crimes committed with actual fully automatic weapons proves pretty conclusively that making certain weapons illegal actually DOES keep them out of the hands of criminals

gbs gun types would always argue that that actually proved that automatic weapons weren't dangerous because no one commits crimes with them.

It’s easy to think of the 1990s as a fat and insignificant decade, but in the handwritten, photocopied pages of a zine called Dishwasher was a world every bit as vivid and passionate and strange as that of ’50s beats or ’70s punks— the world of nomadic pearl diving (aka suds busting) as described by the heroic Pete Jordan. This is a story of youth (desperate to avoid experience), of work, and of the mad vastness of America, as compelling to my mind as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

Never mind that Jordan was a writer slumming it to get material. Never mind that only a child of privilege can afford to think of a menial job as an heroic enterprise, or to make up stupid, pseudo-poetic phrases to describe it, like “pearl diving” and “suds busting.” Never mind, either, that dishwashers are unskilled laborers, not members of a subculture, and that most of them who aren’t Dishwasher Pete would rather be doing something else. To This American Life fans, everyone is measured by middle-class terms—even people left scraping dirty plates for minimum wage in a hot kitchen.

Although Dishwasher Pete’s contributions have largely been relegated to TAL’s archives, his legacy of studied incuriosity about the limitations of wage slavery lives on. Take the last segment of the popular 1997 episode “Conventions,” in which Glass interviewed the Grateful Dead lyricist and cyberlibertarian activist John Perry Barlow. Twenty years ago, while attending an Apple convention at the behest of his pal Steve Jobs, Barlow fell instantly in love with a comely young psychiatrist attending a rival convention in the same hotel. On a weekend one year into their charmed courtship, the pair flew from their Manhattan home to California to see a Pink Floyd concert with Barlow’s friend Timothy Leary. On that Golden State junket, they agreed to wed, but, in a tragic turn of events, both contracted a virulent flu and decided to return home early.

“She took an afternoon flight, and I took her down to the airport,” Barlow relates to Glass over a mournful electric guitar soundtrack. “ gave each other a great big kiss, and she said, ‘Nothing can keep us apart, baby. We were made for each other.’ And she just walked onto the plane, and went to sleep, took a nap, and it turned out that the virus that we both had . . . had attacked her heart.” The Garciaesque solo guitar soundtrack that the show’s producers used to punctuate the segment comes to an ominous stop. “As she was sleeping, she started to fibrillate and just died. She was two days short of her thirtieth birthday.”

“Oh my God,” Glass says, though he must have known what was coming.

Oh my God, indeed. The poor psychiatrist did everything right: she had an advanced degree and a white-collar job that would pay for health insurance, found true love with a rebel in an Armani blazer, and death came for her, too. Is nobody safe?

“Prior to this I didn’t believe in the soul,” Barlow says. The noodling guitar resumes. “We were the same soul. Having seen that, that changes everything.”

“Now that you’ve had this experience with her, do you find that you have this experience all the time in a smaller form, where you meet a group of strangers and there’ll be one whose eyes strike you and you think, okay, I can see a part of this thing?” Glass asks.

“Absolutely,” Barber answers. “I feel an ability to attach on a moment-to-moment basis that is completely unlike anything that I’ve felt prior to that.”

Does Glass pause to note that Barlow is a free-market ideologue? That a list of his friends reads like a who’s who of Boomer hippie capitalists? That he has the disposable income to fly out to attend a terrible rock concert on a whim? No, stupid—it’s all about the soul. John Perry Barlow’s role on This American Life was identical to the one carved out for Dishwasher Pete: to smooth over and soften up social reality, to serve as a lifestyle docent to a privileged class of listeners brought face-to-face with the void. But where Dishwasher Pete was engaged in harmless slumming, Barlow was exploring a brand of yuppie theodicy: bestowing transcendent social meaning on the otherwise senseless death of a thirty-year-old woman. Sure, Barlow’s betrothed is gone, but he’s learned something, and that’s what really counts.

On the surface, Barlow’s testimonial couldn’t be more different from the saga of Nellie Thomas, a black guy living in a poor neighborhood in Chicago’s South Side. In a TAL segment called “Everything Must Go,” a Columbia University sociologist named Sudhir Venkatesh talks about how Thomas made thousands of dollars by illegally selling ammunition, but had no idea what to do with all that money. Instead of enjoying it, he’s afraid he’ll be robbed, and so he hides bricks of cash in his furniture and backyard while keeping a sleepless shotgun vigil. Thomas finally gives up and asks Venkatesh for advice.

