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Prologue

Bob Carlson and his 10-year-old daughter, Tess, were driving by Six Flags Magic Mountain when she told him about one of her biggest fears: roller coasters. So they decided to try and take one on.

Act Two: Streetwise

Most big grand transformations we go through really come down to a hundred little things that we change about ourselves. This recently happened for a refugee from Afghanistan, now living in Detroit.

Prologue

Ira talks about the phenomenon of weird food mashups that fast food companies started selling in the last five years – things like the pizza with hot dogs on the crust that Pizza Hut made or the Hardee's burger with a cheesesteak as the topping on the burger. Ira explains that there is something about these foods that he's been wondering about.

Prologue

When Jordan was going into his senior year of high school in small town Utah, he and his buddies all lived together in a house, daring each other into Jackass-style pranks and stunts. There's one particular thing Jordan did that he did not want to talk to Ira about.

Prologue

Host Ira Glass introduces the story of the New United Motor Manufacturing Inc., aka NUMMI. In 1984, General Motors and Toyota opened NUMMI as a joint venture.

Prologue

Ira talks to cyber cafe workers around the world about something that lots of Americans have never heard of, but that people in other countries know all about: a lottery run by the U.S. government where the prize is a visa to come to America. Each year people flock to cyber cafes to enter it, hoping for a lucky break that will change their life.

Prologue

Erik Larson has read lots of captain’s logs while researching big historical events. When he found the log of Captain Walther Schwieger, the guy who headed the U-boat that sank the Lusitania, he knew something didn’t sound right.

Act Two: Freedom Fries

Recently, This American Life has been getting a lot of hate mail about the young women on our staff — listeners complain about their "vocal fry." Ira investigates the phenomenon.

Prologue

Ira talks to reporters John Diedrich and Raquel Rutlidge, from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. They got a call from a landlord who said agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had trashed his place.

Prologue

Host Ira Glass talks to business professor Pino Audia and Fast Company magazine columnist Dan Heath about corporate creation myths and why so many of them involve garages.

Prologue

Ira talks to Joel Gold, a psychologist and author, about a strangely common delusion known as the "Truman Show Delusion," in which patients believe that they are being filmed, 24/7, for a national reality television program. Joel wrote a book with his brother Ian called Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness.

Prologue

Ira brings up a story that got a lot of attention last year, in the New York Times and also on a lot of morning news shows. A couple was sailing across the Pacific Ocean with their two small children, and after three weeks of sailing they signaled for help — which came in the form of four National Guardsmen and a navy vessel.

Act One: When May Day Comes in April

Ira finds out more about what Eric and Charlotte Kaufman’s sailing trip was meant to be, how prepared they were for such an extensive trip, and exactly what went wrong on their sailboat that led to the dramatic rescue for which they were so roundly criticized.