Ira Glass

WUNC 50th Anniversary Celebration This American Life host Ira Glass brings a night of storytelling in the style he pioneered on his hit radio show: funny stories with feelings. His program is heard each week by over three million listeners and has won the highest honors in broadcasting, including three Emmys (for a TV adaptation) , eight Peabody Awards and the first Pulitzer Prize ever given to a radio show or podcast. For decades, it’s been one of the most popular podcasts in the world. Glass invented a way to tell radio stories that reshaped audio storytelling and has been widely imitated. Whether you’re a longtime fan of the show or discovering his work for the first time, you’re in for an evening of funny and moving stories about people who may as well be your neighbors, your friends, or you. “It can be easy to take the greatness of “This American Life,” the weekly public-radio show and podcast hosted by Ira Glass, for granted. It was instrumental in creating a genre of audio journalism that has flourished in recent decades, especially since the podcast boom—which was initiated by the show’s first spinoff, “Serial,” in 2014. Like “The Daily Show” or Second City, “This American Life” has trained a generation of talented people, and Glass’s three-act structures, chatty cadences, and mixture of analysis and whimsy are now so familiar as to seem unremarkable.” The New Yorker. “This American Life’s approach was so revolutionary, the results didn’t seem like documentaries at all. Now all radio documentaries sound a bit like TAL.” The Guardian “This American Life began as an experiment in form and tone; the idea was to produce a distinct narrative style of radio storytelling. It’s a testament to This American Life’s impact and ubiquity that its chatty style of narration now looms over audio producers everywhere.” New York Magazine