About Ira Glass: Ira Jeffrey Glass is an American public radio personality and the host and producer of the radio and television show This American Life.
The TiVo is really an amazing machine. Like everyone who has one, I totally recommend it. Just as everyone who's married will tell you to get married, and everyone who has a baby tells you to have a baby, everyone who owns a TiVo will tell you to get...
Grease and starch just always win over protein. In food as in so many things. Look around you, that's what our whole country is based on. It's amazing that Michael Jordan can be an iconic figure because he's basically just protein.
I think good radio often uses the techniques of fiction: characters, scenes, a big urgent emotional question. And as in the best fiction, tone counts for a lot.
Writing is just very difficult. I'm an adequate performer. And I think I have a special talent as an editor. Editing is what I do best.
I think good radio often uses the techniques of fiction: characters, scenes, a big urgent emotional question. And as in the best fiction, tone counts for a lot. But a lot of effective and interesting radio is based on one character who reacts to the ...
Not owning a car anymore, I feel like I'm barely an American. I miss it. And I barely ever get to listen to the radio in the car, which is the best place for radio.
I was a semiotics major at Brown, and there's this idea that stories are better, books are better, and movies are better if they cocked you off your axis and you were completely disoriented and you'd really have to rethink everything. Nobody has that...
The radio is good for taking somebody else's experience and making you understand what it would be like. Because when you don't see someone, but you hear them talking - and, uh, that is what radio is all about - it's like when someone is talking from...
We're Jews, my family, and Jews break down into two distinct subcultures: book Jews and money Jews. We were money Jews.
The flakier your mission, the fiercer you have to be on the business side.
Like most people in radio - and in magic - I'm not cool. I know people who are hip, and I can feel distance between them and me.
I started out doing production work on promos, stuff like that. I didn't think it was cool to be working for NPR. I didn't need anything to be cool. I just wanted something to do that would be interesting. It was fun. I didn't think of it as anything...
People are generally forced to change. We don't want to change, and then something absolutely forces us to realize that what we are doing isn't working or that our picture of the world is wrong. We fail. So we change.
Starting in the 1970s, American cars started to lose market share to foreign cars. It was clear what was happening - these better-made foreign car companies were encroaching on the U.S., and the U.S. car makers had less than half of their own country...
Honestly, I find the analysis of dreams is one of the dullest things. I say this as a therapist kid. I find them deeply uninteresting, as a window to the soul.
When you're learning, especially to write, unless you're some incredibly gifted writer, a young Malcom Gladwell, say, you need to be imitating people. You need to be imitating how they make their work, how they structure it, how they design the piece...
I don't go looking for stories with the idea of wrongness in my head, no. But the fact is, a lot of great stories hinge on people being wrong.
I'm not a go-in-for-the-kill kind of interviewer. It's a great thing to me, that kind of interviewer, but I'm not it. It doesn't play to my strengths at all. I like to interview people who are interested in telling their story and tell it as truthful...
I'll meet listeners who tell me what a great voice I have. But I don't have a great voice for radio. My voice is the utterly normal voice, but sheer repetition has made them think it's OK. Mick Jagger once was asked, 'What makes a hit song? He said, ...
Radio is more powerful the closer we mimic the way we actually speak to each other. That's why Howard Stern is such a great radio talent. People on his show are actually speaking to each other. You might not like what they're saying, but they're real...
