This American Life – Episode 831: Lists!!!

Air Date: August 17, 2025
Host: Ira Glass
Theme: How the humble list tames chaos, brings order, reflects our inner lives, and sometimes wields unnerving power in both personal and political spheres.

Episode Overview

This episode explores the fascinating, quirky, and sometimes haunting power of lists—how they entertain, clarify, commemorate, organize, and even control both our private lives and the fates of entire nations. Through recollections of pop-culture phenomena, personal stories, and reporting from inside Putin-era Russia, the show examines why lists are so irresistible and what it means to find yourself on one (or make one of your own).

Key Segments and Insights

1. The Allure of Lists: From the People's Almanac to Everyday Life

Guests: Elijah Wallichinsky (co-author of The People's Almanac and The Book of Lists), Aviva DeKornfeld (producer)

• [00:00–05:44] Ira Glass & Elijah Wallichinsky:

  • The 1970s bestseller "The People's Almanac" captivated readers with its encyclopedic, eccentric, and highly detailed content. Wallichinsky, one of its authors, realized people loved the sections jammed with lists—whether practical (cities, rivers) or oddball (celebrities who never existed, sexual positions, famous brains and their weights).
  • Quote:
    • "The most popular chapter in the People's Almanac was lists." – Elijah Wallichinsky [01:33]
    • "They accidentally figured out how to give the pleasure of scrolling the Internet way before the Internet existed." – Ira Glass [02:43]
  • The most-requested list? “Six sexual positions in order of popularity... with a sentence of advantage and disadvantage for each.”– Elijah Wallichinsky [04:28]

• [05:44–06:44] Lists as a Tool for Change

  • Wallichinsky used a list format to raise awareness about global dictatorships in Parade Magazine, making complex issues digestible and emotionally resonant to millions.
  • Quote:
    • "It became a cover story... The list format made accessible to people a subject they didn't know they might be interested in." – Elijah Wallichinsky [06:44]

2. Lists as Personal Coping and Meaning-Making

Guest: Aviva DeKornfeld (producer)

• [07:24–12:31] The Private Universe of Self-Lists
  • Aviva reveals her compulsion to create deeply personal, idiosyncratic lists in her phone’s notes app, ranging from “things that are off brand for me” to “times strangers have involved me in their business.”
  • Memorable List Entries:
    • "I'm bad at jumping."
    • "I'm inconsistent with my birth control."
    • "I've never kissed anyone famous…" [09:19]
    • “Common things I’ve never done: karaoke and going to Costco.” [10:34]
  • The act of making lists, for Aviva, is both psychological relief and a way to capture and process identity.
  • Quotes:
    • "I'm just trying to make sense of who I am and what is going on in my brain…" – Aviva DeKornfeld [10:58]
    • "Once it's on a list, I don't feel like I have to remember it." – Aviva DeKornfeld [11:56]
    • "I have no idea how to write any radio story without a list to take control of all the confusion and all the possible choices..." – Ira Glass [12:31]

Act One: List for Life

[14:54–29:44]
Story by John Facil (and brother Pat), produced by Sean Cole
A deeply personal story of grief, legacy, and the shadow side of striving through a brother’s motivational “Goals for Success” list.

• After their brother Mike’s suicide, siblings are left with a poster of his 16 maxims—“Make a commitment. Be unselfish. Improve every day… Eliminate mistakes.”

• The list, a source of both inspiration and ambivalence, becomes part memorial, part burden.

• As the community adopts Mike's list as a symbol of excellence, his brothers grapple with the gap between this idealized version and the messy, real person they lost.

• Notable Quotes:

  • "Pat, saw something in the list that I also felt, but I couldn't necessarily name. What role do you think the list played in his death?" — John Facil [19:46]
  • "It shows you the type of pressure he put on himself. There's nothing about self care in it, nothing about being true to yourself either." – Pat Facil [20:00]
  • "It's painful for me because ... the list is about what trauma did to Mike. And now these adults are waving it around like it was some sort of thing to be proud of." – Pat Facil [24:50]
  • "He was greedy and bad with money ... put a subwoofer in his car ... These are the stories that, like, I'm proud of, because they're a reflection of who he was." – Pat Facil [26:50–28:39]

• Eventually, John and Pat succeed in having a line about the strength in vulnerability added to the public display of Mike’s list in the school gym.

Act Two: Lists of Dogs and Enemies: Organization and Exclusion

[31:59–34:37]
Guests: Bobby Sherwood, Chris Benderev
Topic: Bobby keeps a sprawling list of neighborhood dogs (and their owners) on his phone—names, attributes, even social hierarchies—so he won’t forget or fake small talk.