“What do your people do when they have all this stuff that they can’t use?” Thomas asks.

“I’m Indian, but I assumed he meant middle-class folks,” Venkatesh narrates. The sociologist then advises the hustler to have a garage sale. Thomas, overjoyed, thanks Venkatesh profusely, then begins “running around like a child building a tree house,” stuffing thousands of dollars in his couch cushions and vacuum cleaner.

Thomas’s story follows the same basic narrative arc as Barlow’s, giving listeners a heady rush of tension and resolution, only to impart the clichéd lesson that crime doesn’t pay. Any feelings of danger or anxiety over hearing about an actual poor person are filtered through a guide with a PhD. Venkatesh glosses over the likelihood that, by selling illicit ammunition, Thomas had directly fed the increase of violence (and perhaps death) in his community. Instead, Venkatesh takes pains to tell us that Thomas is just a nice, kind of quirky guy who wants to live a quiet life. He doesn’t spend his money on flashy cars or drugs or women—he’s practically middle class. Carry on, listeners—poor people aren’t crushed and dehumanized as you might have suspected. Sometimes they even find money in vacuum cleaners!

However, when poor Americans who aren’t self-healing spiritual beings wander into This American Life broadcasts, they tend to become strangely invisible. When TAL devoted an episode to budget cuts that forced towns to slash city services, producer Sarah Koenig visited Trenton, New Jersey, to interview residents coping with cutbacks in community policing in a municipality regularly ranked among the country’s worst outposts of violent crime.

“There’s been muggings. There’s been shootings. There’s been break-ins,” says Trenton city councilwoman Marge Caldwell-Wilson. “We had a rash of burglaries during the day while people were home. They were stealing copper downspouts and running down the street as the neighbors were yelling at them. So that’s how brazen things are happening.”

“I keep asking if she’s talking about her neighborhood, because her neighborhood is beautiful,” Koenig says, incredulously. “Historic Victorian townhouses, lovely clean streets—I saw a Volvo station wagon parked across from Marge’s house, two car seats in back, a New Yorker magazine in the passenger seat.”

Like many rust-belt cities on the East Coast, Trenton is a notoriously violent place with a declining industrial base. Its unofficial slogan, spelled out on a trestle bridge leading into the city, is “TRENTON MAKES, THE WORLD TAKES.” Though Koenig talks to some people from the lower orders and duly notes their own fear over the spread of violent crime, she takes pains to situate Trenton’s perennial crime epidemic in the cloistered retreats of New Yorker-subscribing sedan owners whose copper tubing is at risk. Look out, public radio listeners—they’re coming for you, too!

In April, in advance of a live performance of This American Life to be simulcast at five hundred movie theaters in the United States and Canada, I interviewed Glass for the Boston Phoenix, where I’m a staff writer. Though interviewed in this context is an overstatement; it was one of those conference calls set up for celebrities who are too busy or important to speak with reporters individually.

I was allowed one question: “Were David Sedaris’s stories exaggerated, and does that matter?”

After a fair amount of throat-clearing about going back over the Sedaris oeuvre, Glass conceded that “yes, there are exaggerations in his stories, and he’s the first to admit it. As he says, when asked if the stories are true, he says they’re true enough for you. That said, in the wake of Mike Daisey, one of the things we’ve talked about at our show is should we only have on stories that we factcheck? Like, should we only have stories that are 100 percent true?”

Since such ironclad guarantees, Glass said, are unlikely in a case like Sedaris’s, the show has two options with comic monologues going forward: “We either fact-check them and let the audience know they’re true, or at least figure out some way to clue in the audience to, like, this is not to be taken the same way as the journalism.”

“Though, truthfully,” Glass continued, “it’s a funny thing. I would like to believe that the audience is sophisticated enough that they can tell the difference and that we don’t have to cue them.”

That’s a bold wish, given the kind of audience Glass has cultivated. All too eager for soft landings in times of moral confusion and social trouble, they’ve made “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory” among the most popular broadcasts in TAL history, second only to the show in which Glass retracted it. Apple, of course, has emerged from the scandal in better financial shape than ever. By the end of the week in which Daisey’s confabulations were reported, Apple stock climbed to a stunning price of $599, prompting the company to announce an unprecedented $45 billion dividend payment to its investors.

By the end of the conference call, another journalist offered this of the broadcast that walked back many of Daisey’s factual claims: “That show was just as riveting as the original Mike Daisey.” The befuddled Glass thanked her, and laughed.