The monologist Mike Daisey’s recent travails have taught him something valuable. His new work, a series of six monologues to be performed, one per month, at Joe’s Pub beginning Monday, will allow him to premiere a piece only when he’s comfortable with it.
“One of the reasons we constructed this series the way we Read More
David Rakoff, an “East Asian Studies Major Who Has Forgotten Most of His Japanese” and one of New York’s finest essayists, passed away Thursday evening following a long battle with cancer. He was 47. Read More
NPR’s Planet Money—which was born out of the Peabody award-winning This American Life episode about the financial crash in 2008, “The Giant Pool of Money”—is the financial news digest of choice for plenty of people who enjoy their finance explained to them in a generalist, Ira Glass-approved tone. Now, the show and Davidson are coming under fire for some perceived standards and ethics breaches. Let’s break this down. Read More
Chicago, it’s really over. Sure, Ira Glass left a few years ago. Sure, he packed up the entire This American Life crew, said that he was never coming back, but all that time, he couldn’t seem to settle down in any of the New York neighborhoods. And sometimes he even talked about how much he missed you, how he used to be able to get in a car and be anywhere in Chicago in 20 minutes. But now he’s gone and bought a condo at 159 West 24th Street!
Yes, Mr. Glass and wife Anaheed Alani paid $1.26 million for the one-bedroom apartment, a buy first spotted by The Real Deal. Read More
HBO is in development on a series based on a This American Life segment–material less capacious than, say, The Corrections (another upcoming HBO project) and yet as intriguing. The story is about a workaday fellow who tries to break out of his rut (very Nate on Six Feet Under!) by rescuing Mexican kidnap Read More
PRI’s This American Life has retracted its most popular broadcast ever, “Mr. Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory,” because it contains “significant fabrications,” host and executive producer Ira Glass announced today. An excerpt of Mike Daisey’s one-man show The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, it has been downloaded 888,000 times and streamed another 206,000. Read More
Nice try, guys. I think we all know that The American Life looks like Ira Glass.