• “He also finds it helpful to rank all the dogs so his dog Chewy’s favorites are at the top and his least favorites are at the bottom.” [32:39]
• The lists serve as a coping mechanism for social anxiety, a relationship catalog, and a quirky microcosm of order in everyday life.

Act Three: Target Lists — Bureaucracy and Power in Putin’s Russia

[34:37–62:42]
Story reported by Masha Gessen with voices of Russian dissidents and exiles

• The Russian government’s ever-expanding lists—“foreign agents,” “undesirable organizations,” “unfriendly countries”—are designed both to stigmatize and to control, often with Kafkaesque, life-altering consequences for those listed.
• Masha Gessen and friends recount the moment a peer was added to the foreign agent list the day after Thanksgiving, and trace how such classifications haunt exiles and dissenters for years.
• Quotes & Key Moments:
  • “It's like a sinister version of Oscar nominations… Because, you know when Oscar nominations come out, then you have to wonder what's going to be the outcome for any one of these.” – Ira Glass, M. Gessen [35:46]
  • “It's a day that changes your life.” – M. Gessen [40:34]
  • On being notified: "I realized my wife was pale ... she told me I was declared a foreign agent." – Ilya [41:07]
  • "If you communicate anything publicly ... you have to warn people that they are dealing with a foreign agent. In extra large type.” – Galina Arapova [44:03]
  • "The paperwork has to be perfect every time, but the rules are vague ... it's all made as a big trap." – Galina Arapova [44:33]
  • "I just didn't feel anything ... you cannot stay unsafe. You have to be prepared every day that you could be arrested, they could come to your flat." – Karen & Zoya [45:36, 57:12]
• The act of being listed brings a kind of social and existential exile—often irreversibly so.
  • "Being considered a criminal by the Russian state means I'll never be able to go home again, not even if there's a change of regime ... I'm in exile for life." – M. Gessen [53:36]
• Zoya, an LGBT activist, describes buying a reinforced apartment door to stall police raids, just long enough to "clean her computer" and protect friends and her dog.
  • "I asked, what door will slow police down? And the guy thought I was a drug dealer." [58:12]

Memorable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• The Internet Before the Internet:
  "They accidentally figured out how to give the pleasure of scrolling the Internet way before the Internet existed." – Ira Glass [02:43]

• Private Lists, Public Identity:
  "Once it's on a list, I don't feel like I have to remember it." – Aviva DeKornfeld [11:56]

• On Pressure and Perfectionism:
  "There's nothing about self care in it, and there's nothing about being true to yourself either ... it shows you a lot of what was going on with him and this mindset that he got trapped in." – Pat Facil [20:00]

• The List as Lifeline and Exile:
  "Being considered a criminal by the Russian state means I'll never be able to go home again, not even if there's a change of regime." – M. Gessen [53:36]

Thematic Reflections

• Lists as Order Out of Chaos: Across stories—from pop trivia to dog parks to the Russian state—lists appear as an attempt to contain chaos, ease memory and anxiety, and make the unimaginable manageable.
• The Double-Edged Sword: Lists can bring comfort and clarity, but can also enforce rigid expectations, deepen stigma, or serve as tools of oppression.
• Vulnerability and Truth: Each segment ultimately returns to the idea that what's left off lists (flaws, sadness, complexity) is often as important as what makes the cut.

Key Takeaways

• Lists are far more than organizational tools; they shape experience, memory, and identity, for better and worse.
• Being on a list can confer power, belonging, stigma, or exile.
• The urge to list, and to be listed, is both deeply human and unavoidably political.

Useful Timestamps

• [01:33] – Elijah Wallichinsky on the explosion of reader letters about lists
• [04:28] – The infamous “six sexual positions” list
• [11:56] – Aviva DeKornfeld describes the psychic relief of listing
• [19:46] – Discussion of the psychological pressure behind a life-list
• [35:15] – The Russian government’s Friday tradition: announcing new “foreign agents”
• [41:07] – Ilya on learning he was declared a foreign agent while cutting turkey
• [44:33] – Galina Arapova on the bureaucracy designed “as a big trap”
• [57:12] – Zoya on living with the certainty of state persecution

Closing Note

This episode invites listeners to see lists not just as practical tools but as mirrors reflecting our anxieties, ambitions, histories, and hopes. Whether in a teenager’s bedroom, on a dog-walker's phone, or in a regime’s database of enemies, lists shape the worlds we live in—sometimes taming chaos, sometimes revealing it, and always demanding that we reckon with what’s worth counting, and what’s worth remembering.