Wonder, Take the Wheel

Note from Julia: I would call a large percentage of audio producers congenitally modest — if not in private, at least in public. Producers are not behind the mic; they are behind the people who are behind the mic, which makes production work doubly unseen and often overlooked. It takes a certain type of person to be OK with that. 

In addition, it’s not always a great idea to be outspoken about the industry you work inside (which makes this project…uh, let’s not think about that). Anyway, this is all to explain why I think academics play such an important role in audio culture. Academics are beholden to very different power structures, and they listen with an ear towards longer-term patterns, histories, and dynamics. When they turn to our work, they don’t necessarily describe it the way we would, but it’s very enlightening to read what they have to say. 

You might be surprised to learn that Bloomsbury Press has been publishing a series of books under the rubric of “Podcast Studies.” An excerpt from the latest title is our guest post today. The book is called Empathy Machines: This American Life, Podcasting, and the Public Radio Structure of Feeling. Author Jason Loviglio, a professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, has long had his ears on audio culture in the US. Here, he takes as a starting point an anonymous Post-It note on a suggestion board that sprung up at the 2016 Third Coast International Audio Festival. It said, “Become empathy machines!”

“My ambition in these pages is to suggest an origin story for the contemporary urgency for more audio empathy machines and perhaps to understand why this appeal may not be sufficient to the challenges we confront,” Loviglio writes in his introduction. “The appeal of empathy machines, however, has served as a map for the traffic in feelings coursing through public radio and its podcast progeny over the last three decades.”

Loviglio traces the prioritization of listener emotion, starting with the establishment of public media, through audience research in the 1980s and 1990s, the experiments of alt.NPR in the 2000s, and the creation popular shows such as Invisibilia and Planet Money. But the main focus of much of his book is on This American Life, the juggernaut narrative program that recently observed its 30th anniversary.

Loviglio is not here to write a love-fest, nor a scathing review — he’s doing nuanced, complicated literary criticism. Our field deserves much more like it. I hope after reading this excerpt, you’ll read the rest of the book and the others in this series from Bloomsbury. Then drop your modesty, if you indeed have it, and pitch the editors another entry to go on the shelf with these!

Here’s Jason Loviglio:

In 1999, Glass’s then-wife thought it important to tell Mary Wiltenberg, an intern new to This American Life, that in order to understand Glass and the show, she needed to know that Glass had only ever had two jobs in his life: a birthday party magician, starting at around twelve years old; and a radio producer, starting at around 19 years old. This anecdote sheds light on Wiltenberg’s early struggle at TAL, documented in not one, but two illustrated books by Jessica Abel, Radio: An Illustrated Guide and Out on the Wire: The Storytelling Secrets of the New Masters of Audio.

As part of her application process for the internship, Wiltenberg pitched a story about a successful labor action by Black and white sharecroppers in southeastern Missouri in 1939. Executive producer Julie Snyder told her that the story was “great,” but “not what we do.” Wiltenberg came back with a different story, which was eventually featured in the episode Do-Gooders (#126, 1999), about an affluent older couple who try and fail spectacularly to revitalize a run-down working-class small town, Canalou, Missouri. Their well-intentioned efforts to work towards the civic good backfire, ending in gunplay and hurt feelings: a fiasco…

Fiascos represent a very specific form of surprise that TAL producers are especially fond of. In fact, in 1997, they dedicated an entire episode to stories on the theme, entitled simply Fiasco! (#61), a theme so compelling they remixed it several times over the next fifteen years. In Canalou, the fiasco represents a bemused take on the idea of urban renewal, class mobility, and liberal interventionism, a better fit for the show’s “apolitical” ethos than an inspiring story of class unity across racial lines.

The no-good-deed moral is dramatically underscored in the episode’s next act, which examines the disastrous results of international humanitarian aid in Rwanda, when international do-gooders supported the Hutus, who were in the process of slaughtering the Tutsi by the hundreds of thousands. It’s a horrible story, on a scale that strains against its thematic inclusion with the Canalou Fiasco. A brief reference to Paul Rusesabagina, the hotel manager who saved hundreds of Tutsis, and was the hero of the movie Hotel Rwanda, adds a much needed but flimsy counterweight to the program’s main thrust that attempts to help others are doomed to failure. Importantly, this exception to the rule acts alone. Glass compares Rusesabagina admiringly to Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, citing his pragmatism and lack of idealism.

