890: Maximal Americanness
7/5/202656 min
On this country's 250th birthday, we bring you stories about the most American people, places, objects, and social norms that make this country what it is.
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- Prologue: Ira talks to Pablo Torre about Major League Baseball’s new challenge system, and how it’s been optimized for maximum drama. (10 minutes)
- Act One: Writer Jiayang Fan wrestles with a very common question she has never quite understood. (5 minutes)
- Act Two: People come from all over the country to walk down one of Michigan’s tallest sand dunes, and then promptly turn around and trudge back up. Aviva DeKornfeld talks to Americans spending their limited vacation time on this punishing activity. (8 minutes)
- Act Three: Emanuele Berry talks to Ira about Season 13 of the reality TV show, Survivor, known to fans as the “race war” season. (8 minutes)
- Act Four: Years before his famous dictionary, Noah Webster wrote a book that took on a life of its own and served an unexpected purpose. (8 minutes)
- Act Five: Emmanuel Dzotsi investigates a musical phenomenon very particular to the United States: singers embellishing the end of the national anthem. (9 minutes)
Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org
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First 90 secondsIra Glass· Host0:00
Support for This American Life comes from Squarespace, the all-in-one platform for creating a fully custom, on-brand website. Choose from a wide range of professionally designed, award-winning templates, with options for every user category. Showcase your offerings with a website designed to grow your business, and manage payments seamlessly with branded invoices and online payments. Visit squarespace.com/american to get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. A quick warning: there are curse words that are un-beeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. When he was in his 20s, it was years ago, Pablo Torre started appearing on TV talking about sports, talking about something that now he's kind of embarrassed about.
Pablo Torre· Guest0:49
I was a gasbag on ESPN. Various people did not like me, I think. I just sort of represented this new, young person who was vaguely, uh, Asian, but also Mexican. I'm Filipino. Uh, that answers that mystery. [laughs] Um, but I had this take from the very beginning of my time on TV back in 2012, which was we debate in sports all of the time. How much did the refs blow this? What should the call have been? Who's the hero? Who's the villain? What's right and what's wrong? And I had been arguing forever that robots can solve this. Like, we have the technology. If you replace the referee or the