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From This American Life and WBEZ Chicago, it's serial.

One Story told week by week.

I'm Sarah Koenig.

For the last year, I've spent every working day trying to figure out where a high school kid was for an hour after school one day in 1999.

Or if you want to get technical about it, and apparently I do, where a high school kid was for 21 minutes after school one day in 1999.

This search sometimes feels undignified on my part. I've had to ask about teenagers' sex lives, where, how often, with whom, about notes they passed in class, about their

drug habits, their relationships with their parents. And I am not a detective or a private

investigator. I'm not even a crime reporter. But yes, every day this year, I've tried to figure out the alibi of a

17-year-old boy. Before I get into why I've been doing this, I just want to point out something

I'd never really thought about before I started working on this story. And that is, it's really

hard to account for your time, in a detailed way, I mean. How'd you get to work last Wednesday,

for instance? Drive, walk, bike? Was it

raining? Are you sure? Did you go to any stores that day? If so, what did you buy? Who did you

talk to? The entire day, name every person you talked to. It's hard. Now imagine you have to account

for a day that happened six weeks back, because that's a situation in the story I'm working on, in which a bunch of teenagers had to recall a day six weeks earlier.

And it was 1999, so they had to do it without the benefit of texts or Facebook or Instagram.

...