Stories about people who turned to the experts and got horrible advice. One story is about people who went to therapists who made them sicker. Another is about how the hosts of Car Talk inadvertently (or perhaps intentionally) destroyed a car belonging to one of their own employees.
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Prologue
Host Ira Glass talks with NPR's Car Talk hosts Tom and Ray Maggliozi and a former employee of theirs, Joe Richman. Ray once fixed Joe's beloved '72 Plymouth Valiant, a repair job which hastened it to its grave...but probably got Joe a girlfriend. Tom and Ray discuss how common it is for car experts to screw up a repair. (6 minutes)
Act One
An Epidemic Created By Doctors
Alix Spiegel reports on the "Recovered Memory" movement. In the early 1990s people across America turned to experts in psychology for help...and many people were told that the source of their problems could be traced to traumatic events they could not even remember, to memories that had to be recovered through special techniques. In the last ten years, this whole approach to psychology has fallen out of favor. So what happened that so many experts came to believe in a treatment that turned out to make many of their patients worse, not better...and what happened when the patients and therapists figured all this out? (37 minutes)
Act Two
Not Stella Adler, Just Stellllaaah
Sure, those who can't do, teach. But what about those who can do? Marlon Brando has created a set of instructional videos about acting, called Lying for a Living. Reporter Jod Kaftan got a sneak preview. He says Brando clearly wants to do right by his students, but the qualities that make him a great actor make him a dreadful teacher. (13 minutes)
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Susan Burton introduces some of the many women who went to a Yale fertility clinic for IVF treatment, and charts their experience from hopeful beginning to excruciatingly painful egg retrieval.
Round Two: The Fiasca in Nebraska
The brawl on the mall of the University of Nebraska turns into a fiasco at the state capitol, as legislators try to step in and dictate what should happen at the university. (16 1/2 minutes)
Act Six: Lessons From Ancient Wars
The story of a preventive act of war committed 3200 years ago, in the land that's now Turkey, not too far from Iraq.
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