The daddy of all podcasts, This American Life, may be on its 612th episode, but it’s still capable of dishing up a storyline that reminds you why it’s still so popular. Ask A Grown-Up looks at the idea of offering advice to teenagers, but it’s so much more than that, with lessons on love, loss and getting older.
“Where do we start?” asks Ira Glass. “With Run The Jewels,” says Sean Cole. He talks about a video he watched of El P and Killer Mike answering questions from teenage girls. “It’s 17 minutes long and I was spellbound,” he says.
Run The Jewels’ chat is from Rookie’s Ask a Grown Man, the brainchild of brainy child Tavi Gevinson. After launching her first blog at 11, she has turned celebrities such as Beastie Boy Ad-Rock, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Thom Yorke into video agony aunts, offering support to teenagers in need. “If someone really cool says they’re on your team, that stays with you,” she says.
Glass has long been a fan of Ask A Grown Man (he’s also worked as a consultant for Gevinson’s magazine Rookie) and was once asked to contribute, but he had to make balloon animals at the same time because he wasn’t famous enough to hold the attention of Rookie’s teenage audience. (Watching him fashion a Snoopy while answering questions from people who want to know about whether their crush likes them back or how the Buffy/Angel age gap worked out is magical though.)
TAL is always a masterclass in broadcasting, with no words wasted and the ability to switch points of view while maintaining warmth. But it’s when Glass launches into a monologue about his 89-year-old friend Mary, who died recently, that it demonstrates how intimate and moving its storytelling can be. “OK, this is a very personal thing to say on the radio,” he says, voice crackling. “But my wife and I separated a few years ago so Mary has usually been the person who I talk to last before I’d go to sleep.” It leads him to think about being a grownup and losing friends. “The ones you love die off and then, and this is a total unforeseen pisser, you miss their crappy bad advice. Because even the worst advice from a friend comes with a second message: ‘I got your back.’”
If you like this, try this… Radiolab
