826: Unprepared for What Has Already Happened
This American Life
This American Life
4.6 • 88.8K Ratings
🗓️ 17 March 2024
⏱️ 62 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
People waking up to the fact that the world has suddenly changed.
- Prologue: Jackson Landers tells the story of a very strange decision he made one summer day. (6 minutes)
- Act One: Elena Kostyuchenko tells the story of how she was probably poisoned after reporting on Russian’s invasion of Ukraine, and how she kept not believing it was happening. Bela Shayevich translated this story from Russian and reads it for us. (21 minutes)
- Act Two: A recording of comedian Tig Notaro in the process of trying to catch up to the present and absolutely not being able to. (8 minutes)
- Act Three: Producer Zoe Chace with a political fable that she noticed playing out last week in North Carolina. (11 minutes)
- Act Four: Producer Tobin Low finds a group of people with a special relationship with the idea of catching up. (10 minutes)
Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show. |
| 0:05.4 | If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, This American Life. |
| 0:10.0 | org. |
| 0:11.0 | From WBS in WBS, Chicago, It's This American Life, Myra Glass, and I'm W.B.E. Z Chicago It's This American Life, |
| 0:13.8 | Myra Glass, and I am happy to welcome to the studio, Lily Sullivan, |
| 0:16.8 | one of our producers. |
| 0:17.6 | Hey Lily. |
| 0:18.2 | Hi, Ira. |
| 0:19.4 | And you're here because we wanted to kick off today's show |
| 0:21.9 | with this interview that you did and |
| 0:24.9 | explain who this is with. So this interview is with this guy named Jackson Landers. |
| 0:30.7 | Jackson he's an outdoorsy type of person, he fishes, he hunts, and he writes about that stuff. |
| 0:36.5 | He's a journalist who sometimes does this adventure journalism. |
| 0:40.0 | Like he wrote a whole book where he traveled around North America hunting and eating invasive species. |
| 0:44.4 | But the thing that I talked to him about was this one moment that happened near his house in Virginia, |
| 0:50.0 | the day he went fishing. |
| 0:52.0 | And I got in my car, I already had the fishing gear in the car, it stays there all summer. |
| 0:55.9 | And went to the reservoir and I pick up my water shoes and I put them on and while I'm putting one of them on I feel like a it's like a |
| 1:07.3 | a bee sting and it didn't last long wasn't it wasn't too painful but it felt like a beast thing. I took off the shoe, and I shook it out and I saw the pieces of the dead spider and I knew those are the legs and the fragments of a dead black widow. |
| 1:22.0 | Oh boy, this isn't good. |
| 1:25.0 | So Jackson actually knows a lot about black widows, spiders, and their bites. |
| 1:30.0 | He lives in a place where there are a lot of them, you know sometimes he finds him in the house or one time he found one and he put in a mason jar and kept that jar in his desk for months and you know he would feed it and observe it and watch its behavior so he knew a lot about |
... |
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