This American Life

A doctor named Benjamin Gilmer gets a job at a rural clinic in North Carolina. He’s replaced another doctor named Gilmer – Dr. Vince Gilmer – who went to prison after killing his own father. But the more Benjamin’s patients tell him about the other Dr. Gilmer, the more confused he becomes. Everyone loved Vince Gilmer. So Benjamin starts digging around, trying to understand how a good man can seemingly turn bad. Sarah Koenig reports.

Think back to two summers ago, the summer of 2020, when a series of violent, highly-publicized killings of Black Americans sparked outrage and a national movement to eradicate racism and its evils. That movement gave way to a newer, reactionary one, a backlash that is playing out in schools and school board meetings across America. Host Emanuele Berry shares stories about Black people who got tangled up in this current backlash in both extreme and very personal ways. 

People use machines to find people they lost.

Stories about the intersection of Christmas and retail, originally broadcast in 1996 when our show was only a year old. Including David Sedaris's story "Santaland Diaries," which first aired on NPR's Morning Edition in a much shorter version.

People earnestly doing what they're told, and absolutely not getting what they were promised.

In 2006, a new convert showed up at a mosque in Orange County, California. Known as Farouk al-Aziz, the convert was actually an FBI informant named Craig Monteilh. That informant’s infiltration of the mosque is at the heart of FBI v Fazaga, a case heard at the Supreme Court last month. We return to our episode from 2012, which tells the story behind it.

This bird-focused week, stories about birds and the hearts they sway, the havoc they wreak, the lives they change.

Getting the point across — or trying to, anyway.

A man who was imprisoned for 14 years in Guantanamo Bay, without charges, gets out and issues an invitation to all the people who kept him there. Amazingly, three of them agree to talk.

In a world where a virus spreads across the country and most people are not going to movie theaters, we bring the movies to you.