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maxnmona posted:I've been spending the last couple years going through This American Life in order from the beginning (I'm still only up to 2001. There are a lot of episodes), and there are some pretty weak ones now and then, especially towards the start. Yea that one was a snooze for me too. I'm trying to remember any others where I didn't like ANYTHING in them and can't. Usually there's at least one gem to make me go 'ok, worth it'. For the favorite stuff, I'm a whore for Sedaris, I own all his books and adore any story he has to tell, so basically any episode he's in becomes my favorite. Also I remember very distinctly there was one This American Life about a mall santa union and some insane drama there? That was pretty loving excellent all around.
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Oct 2, 2011 00:59
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X-Ray Pecs posted:This episode was #371, Scenes From a Mall. The other stories are okay, but the mall Santa thing is brilliant. Thank you. I always love when they focus on just one, loving insane, thing for just one story in a sea of relative normal stories around it. Is this also the one with the doll store, where the woman had a 'deformed' doll with flippers she used as a floor model, and when it basically came down to either buying a black doll or a 'deformed' white one, people wanted the flipper-baby one?
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Oct 2, 2011 17:10
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UltraRed posted:I think the worst example of Ira's feigned surprise is in the history of money story, or maybe in the banking collapse story, where he acts surprised that, *gasp*, venture capital exists. He's a man in his 50s. He must think we're a bunch of dumb teenagers. Uh financial stuff is a very nebulous concept even to a lot of well versed people, unless your job is literally 'understand financial systems and monetary law' it can be incredibly dense and confusing. I guess you can take it as 'dumb teenagers' stuff if you wanna be a big baby but yea, if you're describing financial poo poo it's best to assume your audience has no grasp of the major concepts because chances are they don't.
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Nov 28, 2011 21:46
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Solkanar512 posted:More to the point when "The Giant Pool of Money" first aired, the talking point across the media at large was, "this whole mess is too complicated for us normal folk to understand, we should leave it to the experts" when that line was a giant pile of bullshit. Oh yea, forgot, yea when they first aired there was a heavy mantra of 'us common folk can't ever grasp those crazy money talks!' so yea I get him feeling the need to handhold.
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Dec 1, 2011 02:40
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maxnmona posted:You may think that based on short excerpts, but I've sat in a theater for the entire monologue, and there's a reason Mike Daisey has been selling out theaters for over a decade. Mike Birbiglia is a stand up comedian whose pretty good at telling a story. Daisey is a storyteller like no one else working today. Or you could just let someone not like his style without freaking out yet again to defend him against anything at all against him. I'm not super into his style either, even aside from the whole 'lied and damaged his cause because he's a moneygrubbing piece of poo poo' thing, his voice is a bit 'off' to me, it's a personal thing.
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Mar 19, 2012 14:40
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maxnmona posted:Of course they edited it. The actual interview was not fifteen minutes long. And Glass summarized several of Daisey's answers instead of playing them. You literally thought he meant that he thought the real interview was 15 minutes, and not that his problem was the long awkward silences. You have a super strong devotion to defending every aspect of this dude to the point of self-imposed insanity.
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Mar 21, 2012 00:08
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TAL is a show, to me, that has a lot of blandness to it. Neat stories but nothing that sticks with me too long. The rare times when it does have a legit haunting, beautiful, story like what Warchicken mentioned, though, make it totally worth the download every week. Also the live show is great, just got around to watching it.
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Nov 29, 2012 00:34
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tnimark posted:I will continue to eat fried calamari/pig butthole because that poo poo is delicious. The Vietnamese place near me makes bomb rear end calamari with a great dipping sauce, but they're also kinda cheap so now I'll never get the thought out of a corner of my mind that I may be eating pig rear end in a top hat. I mean, I'm still getting it because it loving rules, but that drat thought.
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Jan 17, 2013 07:56
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Rick posted:I like that they give the big stories and little stories fairly equal representation. That's really why I keep tuning in. I'm a news nerd so for most of their big story coverage I've heard rumblings about and they're just providing a fresh view of it, but then they do the little obscure, in the big picture totally meaningless stories, and they treat them with the same respect and weight, and I love it. It's like they listen to those five minute 'haha and the cat show's in town today, I hope everything goes purrfect' bits of local news and go 'yea, what's going down at the cat show?'
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Feb 17, 2013 23:17
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What discussion "Company bad ergo episode bad"? Lots of companies are bad. I dare say most major league companies are, to some degree, not awesome morally, but that doesn't have anything to do with an episode of This American Life.
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Jun 7, 2013 08:37
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Hitch posted:Whether you like their reporting or not, can we at least agree that the patent system is fundamentally broken? I think that is bigger issue. Fundamentally broken, no. Requires fixing, yes. There's a pretty big gulf, and I've seen a lot of lovely internet libertarian types talking about how this episode was proof we need to just straight abolish patents and all. Our patent system is a strong one, it just needs to be modernized better.
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Jun 7, 2013 23:57
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UltraRed posted:Your friends will shun you if you do? Yes, welcome to cultural traditions. She can leave her culture behind or she can be turned into an outsider for breaking a fairly large concept in it. Her husband is aware of this and it absolutely is his fault, in that culture, for being a poo poo about things.
