"Simple curiosity goes incredibly far."
Ira Glass Offers Some Insight Into His American Life
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Ira Glass began his public radio career as an intern at NPR in Washington in 1978. But it was "This American Life," the award-winning weekly story anthology he created in 1995, that's made him, well, as famous as people in public broadcasting get. The second season of "This American Life's" TV incarnation airs on Showtime next month, and next Saturday Glass appears at Lisner Auditorium. We caught up with the Baltimore native by phone the morning after his first day off in six weeks.
-- Chris Klimek
People have shared some of the most intimate experiences of their lives on your show. How do you get them to do that?
The fact that we are (a) interested and (b) incredibly nosy makes people open up. Being genuinely, actually interested in what they went through and what they think of it goes a long way. It's not very fancy, as a reporting tactic. [Laughs.] Simple curiosity goes incredibly far.
You lost weight for the TV show. Why? You're not on camera much, and you're seated behind a desk when you are.
I was just aware before we started doing the TV show that I would have to look at a lot of pictures of myself, and I knew that would be painful if I didn't like the way I looked. It wasn't anything more complicated than that -- the network didn't care. Simply by cutting out starches from my diet and going to the gym every day for, like, 40 minutes, I lost about 30 pounds pretty quickly.
The most vulnerable I've ever heard you sound on the air was an episode called "Get Over It!," where you spoke about shopping for clothes with a recent ex-girlfriend. You're married now, to a fellow journalist to boot. Do you feel less free to talk about your private life?
