Ira Glass
I never realized before this the emotional power of some really simple, corny tropes: people with top hats, people with batons, confetti going off, how important it is to smile.Collection: Smile
I was a semiotics major at Brown, and there's this idea that stories are better, books are better, and movies are better if they cocked you off your axis and you were completely disoriented and you'd really have to rethink everything. Nobody has that experience, actually.Collection: Movies
People are generally forced to change. We don't want to change, and then something absolutely forces us to realize that what we are doing isn't working or that our picture of the world is wrong. We fail. So we change.Collection: Change
In radio, you have two tools. Sound and silence.
I don't go looking for stories with the idea of wrongness in my head, no. But the fact is, a lot of great stories hinge on people being wrong.
I'm not a natural storyteller at all. If anything, I'm a natural interviewer, a natural listener, but I'm not a natural storyteller.
Grease and starch just always win over protein. In food as in so many things. Look around you, that's what our whole country is based on. It's amazing that Michael Jordan can be an iconic figure because he's basically just protein.
Semiotics is really interested in the questions like, what keeps you watching something, what keeps you - you know, what keeps you listening to a story on the radio? Like, what keeps you turning the pages in a book? What's the pleasure of it that's moving you forward, that's pulling you in and grabbing you and pulling you forward?
I'll meet listeners who tell me what a great voice I have. But I don't have a great voice for radio. My voice is the utterly normal voice, but sheer repetition has made them think it's OK. Mick Jagger once was asked, 'What makes a hit song? He said, 'Repetition.'
The radio is good for taking somebody else's experience and making you understand what it would be like. Because when you don't see someone, but you hear them talking - and, uh, that is what radio is all about - it's like when someone is talking from the heart. Everything about it conspires to take you into somebody else's world.
If you want somebody to tell you a story, one of the most easiest and effective ways is if you're telling them a story.
There is a feeling, when you listen to radio, that it's one person, and they're talking to you, and you really feel their presence as one person.
We're Jews, my family, and Jews break down into two distinct subcultures: book Jews and money Jews. We were money Jews.
Just when did I get to the point when staying at a hotel wasn't fun?
Where radio is different than fiction is that even mediocre fiction needs purpose, a driving question.
I suppose I shouldn't go around admitting I speak untruths on the radio.
You'd think that radio was around long enough that someone would have coined a word for staring into space.
It's not a terribly original thing to say, but I love Raymond Carver. For one thing, he's fun to read out loud.
But you can make good radio, interesting radio, great radio even, without an urgent question, a burning issue at stake.
In some theoretical way I know that a half-million people hear the show. But in a day-to-day way, there's not much evidence of it.
But sadly, one of the problems with being on public radio is that people tend to think you're being sincere all the time.
I think good radio often uses the techniques of fiction: characters, scenes, a big urgent emotional question. And as in the best fiction, tone counts for a lot.
One reason I do the live shows - and the monthly speeches at public radio stations - is to remind myself that people hear the show, that it has an audience, that it exists in the world. It's so easy to forget that.
When I say something untrue on the air, I mean for it to be transparently untrue. I assume people know when I'm just saying something for effect. Or to be funny.
Any story hits you harder if the person delivering it doesn't sound like some news robot but in fact sounds like a real person having the reactions a real person would.
I am mostly a pretty worried person. In conversations, I am always worried about what to say.
I don't tweet because I don't need another creative venue. I don't need another form for self-expression. I don't need another way to get my thoughts out to people. I have one. I'm good.
I don't take care of my voice at all, which is one reason that I sound as bad as I do.
I don't own a radio. I listen to everything through apps or on my iPhone. And then I download the shows I like. Shows like 'Fresh Air', 'Radiolab', 'Snap Judgement', all those shows.
I feel like in an interview situation, it's a kind of intimacy that I can understand and handle - versus in real life, when I'm much more of a bumbler and have a hard time.
I just have a harder time, I think, feeling close to people without self consciousness.
I think one of the reasons that I got so good at it, as somebody making radio stories, is that on the radio I can actually - I can understand what's happening in the interview and can make a connection in a way that makes sense.
I think the name of the show, 'This American Life' - we named it that just because it seemed like it made the thing feel big. But we don't think about whether it's an American story or not. We happen to be Americans. I think for the stories to work, they have to be universal.
I have a pit bull. He's a rescue. He's adorable.
I have been shocked at the number of people who don't watch television.
I've actually done events at radio stations where I feel like I've had to give a little talk in behalf of television as a medium.
I didn't watch T.V. from the time I was 18 'til my mid-30s. And then I got a T.V. to watch 'The Sopranos.' I realized, 'Oh, T.V. is really interesting.'
It's rare for me to read any fiction. I almost only read nonfiction. I don't believe in guilty pleasures, I only believe in pleasures. People who call reading detective fiction or eating dessert a guilty pleasure make me want to puke.
Harry Potter to me is a bore. His talent arrives as a gift; he's chosen. Who can identify with that? But Hermione - she's working harder than anyone, she's half outsider, right? Half Muggle. She shouldn't be there at all. It's so unfair that Harry's the star of the books, given how hard she worked to get her powers.
I don't read novels, but my semiotics study influenced everything about the way I read and edit and write.
I'm in production year round. I work long hours. I have a dog and a wife. There's not a lot of available time for consuming any culture: T.V., movies, books. When I read, it's generally magazines, newspapers and web sites.
When I was in college, I was a semiotics major, which is this hopelessly pretentious body of French literary theory.
I'm not a go-in-for-the-kill kind of interviewer. It's a great thing to me, that kind of interviewer, but I'm not it. It doesn't play to my strengths at all. I like to interview people who are interested in telling their story and tell it as truthfully as they can.
I am such a do-goody, people-pleasing kid - or I was - I don't think I've ever been fired, not even from an ice cream shop, magician for kids' parties, not even in my early jobs in radio.
I read the newspaper, but I live in my own little bubble.
Honestly, like, I'm a superfan of the 'New York Times,' but I know nothing about how they put it together, and I really don't care.
I was a temp secretary for a long time, and I went at it with a passion, and I tried to do a nice job in all my jobs.
I eat the same breakfast and lunch every day, both at my desk. I employ no time-saving tricks at all.
I don't think I'm better than everyone else at anything, but I am very quick at organizing a big mass of interview tape into a structure.
Traditional broadcast media seems old-fashioned and vague to me. When I watch television news, I'm aware of what skilled journalists they are, but I find it hard because of the corny way they present it.