827: All the King's Horses

Ira Glass

My grandfather, Melvin, ran a hardware store in Baltimore that also sold model trains. And he had a huge-- and I mean huge-- train set in the basement of his house on Pimlico Road that I loved. This thing was vast, with tunnels and bridges and towns and streetlights that lit. And the train engines puff smoke as they scooted around the track on this big, wooden platform in the basement in the middle of all this epic amount of clutter and junk and his tools and, for some reason, a mimeograph machine.

And in the corner of the basement was the filthiest toilet I had ever seen-- like, frighteningly dirty to me as a little suburban kid. The whole basement was a chamber of chaos, and it was the most unsettlingly-chaotic thing in it. But that is not the story I'm here to tell. The story I'm here to tell is about Melvin and one of his sisters.

[PHONE RINGS]

Ira Glass

To be sure I was getting the facts absolutely right on this thing, I called the last person in the family who might remember it, my Uncle Bennett. He was at home.

[PHONE RINGS]

Ira Glass

Renee is Bennett's girlfriend. They live together.

Ira Glass

I guess you're getting this-- these are older people who do not want to be bothered to cross the house or yell from room to room. Anyway, the story-- the story that I'm here to tell about my grandfather, Melvin, and his brothers and sisters.

Let me just give you the family geography here. He's one of four kids. And for the purposes of this particular story, you should imagine them in two competing teams. There are the two older kids, Melvin and Dorothy, and the two younger kids, Ray and Calvin.

OK, Melvin and Dorothy, Ray and Calvin. It's 1964, and their mom dies. The four kids are all in their 40s and 50s at this point. And then just after she died--

Ira Glass

Again, the two older kids-- Melvin and Dorothy. The younger kids, Calvin and Ray, took all the good stuff.

Ira Glass

This, Bennett explained to me, was apparently typical behavior for Ray.

Ira Glass

Didn't talk to her, didn't talk about her.

Ira Glass

Calvin, meanwhile-- Ray's partner in this family heist-- Calvin was a baby in the family, 13 years younger than the next-oldest kid. And the way that I always heard it, nobody held this against Calvin because everybody knew that Ray could just push him around and get him to do whatever she wanted.

So Calvin was around. I remember Calvin clowning around, doing little magic tricks for me at charity crab feasts that Dorothy used to organize all through my childhood.

But not Ray. It really was like Ray never existed, was never spoken about, off in Florida. I and my sisters met her only one time. Bennett, her own nephew-- Bennett only met her once on a trip to Miami after he was married.

Ira Glass

I think this story really got to me when I was a kid, and I first heard it because it was the very first glimpse I had at the idea that you can destroy things completely-- like, totally wreck them beyond repair-- with somebody you know so well. I mean, I guess I'm lucky that I lived in a family where something like this would be so rare. But still, for me, personally, that has been a hard lesson to hold on to.

When I was married and things were going badly and we were in counseling and trying to patch it together for so many years-- like, more years than I want to admit here on the radio-- and I think part of it was because I just had this feeling, like, we are not people who get divorced. Like, we are bigger than that somehow. My mom was a marriage therapist. I just couldn't accept-- I think we both couldn't accept-- that we had just broken things between us so badly that there was no coming back from it.

I just didn't want to admit that-- which brings me to Humpty Dumpty. I didn't know this, but some of my coworkers with little kids at home were talking about how unsettling Humpty Dumpty is to some of those kids. Laura said that at the doctor's office, there's a poster. And their two-year-old saw it and after that was like, someone can break and not go back together? And then remembered it when they went back to that office a year later.

Zoe's son, Max, is two and a half.

Ira Glass

We posted a thing on social media about this and got a ton of responses from parents whose kids were terrified of Humpty Dumpty. One said her preschooler couldn't stand to see her crack eggs in the kitchen because it reminded her of the nursery rhyme. Another said her two-year-old spent weeks asking if he could recreate the story with an egg from the fridge, which they did-- like, a few times-- puzzling over the impossibility of putting an egg back together once it's cracked.

A few people wrote to talk about how it messed them up as kids to picture Humpty Dumpty left there in pieces on the side of the road, sad look on his face. A woman named Isabella wrote, "I wondered if he had to exist conscious in his cracked state forever or if he would slowly die. Because he seemed to be still alive after he had cracked."

There's something about that image of someone broken so badly that nothing can fix it, that things can go so wrong, the finality of that-- before you understand all the bad things that can happen in the world, how things come apart and people you love can die and you will die, before you get to any of the entropic, messy chaos of our world with its blackened toilets and its long-ago trashed model trains, you get this glimpse, this fat, cartoon, overdressed egg man smashed to tiny bits of shell and goo.

Today on our program, people who hit a moment when things shatter apart-- now they make sense of it and not go to pieces themselves. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, Toy R Us. Sometimes there's a really specific moment when things fall apart, and you know exactly what the moment was, but you were left with no idea how or why it happened or-- more important-- how to put the thing back together. David Kestenbaum found a family that happened to, a father and son, years ago. And the son has thought about it ever since.

David Kestenbaum

The son in this story, his name is Peter Ocko. And I don't usually love hearing people's dreams, but this is how our interview started.

