Brief Summaries of Public Radio #2: This American Life (6/13/2008)
Show: This American Life
Episode Date: June 13, 2008, "The Truth Will Out"
Length: 60 Minutes
Producer: WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International
What I already knew:
- Israeli author Etgar Keret returns to TAL with a story read by actor Dermot Mulroney. Keret had previously been on the program in a 2005 episode called "Know Your Enemy."
- Investigative journalist Lawrence Wright has talked to more members of Al-Queda and their associates than just about any journalist alive. He won the Pulitzer Prize last year for his book The Looming Tower: Al-Queda and the Road to 9/11.
What I didn’t:
- Under the pretense of using him as a source, the FBI wiretapped Mr. Wright’s phones. He wrote about in in a New Yorker article titled "The Spymaster."
- The US intelligence community doesn’t have nearly enough agents or analysts who can speak fluent Arabic, Farsi, Pashtu, the languages most used by the terrorist groups it now targets.
Notes: When working at a slow, data entry job in the late 1990s, I listened to 4 episodes of TAL via their web archive every day. Far as I know, they were one of the first public radio shows to do this. But they were quite slow coming to podcasting, so there’s probably an 18 month dead zone in my relationship with the show.
Now the show is the most popular podcast on iTunes, which is costing WBEZ a ton of cheddar. They’re fundraising for it as we speak. I’m probably going to toss a few coins their way.