823: The Question Trap
An investigation of when and why people ask loaded questions that are a proxy for something else.
- Prologue: Host Ira Glass talks with producer Tobin Low about the question he got asked after he and his husband moved in together, and what he thinks people were really asking.
- Act One: “What do you think about Beyoncé?” and other questions that are asked a lot, raised by people on first dates.
- Act Two: When a common, seemingly innocuous question goes wildly off the rails.
- Act Three: Why are people asking me if my mother recognizes me, when it’s totally beside the point?
- Act Four: Schools ask their students the strangest essay questions sometimes. The experience of tutoring anxious teenagers through how to answer them requires a balladier, singing their lived experience to a crowd as though it were the Middle Ages.
Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org
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