If you've never heard This American Life, our staff's favorite shows page provides a great introduction to what we do. You might want to start there. Or, if you're looking for a written introduction, here goes:

One of the problems with our show from the start has been that whenever we try to describe it in a sentence or two, it sounds awful. It's a bunch of stories -- some are documentaries, some are fiction, some are something else. Each week we choose a theme and invite different writers and performers to contribute items on the theme. This doesn't sound like something we'd want to listen to on the radio -- and it's our show.In the early days of the show, in frustration, we'd sometimes tell public radio program directors that it's basically just like Car Talk. Except just one guy hosting. And no cars.

It's a weekly show. It's an hour. Its mission is to document everyday life in this country. We sometimes think of it as a documentary show for people who normally hate documentaries. A public radio show for people who don't necessarily care for public radio. What we look for in putting the show together are stories that we love, truly love. We have the themes because mostly, they make it sound like there's a reason to hear a story about, say, a contest where everyone stands around a truck for days until one person is left standing ... or a grown woman who discovers that her elderly Chinese father is trying to procure a mail order bride from China ... or a man who's obsessed with Niagara Falls, lives minutes from the Falls, writes and thinks about the Falls all the time, but who can't bring himself to actually visit the Falls, because "they've ruined the Falls." If you're not doing stories about the news, or celebrities, or things people have ever heard of elsewhere, you have to give them a reason to keep listening. The themes make it seem like there is a reason.

We think of the show as a kind of journalism. Our former Contributing Editor Paul Tough says that what we're doing is applying the tools of journalism to everyday lives, personal lives. Which is sort of true. It's also true that the journalism we do tends to use a lot of the techniques of fiction: scenes and characters and narrative threads. Meanwhile, the fiction we have on the show functions like journalism: it's fiction that describes what it's like to be here, now, in America. What we like are stories that are both funny and sad. Personal and sort of epic at the same time.

We view the show as a little experiment. We try things. We want it to be different than anything else on the air.