I enjoy listening to Morning Edition, Talk of the Nation, Fresh Air, Marketplace, and other fine programs on the NPR. But I never really understood the fandom of This American Life. In fact, this Onion article pretty much sums it up for me, and how I interpret the show:
Here's my favorite passage:
"We've done it," said senior producer Julie Snyder, who was personally interviewed for a 2003 This American Life episode, "Going Eclectic," in which she described what it's like to be a bilingual member of the ACLU trained in kite-making by a Japanese stepfather. "There is not a single existential crisis or self-congratulatory epiphany that has been or could be experienced by a left-leaning agnostic that we have not exhaustively documented and grouped by theme."
Any San Francisco readers will also recognize a similar self-congratulatory theme in KQED's Perspective series, played intermittently during Morning Edition. The Perspectives are consistently... nauseatingly... vomitous. Oh, mercy.
Oh, and sometimes I want to strangle the FM dial when I hear Carl Kasell's voice giving the national news in the mornings. His slurpy delivery, his clearly audible shuffling of papers, his monotone readings, they all drive me into a rage.If anyone ever wanted to torture me, I'll give you a tip. Forget about the thumbscrews; duct tape me into a chair with a radio with NPR playing nothing but This American Life and "The Best of Carl Kasell's Awful Newsreading."
Just thinking about his voice makes me sweat.
Read The Onion article.
