857: Museum of Now

This American Life

Society & Culture, News, Politics, Arts

4.6 • 88.8K Ratings

🗓️ 30 March 2025

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Artifacts and exhibits of this particular moment we are living through.

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Exhibit One: Ira talks to producer Emmanuel Dzotsi, who brings the first exhibit into the studio with him: a chunk of concrete with some yellow paint on it. He got it from the demolition site in Washington, DC, where the giant Black Lives Matter letters are being dug out of the street with heavy equipment. (8 minutes)
Exhibit Two: Producer Aviva DeKornfeld talks to Ranjani Srinivasan, who tells the story of how her life was transformed over five days via a series of events that started out confusing and escalated to frightening. (25 minutes)
Exhibit Three: Producer Laura Starecheski takes us inside one dramatic court hearing on the Trump administration’s executive order and new policy banning transgender people from serving in the military. (20 minutes)

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Transcript

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0:32.8	So please consider signing up at thisamericanlife.org slash life partners. That link is also in this episode's
0:39.1	show notes. Thanks for considering. Okay, off to lift some weights in a humble way.
0:47.5	I'm WBC Chicago. It's This American Life. And I am joined in the studio by my co-worker Emmanuel
0:52.5	Jochi. Hey, Ira. Hey there. So I have come in the studio by my co-worker Emmanuel Jochi. Hey, Ira. Hey there.
0:54.9	So I have come into the studio today with this, actually.
0:59.7	Let me just get it out of this bag really quickly.
1:02.0	Hang on here.
1:07.1	So that is like a piece of rock about the size of a football, yellow on one side.
1:15.0	Yeah, it's a piece of concrete.
1:17.1	Uh-huh.
1:17.6	So there's a story behind this, which is a couple weeks ago I went to this one street in Washington, D.C.
1:25.2	And on that street, they're like, I don't know,
1:28.2	maybe a dozen construction workers
1:30.0	who were using, like,
1:31.6	all of this heavy machinery
	...

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