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Jan 23, 2014 09:36
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UltraRed posted:Is it a large concept? If you're bound to an ex husband who everyone knows is a jerk, will people shun you? Well, it is a large concept treating a woman as property after all! Better not break it! *hint* They should reject it and get on with their lives. Jesus christ I'm not saying it's a good thing, I'm saying this woman has spent a major part of her life in this culture and now because her husband is a piece of poo poo she's left with a choice of accept a terrible situation or abandon her culture. Her husband knows this and that's why he's doing this, because he's a bad person, which is why in those communities rabbis will sometimes go all Godfather on guys like him. You're not, like, some great enlightening sage to go this is a hosed up thing, that doesn't change that leaving one's culture is a pretty big deal, even if it's a lovely culture.
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Jan 23, 2014 21:27
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UltraRed posted:The entire context of the story is that this is the fault of a crazy ex-husband and not a backwards ideology. Like I said before, if this were a Mormon problem or an Amish problem, the segment would be presented as "look at this goofy culture!". And if it was about unicorn farts it'd be presented as a joke or something, there we've both made pointless assumptions based on nothing but what we're pulling out of our asses. The point is, in this hosed up cultural tradition, the husband is at fault here for being a piece of poo poo, like, he's part of this culture too, he knows how it works, he's not some innocent victim of NPR's misandry or whatever.
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Jan 23, 2014 23:55
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Yea the very loose definition, yet slavish devotion to, the concept of 'learning from tragedy' was what turned me off. Like, sometimes you get a legit horrible situation that someone came out a better person from, but most of them are just petty problems that turned out to be ok and they're treated with the exact same reverence and respect.
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Jan 24, 2014 21:22
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There's nothing the core NPR crowd loves more is to hear a sad story and cluck their tongues and go 'oh dear oh dear oh dear' so they can bring it up next time they're talking about how the world is just terrible and if only someone would do something. It's tragedy porn because the listeners have fallen into the tumblr trap of thinking 'awareness' fixes anything on its own, so by nodding and agreeing that these stories are quite sad they're helping, really!
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Jun 21, 2014 03:52
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The Modern Leper posted:Well that's certainly a bunch of vague accusations, characterization and out of context quotes. Shame Project is my favorite thing because it's literally the political version of "I HEARD ABBY SAID YOU WERE A SLUT".
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Mar 22, 2015 00:13
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X-Ray Pecs posted:I find it incredible that in the middle of an episode about how society judges and dehumanizes certain segments of the population based on physical appearance, and how these effects are amplified if you're part of different minority, they throw in some racist-rear end jokes. it pretty much perfectly encapsulates that whole 'movement' well. There's plenty of people just making the valid point of 'hey maybe don't be lovely to people because of how they look. Like, maybe be an adult?' That's fine, that's cool, that's a good message. But when you get to 'Michelle Obama trying to help kids eat better is BASICALLY a war on fat people as an identity' as if you're an oppressed minority that's when poo poo hits crazy town.
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Jun 25, 2016 06:33
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I have a crazy theory where people like things that support their worldview but don't like things that challenge it and are willing to believe news that contradicts their worldview is actually lies made to trick them. I don't have a name for it but I'm filling out the patent as we speak.
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Feb 1, 2017 00:49
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The Modern Leper posted:The privacy/consent question occurred to me as well, but what's the reporter's responsibility to save people from their lack of self-censorship? He openly identifies himself as a reporter at every opportunity - unless you think he misrepresented people for narrative purposes (a legitimate concern), he's observed his ethical obligations.
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Apr 2, 2017 22:41
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in_cahoots posted:This is pretty much how I feel. The "but he's an atheist" argument seemed particularly specious. Atheists have families too, just because they're dead and gone doesn't mean their secrets can't cause others pain. yea that genuinely made me angry for a sec. The idea that 'repercussions' starts and stops at him for something like that is so absurd he might as well have just said 'yea I'm trying to tell a story and this makes the story stronger'. It'd still be scummy but at least that way it's like 'oh, yea ok fair'. But yea I just have some pretty serious ethical issues with the show as a whole, though I'm willing to say those are more personal morality things than an objective 'he did a bad thing here' thing. That one case was an example where I feel he completely crossed the line by any standards, though. It's one thing to say 'ok something huge happened during what should have been kinda a puff 'local oddball talks to reporter for a bit of humanizing' thing, I feel I have a duty to follow this through'. It's a complete different ballgame to say 'so that means now my focus is on a narrative and that means everything said to me that fits that narrative is open season'.
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Apr 3, 2017 02:02
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bad day posted:I'm sure absolutely everyone interviewed on this show signed the requisite legal documents. I mean you do know the context for the thing that we're talking about right? I don't think 'well he's happy to get attention' counts for much. Yea no poo poo they didn't break laws or whatever. It was just a dick move that makes it look like their word means nothing when it comes to sensitive things.
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Apr 3, 2017 04:15
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bad day posted:If you think S-Town was out ethics you clearly aren't familiar with modern documentary television programming. th-those are bad too? But this isn't the TMZ thread? So we're talking about S-Town in the TAL thread?
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Apr 3, 2017 04:36
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yea it was v. cool when he outed that dude in a small town using super obvious and not at all subtle clues but didn't actually confirm or deny anything so the rumor mill can be the main decider in a really fuckin sensitive topic
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Apr 3, 2017 18:58
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I CAME HERE FOR A STORY ABOUT BEES NOT MUSLIMS YOU NEOLIBERAL SCUM shouted the normal man at his radio
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Apr 5, 2017 05:03
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that's literally describing an NPR conspiracy
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Apr 5, 2017 18:17
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Virtue signaling means nothing but it was supposed to mean poo poo like that old joke 'donate now to get this tote bag with our logo on it, to raise awareness for the important message that you've donated to us.'
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Apr 18, 2017 20:24
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