David Kestenbaum

The job was exciting for Peter's dad too. His dad had always been searching for a way to be successful. And success was the thing he imagined happening all at once. He saw himself as an inventor. And if he just had the right idea, the world would notice. His ship would come in. He actually read a lot of books about ships and captains.

Anyway, his previous attempt at conquering the world had not gone so well. He'd created these kind of cardboard models of famous landmarks that he tried to sell as kits.

David Kestenbaum

The one bad thing about the job was that Milton Bradley was 90 miles from where they lived in Massachusetts. So his dad would just work there the whole week, only come home on the weekends.

David Kestenbaum

And the stuff in that box, it was kind of magical. This was 1977. And in that box were circuit boards and wires. Milton Bradley was making some of the first electronic games. Their big hit was Simon-- basically, an electronic version of Simon Says-- a kind of chunky Frisbee-shaped thing with four big buttons-- red, blue, green, yellow-- that would light up.

David Kestenbaum

It would play a sequence. You'd have to remember it and play it back.

[NOTE SEQUENCE PLAYS]

[NOTE SEQUENCE PLAYS BACK]

[NOTE SEQUENCE PLAYS]

[NOTE SEQUENCE PLAYS BACK]

OK. Even back then, it was a little boring. I'll be honest. I don't think there were any parents saying, like, I can't get my kid off the Simon. But it did feel like you were holding some object from the future, just to press the buttons and hear these kinds of sounds for the first time. Peter and his dad would sit around in this sort of attic room at this big table and just mess around with this stuff.

David Kestenbaum

They'd build little electronic kits together, which could get kind of tense. His dad liked to follow instructions-- Peter, not so much. They'd share little discoveries with each other, like when Peter realized you could take the spring from a ballpoint pen, put it across the terminals of a 9-volt battery and the electricity flowing through it would make it glow, like the filament in a light bulb.

But more than anything, it was a way to spend time together. Week after week, when his dad would come home, this was their routine. They'd go up to the third floor and just be together, sitting side by side at this big drafting table. And then one day, as Peter thinks he remembers it, a kind of remarkable thing happened in that room, something that changed their lives. It was just Peter there that day in the workshop.

David Kestenbaum

In his memory, he then had another idea. I wonder if you could use those motors to make the wheels turn on a little car. Then the Simon board would be controlling a car. That would be neat.

David Kestenbaum

A programmable car. You could punch some buttons on it, tell it you wanted it to drive forward, turn right, drive some more, turn left. Then it would go and do it.

David Kestenbaum

His dad brought the idea into work. And Milton Bradley started to develop it as an actual toy with Peter's dad leading the team. His dad would update him when he got home. Like, our little thing is still moving forward. And as it got further along, he'd bring home these kind of handmade prototypes of it. The toy that was taking form was sort of a tank, dump truck kind of thing. You could program it to carry something to a place and drop it off, all on its own.

David Kestenbaum

Milton Bradley sold lots of them-- quite a few in Glenside, Pennsylvania, where I grew up. I remember them popping up in friends' houses after Christmas. And those ads were all over TV-- Big Trak rolling across the floor in the suburban living room and delivering an apple to dad.

David Kestenbaum

Sales? Best estimate I was able to find-- $40 million.

This project, it gave Peter's dad the thing he'd been wanting-- a real success. But people are complicated.

David Kestenbaum

Peter's dad was frustrated. He had brought this toy into existence. But in the end, it would be the company's success, not his. The toy was a big hit. But it wasn't going to make his dad rich. Peter would overhear his parents talking in the next room, his dad increasingly unhappy. And, realizing there wasn't going to be any glory for him, he quit the dream job.

He thought about legal action. But, of course, he couldn't sue Milton Bradley for taking his idea. He was an employee, so the company owned everything he created, which is pretty much how it works at any company. But at some point, Peter's dad talks to a lawyer. And one of the things he says to the lawyer is, hey, the whole idea for Big Trak, I didn't come up with that. It actually came from my son, from Peter, who was not a Milton Bradley employee.

David Kestenbaum

And that is how the lawsuit Peter Ocko, 13-year-old boy, versus the Milton Bradley company came to be. The basis for the lawsuit was that if Peter, the kid, had come up with the initial idea for this multi-million-dollar toy, then he was owed royalties. It could be a lot of money.

I asked Peter if the prospect of being a kid suing a giant corporation felt scary. He said not really, though maybe it should have. He said it felt thrilling, kind of awesome. A big, fancy Boston law firm took their case.

David Kestenbaum

Peter says, looking back, he was just coming into that age where you're really craving some kind of identity. And now he had one, teenage whiz kid.

David Kestenbaum

Two years went by of preparation, legal back and forth. And, finally, the court date approached. Peter and his dad would take long walks around the block with the dog, both kind of excited by it all, going over the story he would tell in court. And then there was one night, the night Peter's thought about and puzzled over for years.

David Kestenbaum

To understand what happened, you need to know two things. First was that before bringing the lawsuit, Peter's dad had signed a document making it so that, legally, he no longer had financial responsibility for Peter. This was at the recommendation of the lawyers and made it so that, as far as the jury would be concerned, this would be about Peter, not his dad trying to get money through him-- even though it kind of was. It would also help protect any money they won. That's the first thing you need to know. Here's the other thing.