The story of Glass’s two jobs, first as a magician and then as a radio producer, helps to frame this chapter’s analysis of This American Life, which centers the role of narrative enchantment, alchemy, and affective play in the first decade or so of the show. Because of Glass’s well-documented didactic and formulaic approach to storytelling, these themes come to us largely pre-captioned. Because he spent years “cutting tape” as an editorial assistant at NPR prior to Your Radio Playhouse, the presentations are immaculately edited and structured. Because he spent his youth doing card and rope tricks at birthday parties, he cannot resist the lure of the flourish, the “ta-da” that communicates “delight,” “amusement,” and “surprise” as counterpoints to empathy.

The play of these opposing affects frames the show’s early years and sets a tonal precedent for the American style of podcasting, while simultaneously hinting at its emotional and political limits and contradictions. These early themes represent the warp and woof of the show’s production of “liberal feeling” or, as an early listener to the podcast version of the radio show put it, the magic of “staying in tune with the world in the tiniest way possible. ”It’s utterly pleasurable [sic]… it feels like you’re doing something good, staying in tune with the world, in the tiniest way possible and yet without being frivolous about it. It’s unlike anything else out there.”

“Staying in touch with the world in the tiniest way possible” required not just discipline, but an internalized ambivalence that had been wrought through the alchemy of taste into narrative formula. Riding the line between frivolity and ponderousness was like a magic trick, an exercise in dexterity, deception, and affective economy. It required an audience willing to suspend belief, hungry for homeopathic moments of “good,” the better perhaps to forestall larger commitments. 

Perhaps nowhere in American life at the end of the twentieth century was this formula more compelling than in stories about strangers, a category of people for whom empathy could be measured out in moments of surprise, delight, and amusement.

The words “magic” and “magical” occurred over 800 times across the show’s transcripts and “magic” is mentioned at least once in 219 episodes, or about 27 percent of the entire TAL oeuvre. The word magic evokes a sense of unguarded wonder and refusal of critical distance that is very much in tension with the fending, world-weary archness mentioned above. It is in this tension that TAL manages to have it both ways, a kind of magic trick of its own. 

A 2017 episode entitled Magic Show (#619) makes implicit, then explicit, the point of the anecdote about Glass’s two jobs, magician and radio producer. The repetitive structure of Glass’s storytelling — anecdote-observation; anecdote-observation — is mirrored in his recollection of magic tricks as a matter of disciplined formal repetition: “I did my act so many times it got kind of carved into me.”

A family friend drives home the point in an interview: “You think you’re doing something different [now]?” she asks him. “Wait, wait, wait. You’re saying when you hear me on the radio, it reminds you of my magic act?” Glass responds, seemingly taken aback. It’s the same showmanship she observes, the same “spiel.” Glass performatively resists the idea in the interview but proceeds to liken magic and storytelling, particularly the appeal of the “psychology” of the well-turned surprise. Elsewhere, Glass has admitted that “there was something about [putting on] shows [as a child] that got me into media, and that was what got me to radio. Every trick had a principle behind it,” Glass recalls about his magic show, “and it was cool to think about the principles.”

Glass developed the analogy between magic and storytelling across many episodes, paying particular attention to the tension between expectations and surprise and to the moments of “delight” that occur when the two collide. Unpeeling expectations to find layers of surprise, Glass is at his best when most transparent, laying bare the tricks behind the flourishes. 

“The Magical Mystifier,” as he called himself at age 12, Glass reflects on the many ways performing magic is itself an occasion for surprises, reversals, and moments of insight. “I thought I was the one who was in charge of the situation during the magic show,” Glass admits. But the joke was on him, he understands, in the episode’s first big epiphany: perhaps his adult audience had been indulging him a bit years ago. “I thought I…was controlling everybody’s minds with my mind and my magic,” he shares with sheepish wonder. 

