831: Lists!!!

This American Life

Society & Culture, News, Politics, Arts

4.6 • 88.8K Ratings

🗓️ 26 May 2024

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

How they organize the chaos of the world, for good and for bad.

Prologue: Ira interviews David Wallechinsky, who wrote a wildly popular book in the 1970s called The Book of Lists, full of trivia and research, gathered into lists like "18 Brains" and "What They Weighed." The book sold millions of copies and had four sequels and a brief spin-off TV show. The list books were like the internet, before the internet. (12 minutes)
Act One: John Fecile talks to his brother, Pat, about a list their other brother made before he died. They each have different ideas about what the list means and how they feel about it. (14 minutes)
Act 2: A brief visit with Bobby, who keeps a list in his phone of all the dogs in his neighborhood and their names to save him from the awkwardness of not knowing the name of someone’s dog – because people get upset if you don’t remember their dog’s name. (3 minutes)
Act Two: Reporter Masha Gessen talks to Russians living in America and elsewhere, about lists they’ve been put on by the Russian government in the last few years. Masha is also on one of these lists. Each list has its own complex rules and potential consequences, for the people on the lists and for their family members who live in Russia. (28 minutes)

Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show.
0:05.0	If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, this American Life.
0:10.0	org.
0:11.0	The People's Almanac came out in the mid-1970s.
0:15.0	It's hard to imagine a more eccentric bestseller, over 1400 pages long.
0:20.0	A red like an Encyclopedia written by an excited and precocious 15-year-old
0:23.6	who loved all the obscure details of all the knowledge
0:25.8	in all the world.
0:27.3	There are sections on the greatest man-made disasters ever
0:29.8	and also on the greatest prize fighters,
0:31.8	a guide to buried treasure in the United States,
0:34.4	biographies of famous and infamous scientists, a history of advertising going back to
0:38.8	ancient Greece, and also a chapter about a minister who took over a newspaper for a week in the year 1900 and made
0:45.2	all editorial decisions what was on the front page, what they covered, based on what he believed
0:49.6	Jesus would have done if Jesus had gone to the newspaper game. And at the end of the book was
0:56.0	an address and a note from the authors asking for suggestions for future editions and
1:00.5	asking readers to tell them what parts of the book they liked and disliked.
1:05.0	So we eventually received thousands of letters each of which I read.
1:10.0	David Wallachinsky was one of the authors of the People's Almanac.
1:13.0	And because of that, I was able to determine that the most popular chapter in the People's Almanac was lists.
1:21.0	Lists, of all the knowledge in the world. lists. Some of those lists were boring stuff like the world's
1:33.8	15 biggest cities and 10 tallest buildings and 10 longest rivers.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from This American Life, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of This American Life and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.