Results tagged “thisamericanlife”

Mike Birbiglia remembers when the room was a lot smaller. He's headlining Saturday night at the Warner Theatre, where he'll tell some stories he’s considering for inclusion in his next one-man show. But he cut his teeth at the DC Improv in the late 90s, while a student at Georgetown University. By the time he was 25, he'd done the The Late Show with David Letterman , released his first album, and had his own Comedy Central special.

The following post is from our advertiser, This American Life on Showtime.

“So the thing you have to understand is this is radio,” says the voice in the darkness — a little bit squeaky, a little bit nasal, not at all the voice you’d assign to the leader of a benign radio cult if it weren't already so familiar.

FOUND Magazine has a knack for revealing the beautiful underbelly of America, the forgotten parts of our everyday lives. Highlighting things like the hateful note you left the person parked in your precious parking spot, your laundry list of to-dos, that love note you didn’t find the courage to send, or those rejection letters that you didn’t want to hold onto, FOUND is the curated hamper for everything not worth collecting. That is unless you...

If you were traveling over the holiday weekend, you would have easily missed the announcement that popular local NPR affiliate WAMU 88.5 FM will be making big changes to their broadcast schedule -- most notably moving the entirety of their popular weekend bluegrass programming to an HD Radio channel, leaving many listeners upset and confused as to how the station could abandon their signature music programs on the regular FM dial. Here's what's going to happen come Sept. 17 (or check out the entire programming scheme here):

The phrase “review-proof” usually denotes some property so universally recognizable and demonstrably saleable that no amount of critical huffing and puffing can possibly derail its commercial invincibility.

Between the creepy name and the glowing spermatozoa in the logo, readers can be forgiven for looking at the graphic on the right and assuming that washingtonpost.com is dabbling in creating Frankensteinian abominations/superbeings. Perhaps an alien/Katharine Graham hybrid that can squeeze secrets out of administration sources with its deadly tentacles? There's room for all sorts of mischief in that Arlington skyscraper. Sadly, that's not the case. The project, entitled "onBeing", is actually a new series of video essays that the Post will be adding to every Wednesday. Here's how they describe it:

onBeing is a project based on the simple notion that we should get to know one another a little better. What you'll find here is a series of videos that takes you into the musings, passions, histories and quirks of all sorts of people. The essence of who they are, who we are.

Hmm. It sounds slightly questionable, particularly given the past year's cuts to the Post's news-gathering staff. But we do genuinely enjoy the Style section's Life Is Short feature, and this sounds like it's cut from the same cloth. Maybe it won't be so bad. The site itself is an extremely slick Flash video player — it's worth clicking through just to check out the interface. And the clips are all nicely shot in a style cribbed from Errol Morris (you might recognize it from those "Switch" commercials that Apple ran in the 90s). But the actual content is less than compelling. Right now there are four videos on the site:
• A Georgetown nun talking about how she always sort of wanted to be a nun
• An affable cheesemaker discussing cheesemaking ("at high altitudes you need less rennet")
• A kid edited together into an incoherent ramble about a number of things that sort of sound profound, if you're easily fooled

In its first weekend, the Capital Fringe Festival turned downtown D.C. into a moveable feast of performance, as show after show made its Fringe debut. As we enter Day Five of the festival, it’s now time to go get a second helping—a show you want to see again or a show your friends have told you is a must-see. Even still, a handful of shows will get their start today. At DCist, we’d love to...

FRIDAY:

This Monday will bring the first installment of the F.W. Thomas Performances, and you, gentle DCist readers, are largely to blame. The series, which bills itself as a "monthly literary variety show featuring live presentations from area writers, artists and musicians," was started in part because of the great turnout for a reading by writers John Hodgman, Adam Mazmanian and others here in D.C. in December — an event that we're told DCist readers showed...

FRIDAY