In the new year, stories of people trying a radical approach to solving their problems.

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• Prologue: Ira meets two sisters who got into a fight, and then learned a lesson in turning the other cheek. (8 minutes)
• Act One: A hardened PI works the toughest case of his very young life. (18 minutes)
• Act Two: Producer Aviva DeKornfeld talks to a man who finds himself the target of vengeful crows. (8 minutes)
• Act Three: Comedian Josh Johnson wonders if some people should’ve been spanked as kids. (10 minutes)
• Act Four: Writer Etgar Keret reads his story about a bus driver who refuses to open the doors for late passengers. (9 minutes)

Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org

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When a joke could get you killed, should you say it anyway? A group of Syrian comedians test the limits of their newfound freedom, a year after the fall of the brutal Assad regime.

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• Prologue: Under the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad, comedian Sharief Homsi knew which jokes were too dangerous to say on stage. Now that Syria is under the control of a new government, Sharief and the other comedians of “Styria” set out on a national tour to see how far their comedy can go in this new Syria. (6 minutes)
• Act One: The comedians test out risky material and get big laughs on early tour dates. It’s going smoothly until they find out that their show scheduled in the conservative city of Hama is in danger of being cancelled. (13 minutes)
• Act Two: The comedians go to battle with local officials. (18 minutes)
• Act Three: The comedians try everything they can think of to keep their shows from being cancelled. (20 minutes)

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In this special mini-episode -- an extra episode this week! -- we hear from someone in Venezuela with a very specific take on last week's U.S. attack.

People discovering information about their own lives that they did not know, and suddenly everything looks very different.

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• Prologue: When Pete turned 18, his dad took him on a drive to reveal a family secret he was finally old enough to know. (11 minutes)
• Act One: Sometimes, a lore drop comes when you least expect it. That happened to Jake Cornell and his grandmother. Producer Aviva DeKornfeld talked to Jake about it. (14 minutes)
• Act Two: Ben Austen had a kind of new lore drop happen to him recently. But it was not the clarifying kind of lore drop, where everything suddenly makes sense — it was kind of the opposite. (29 minutes)

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The tiny thing that unravels your world.

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• Prologue: Ira talks to Chris Benderev, whose high school years were completely upended by an impromptu thing his teacher said. (8 minutes)
• Act One: For Producer Lilly Sullivan, there’s one story about her parents that defines how she sees them, their family, and their history. She finds out it might be wrong. (27 minutes)
• Act Two: For years, Mike Comite has replayed in his head the moment when he and his bandmate blew their shot of making it as musicians. He sets out to uncover how it all went awry. (13 minutes)
• Act Three: Six million Syrians fled the country after the start of its civil war. A few weeks ago, one woman watched from afar as everything in her home country changed forever – again. (9 minutes)

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Stories about the intersection of Christmas and retail, originally broadcast in 1996 when our show was only a year old. Including David Sedaris's "Santaland Diaries" about the seasons he spent working as an elf at Macy's.

How one block in Portland, Oregon became a movie-set war zone that lots of people think is a real war zone.

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• Prologue: What the movie Hearts of Darkness and right-wing influencers have in common. (8 minutes)
• Act One: Producers Zoe Chace and Suzanne Gaber follow a bunch of right-wing influencers as they search for Antifa in Portland. (31 minutes)
• Act Two: We meet the so-called leader of Antifa in Portland. (16 minutes)

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When history comes knocking, you have to figure out what to do.

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• Prologue: Brittany’s job is to answer anonymous calls and texts from people in the military. This year, she’s gotten more than usual–most of them are wondering about what to do with orders they’ve been given. Or orders they’re afraid they’ll get someday in the future. (9 minutes)
• Act One: Jad Abumrad tells the story of the "ideological genealogy” of Fela Kuti’s anti-colonial politics–his mother. In late 1940s Nigeria, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti found herself at the center of a big, historical moment: an uprising led by thousands of women selling goods in Nigeria’s markets. Jad goes searching for who she really was, and how she became the person who galvanized a movement when history demanded it of her. (45 minutes)

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