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Ira Glass on his D.C. radio roots and This American Life's approach to politics

By Alison Brody - 7/9/2026, 9:54 PM - 810 words

Faulty reasoning signals

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Ira Glass, creator and host of This American Life, got his start right here in Washington D.C., where he began his radio career as an NPR intern. In 1995 at WBEZ in Chicago he launched the iconic public radio program that revolutionized audio storytelling and has received the highest honors in broadcast journalism, with nine Peabody Awards and a Pulitzer Prize.

Glass is back in D.C. this week for a live performance at Capital Turnaround. He spoke with WAMU’s All Things Considered host Tamika Smith about how his time in the District influenced his career.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You began your career here in Washington. You arrived back in 1978. You were 19 years old.

Yes.

Then you left for Chicago in 1989. When you think back on those early years, what did this city teach you about storytelling that you still carry with you today?

I mean, like everything, honestly. I started at NPR so early. It was just a couple years after public radio began as a national institution. Like, this was so long ago that I basically just walked in off the street. NPR didn’t have a formal internship program, and I just kind of talked my way into the place. And then, you know, I worked with people who were just really trying to invent a way to do radio, which is what it felt like at NPR back then.

What was the moment you realized this is the kind of radio I want to make?

I knew that I wanted to make stuff that would be memorable and have feeling, and it wasn’t clear exactly how to do it. One of the people who we worked with was a guy named Joe Frank, who was a storyteller. And if you look him up online, you’ll see he was just an incredible radio monologist. And I remember I had a moment watching Joe record his story. It was a fictional story, but the way he would tell it, the way he could hold the space with his storytelling, I remember thinking, all I want is to find out: Where is this going? What is going to happen next? I just wanted to know, how does he do this? And for somebody like me, who’s not very talented at making things up, what I tried to do was figure out how do you give people that feeling, but with stories that are true. And that kind of sent me down a path that took years to figure out.

Yeah, I think you figured it out! Now, we’re here in Washington. Politics is our jam. And on This American Life, when you tackle politics, it rarely starts with politicians or institutions. It starts with people. Why has that always been your instinct?

I mean, it began with my instinct in starting the show that I feel like there’s just a lot of everyday life that does not get documented by the media. And then partly it was my fear of talking to famous people. I had no interest in talking to politicians. I feel like there are people who are good at that. It is not my skill set. But I feel like, you know, there’s just so much in this country that isn’t documented. And so when we take on the news, we very much are trying to say, okay, so here’s what the lived experience of this is.

You know, we did an episode which was just about a family in North Carolina. And the dad was here illegally, but ran his own construction business. Had been here for, I think it was 20 or 30 years, had two kids who were teenage girls. And when the latest wave of ICE raids began this past year or so, he and his wife started talking about if they should self-deport. His wife is an American citizen. His two daughters are American citizens. And we told the whole story from the point of view of the teenage girls. And we followed them over the course of months. There were people who heard that story about that family and they were very much, like, this just shows how inhumane this policy is. And there were people who heard it and thought, like, he was paying taxes and he was contributing in that way, but like, dude, he should have followed the rules, we’re right to kick him out. The thing a story like that can do is just show you these things are complicated when they play out in real life.

On Saturday Ira Glass will perform Stories for a Saturday Night: An Evening with Ira Glass at Capitol Turnaround, sponsored by Union Stage and WAMU.