553: Stuck in the Middle

This American Life

Society & Culture, News, Politics, Arts

4.6 • 88.8K Ratings

🗓️ 29 September 2024

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

People caught in limbo, using ingenuity and guile to try to get themselves out.

Prologue: Rachel has two kids. Elias, age seven, is a vegetarian. Theo, age five, is not. But Elias wants Theo, and everyone else in the house, to be vegetarian too. So Rachel and her husband are in the middle of negotiating the desires of two very strong willed kids. (12 minutes)
Act One: Sara Corbett's father-in-law Dick is 81. And he's become obsessed with a limbo most of us hate – the music he hears whenever he's on hold. (14 minutes)
Act Two: Mark Oppenheimer reports on agunah in the Orthodox Jewish community. An agunah is a woman whose husband refuses to give her a divorce – in Hebrew it means "chained wife." If you're an Orthodox Jew, strictly following Jewish law, the only real way to get divorced is if your husband agrees to hand you a piece of paper called a get. Without the get, women who want out of their marriages can stay chained to their husbands for years. In New York, a couple of rabbis were recently accused of using violence to force men to give their wives a get. (17 minutes)
Act Three: Brett Martin documents a previously unnoticed human phenomenon, one that involves airplanes, crying, and Reese Witherspoon. (11 minutes)

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0:00.0	Elias stopped eating meat when he was three or four. His mom can't remember it's been so long. He was seven when I talked to her.
0:07.0	And he doesn't think that anybody else should eat meat either. And he freaks out. He cried and pleaded at his grandmothers at New Year's when he heard that she might cook brisket
0:16.4	until she offered not to. There was the time that he got so upset in a restaurant
0:20.4	smelling the meat cooking in the kitchen and seeing all the people
0:23.6	around them eat their meals they had to go sit up front by the door and it
0:27.9	kills him especially to think that his little brother might still be eating
0:31.5	animals his brother Theo he just turned five at the time of this interview, and emphatically is not a vegetarian. What a surprise, two brothers.
0:38.0	Their mom, Rachel, says that Theo is not asking to eat meat in front of Elias, he's not asking to eat it all that often.
0:44.6	He wants to eat meat sometimes, and I think he feels it's not fair that Elias, you know, I think he calls him
0:50.9	the God of food, and that Elias doesn't have the right to be the
0:53.9	God of food and tell Theo what to do. It causes a lot of conflict and I think
0:58.9	there are conversations almost every single day around this. She recruited one of those conversations for us
1:03.9	when she was taking Theo, the meat eater,
1:06.6	to a party.
1:07.8	There's going to be food at the party
1:09.1	and his brother was going to be there, the god of food.
1:11.9	What would Theo eat? So Theo, we're going to this pot look what do you what
1:16.1	do you think is going to be there? Well I hope this meeting if you get if you give me
1:21.1	me just let me eat it.
1:23.0	So what do you think would happen if you ate meat at the potluck?
1:26.0	Well, we would, a liege would fight.
1:28.0	You and a laz would fight?
	...

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