But his ability to enchant as a storyteller quickly became part of the media narrative in the early years of TAL. A New York Times interviewer gushed that “there are two people in America who so deliberately mesmerize: Ira Glass and Philip Glass. And they’re related (first cousins once removed).”

Magic served as a controlling metaphor in other stories on a theme, like romantic love (Math or Magic?, 2023); the power of names (Name Change, 1997); the power of language (Magic Words, 2014); the failure of language (Say Anything, 2003); celebrity (New Year, 1996); libraries (The Room of Requirement, 2018); and elsewhere. But it proved most useful as a way to evoke a theory of feelings: the appearance, as if by magic, of a rippling through and among strangers of a surprising affective state, a moment of shared feeling. Perhaps nothing better captures the notion of the public radio structure of feeling than the idea of a magic moment in which a story about strangers pulls a listener out of themselves for a temporary spell of empathy. Stories that evoked such moments for listeners often featured storytellers having magical moments of their own. In another episode (To Be Real, 2017), he realizes that for professional magicians like David Blaine, the goal is not “creating a fake world,” but instead to get to “real, raw emotion,” in himself and in his audience, an ambition he plainly shares as a storyteller.

In Act II of “To Be Real,” Glass talks to a magician named Derek DelGaudio, whose act concludes with a bit in which “he walks up to people [in the audience] and stares in their eyes and tells them something about themselves.” It’s a moment, Glass says, in which “the magic is all in service to this very human thing that’s happening.” DelGaudio calls one audience member “a good Christian”; another, “a ninja”; then “a ray of sunshine”; “a wallflower”; and so on.

“Watching him do this,” Glass marvels, changes the experience of being in a room of strangers. “It makes you look at them differently…it stops feeling like a room of anonymous strangers.” The last woman he encounters he calls “a failure,” which sends a ripple of “awwws” through the room and makes the woman cry. DelGaudio “choked up” as well: “I called them a failure in front of a bunch of strangers,” he says, as if surprised by his own trick and its affective impact. Glass seems impressed by this new kind of magic, which dispenses with pretense in order “to get to something utterly real, un-faked, and emotional.”

This remarkable scene, and its unacknowledged cruelty, helps to contextualize the role of “magic” as a way of thinking about feelings in TAL, their temporality and their circulation through social bodies. The standard unit of measure for feelings on the show is the moment. They are produced in and by stories in the moment of telling. In that way, the magic trick is an apt metaphor, as they are produced, serially, in moments, typically before a room full of strangers. In the case of DelGaudio’s act, a room of strangers transformed by the simple act of naming (“a good Christian, a ninja, a ray of sunshine”). As in the Driveway Moment, such moments are both moving and arresting. They stop the narrative to make way for a narrator’s extra-diegetical insight, which is designed as a caption for listeners’ own emotional response. In their affective power, they stop time, or at least stop us in time, the better to feel moved.

Such moments are often represented as moments of human connection, of empathy or fellow feeling. Here, a room of strangers comes together in the shared moment of recognition that one of their number is “a failure,” which seems like a violation of some basic agreement about how strangers behave to one another. But for Glass, it’s an epiphany, an occasion for an ironic kind of empathy: “It’s the sort of moment, watching it, all you can think about is her and her life and what that must be about.”

It’s an unusually stark example of the at-times ruthless formula that produces stories on a theme. The strangers theme is a bit of a procrustean bed, now stretching this story to fit the criteria, now lopping off a bit of that story that doesn’t quite fit. This stretching and trimming can be likened to sleight-of-hand, making things appear not quite as they are, or to editing (i.e., the cutting and splicing necessary to produce a desired effect). Nowhere in the piece on DelGaudio is there any evidence to support that the magician was correct in his designation of each audience member (“a ninja, a good Christian, a failure”). His power came not in accuracy but in putting feelings into social circulation, producing affect out of thin air, and joining strangers, temporarily, into intimates.

JB: Thanks again to Jason Loviglio for sharing this excerpt from Empathy Machines. For a 20% discount on the book, go here and enter the code EMPATHY20.

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