Ira Glass
Ira Glass
Ira Jeffrey Glassis an American public radio personality and the host and producer of the radio and television show This American Life...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionRadio Host
Date of Birth3 March 1959
CityBaltimore, MD
CountryUnited States of America
excuse happened journalist news sort square stick stops straight territory today
Any journalist who doesn't stick to the day's news is sort of part journalist, part anthropologist. Once the excuse for the story stops being - it happened today - then you're square right in the other territory of journalism, which is just straight up documenting of how we live, and what we think of each other.
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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.
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Starting in the 1970s, American cars started to lose market share to foreign cars. It was clear what was happening - these better-made foreign car companies were encroaching on the U.S., and the U.S. car makers had less than half of their own country's market.
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One of the things I learned as a young semiotics nerd was that if you have plot moving forward, no matter how banal the facts of it, simply the fact that the plot is rolling forward makes you wonder what's going to happen next, which creates suspense. So you can control peoples' attention simply by having things move forward in a story.
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For most people when you say - public radio - they automatically think it's like medicine. We only do stories that amuse and interest us. For people who haven't heard the show, we describe it like a movie where there are characters and you're interested in what's going to happen to them.
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I'm a big Penn & Teller fan. But I myself was never very good; I was a teenage magician who performed at kids' parties. I can still perform a vanish, credibly, and I still, in special circumstances, will make a balloon animal.
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You get into this situation, performing for T.V., where you have to speak with utter sincerity. It's just like the radio. You have to say it like you mean it, even though the thing you're saying is actually planned out.
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Often they don't take advantage of the latitude they have. They spend a lot of their early career trying to be the - official version - of a reporter. It's all about replicating a kind of stodgy form that already exists.
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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.'
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I hate dream sequences in movies and T.V. shows generally for their heavy-handed symbolism and storytelling tediousness.
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I remember clearly that when I was little it was explained to me [that] the way that babies were made was that God put the baby into some lady's stomach, right? And, at some point, I learned how it really happened, and really that was the beginning of the end of my belief in God. Up until that point, it had always been a really weird act of intervention on God's part.
people
For people starting public radio shows, one of the things you have to do is you have to talk every single public radio station into picking you up.
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But sadly, one of the problems with being on public radio is that people tend to think you're being sincere all the time.
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If you're not failing all the time, you're not creating a situation where you can get lucky.