大家好，很抱歉最近几天要回国，所以近几日恐怕不能“做笔记”了. 今天与大家分享一个很好的广播频道，可以作为很好的英文学习资料－This American Life.

This American Life started in 1995 in Chicago. It went national in early 1996 and in the years since, it's won a lot of awards—the Peabody, the duPont-Columbia, the Murrow, and the Overseas Press Club, to name a few. Ira Glass, the host of the show, was named best radio host in the country by Time Magazine and received the highest individual honor in public broadcasting, the Edward R. Murrow Award. The American Journalism Review declared that the show is at "the vanguard of a journalistic revolution."

The program is produced by Chicago Public Media, distributed by Public Radio International, and airs on more than 500 public radio stations across the country. They say 2.1 million people listen to us on the radio each week, which sometimes is hard to imagine. It's probably airing this weekend on a station near you. Most weeks This American Life is also the most popular podcast in the country, with around one million weekly downloads.

简单来说这个节目就是，“一个主题，几个故事". 主持人Ira Glass实在是一个非常棒的storyteller, 也是一个很棒的制作人. 曾经的“Mike Daisey 造假事件" 也让我们看出Ira Glass的认真，坦诚。总而言之，这个节目是个有滋有味的心灵鸡汤，一个有人性，有趣，有感动的人间百态。

所有的当期radio，和往期的archive都可以直接在网站收听，也可以在itunes中订阅. 如果实在是没有听懂个别的词句，也可以在网站上找到相应的transcript.

以下是官方网站上的“自我介绍”，文章十分简单－正如广播的内容一样－感受一下！

下角可阅读原文：里面可以方便的找到文章所提到内容的链接－－在这里被我阉割了:(

One of our problems from the start has been that when we try to describe This American Life in a sentence or two, it just sounds awful. For instance: each week we choose a theme and put together different kinds of stories on that theme. That doesn't sound like something we'd want to listen to on the radio, and it's our show.

So usually we just say what we're not. We're not a news show or a talk show or a call-in show. We're not really formatted like other radio shows at all. Instead, we do these stories that are like movies for radio. There are people in dramatic situations. Things happen to them. There are funny moments and emotional moments and—hopefully—moments where the people in the story say interesting, surprising things about it all. It has to be surprising. It has to be fun.

Each episode has a theme. That's mostly because a theme makes it seem like there's a reason to sit and listen to a story about a contest where everyone stands around a truck for days until only one person is left on their feet...or a grown man trying to convince a skeptical friend that not only has he heard the world's greatest phone message, but that it's about the Little Mermaid...or a man who's obsessed with Niagara Falls, lives minutes from the Falls, writes and thinks about the Falls all the time, but can't bring himself to actually visit the Falls because, as he says, "they've ruined the Falls." If you're not doing stories about the news, or celebrities, or things people have ever heard of elsewhere, you have to give people a reason to keep listening. The themes make it seem like you should.

这都是什么乱七八糟 奇怪的故事！不过听起来很吸引人，有木有？

We view the show as an experiment. We try things. There was the show where we taped for 24 hours in an all-night restaurant. And the show where we put a band together from musicians' classified ads. And the show where we followed a group of swing voters for months, recording their reactions to everything that happened in the campaign, right up through their final decision. And the show where we had a story for each of the Ten Commmandments. Or the one where our producers all collected stories for a weekend at the same rest stop. We also occasionally do our own versions of stories that are in the news, including award winning economics coverage that spawned another entire program called Planet Money.

只为努力讲好一个故事！试着讲一个有趣的故事！

We think of the show as journalism. One of the people who helped start the program, Paul Tough, says that what we're doing is applying the tools of journalism to everyday lives, personal lives. Which is true. It's also true that the journalism we do tends to use a lot of the techniques of fiction: scenes and characters and narrative threads.

老百姓的故事，艺术的手法.

Meanwhile, the fiction we have on the show functions like journalism: it's fiction that describes what it's like to be here, now, in the world. What we like are stories that are both funny and sad. Personal and sort of epic at the same time.

艺术的手法，老百姓的故事。

We sometimes think of our program as a documentary show for people who normally hate documentaries. A public radio show for people who don't necessarily care for public radio.

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另强烈推荐一个经济学人杂志的学习频道: justintheeconomist

谢谢！