David Kestenbaum

Like that moment he remembered, hooking the Simon board up to the motors, when exactly did that happen? Was it really before his dad had started on the project at work? Or was he doing it after his dad began working on Big Trak? Like, maybe what he remembered was him trying to copy the thing his dad was doing.

Also, at this point, this was a family story they had told many times. Maybe it had grown in the telling, and the telling had created its own version in his head. He had all these doubts.

David Kestenbaum

The court date got closer and closer. His dad had said this confusing and upsetting thing. Peter didn't know what to make of it. And he was all alone with that.

David Kestenbaum

The trial finally happened. His dad, very invested in it, hated the opposing lawyer, saw him as truly evil. Peter says the whole trial, he wasn't really wondering if they would win. He was looking for clues to what his dad had said and what the truth was.

Eventually, Peter took the stand and swore on the Bible. He says, at that moment, it was the part of him that believed it swearing the oath. He told the story he remembered at that moment in their little workroom at home. His lawyer had him take apart a Simon with a screwdriver on the stand, pull out the circuit board, which seemed to impress the jury.

It's worth noting that the trial was around the time the movie WarGames came out. That's the one where a kid saves the world from nuclear catastrophe because he understands the computers controlling the nuclear weapons better than the adults do. Not surprisingly, the press showed up to the trial. The headline writes itself. "Teenager Sues Milton Bradley."

David Kestenbaum

After the verdict came down, they went out the back of the courthouse to avoid the press, the three of them-- mom, dad, and him. There was a phone booth on the way out.

David Kestenbaum

Peter is pretty sure he knows what the truth is about who came up with the idea for Big Trak. Maybe it was clear at the time. But it was hard to see as a kid-- hard to feel it with confidence, anyway. The truth-- the only thing that really makes sense is-- that Peter had come up with the idea for the toy.

In the trial, some of his dad's coworkers testified that he had come into work and said as much. And it was a thing that, as a family, they had talked about before the lawsuit, that this little idea Peter had was being turned into an actual toy and how cool that was. But that night at dinner, it was a hard fact for his father to have thrown in his face. And so he said what he said. His dad's way of moving past it was just to keep moving.

Years past. Peter had kids. His dad would come and visit-- really enjoyed being a grandfather.

David Kestenbaum

The earliest known version of the Humpty Dumpty rhyme, it's not the same as the one you know. It may have been a riddle about an egg, or it may have been a poem about a person. It went like this.

"Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. Four-score men and four-score more could not make Humpty Dumpty where he was before--" which I read differently from the one we know. You can put a broken thing back together. It's just going to be different.

Ira Glass

David Kestenbaum is our senior editor. Coming up, a man-- not an egg-- falls off a very high wall. And he does not look around for either king's horses or king's men. Imagine that. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, "All the King's Horses"-- about things broken so badly, they cannot be put back together. We've arrived at act two of our program.

Act two, The 95. This next story is about somebody examining something very broken, something documented in a list assembled by the Committee to Protect Journalists, of journalists who've been killed in the Israel-Hamas war. It's the largest number of journalists who've died in any conflict since they started counting.

The list gives each person's name, where they worked, circumstances of their death-- sometimes a few more details, but often, that's all. Reporter Dana Ballout has been reading about the people on the list, watching their work, talking to their colleagues, trying to piece together who they were and what was lost when they died. Here she is.

Dana Ballout

I first started noticing the journalists dying on Instagram. I'm a journalist. I'm Arab. And I've reported on war. A big part of my community is other Arab journalists who do the same thing. And when someone dies, news travels fast.

Recently, I pulled up the list that the Committee to Protect Journalists has been keeping and looked at it for the first time. There are 95 journalists and media workers on it as of today. Almost everyone on it is Palestinian. Scrolling through, I started to get angry. These were the people carrying the burden of documenting this whole war.

Israel is not allowing foreign journalists into Gaza, except on rare occasions with military escorts. These people's names are being buried in a giant list that keeps growing. What I want to do is lift some of them off the list for a moment and give you a glimpse of who they were and the work they made.

I'll start with Sari Mansour. Sari was the director of Al Quds News Network. And he posted a 22-second video on November 18 that was a report from the war, but it also gave me a picture into his marriage.

Dana Ballout

Sari's wearing his press vest and looks exhausted. He's explaining that cell service and the internet keep getting cut off and it's often impossible to text or call anyone, including his wife. So they've resorted to using handwritten letters to communicate while he's out reporting, sending them back and forth with neighbors or colleagues.

Dana Ballout

He ends the video with a picture of one of these letters from his wife. In it, she writes, "Me and the kids stayed up waiting for you until the morning, and you didn't come home. We were really sad. I kept telling the kids, look, he's coming. But you didn't show up. May God forgive you.

Come home tomorrow and eat with us. Do you want me to make you kebab or maybe kabseh? Bring your friends with you. It's OK. And give Aziz the battery to charge. What do you think about me sending you handwritten letters with messenger pigeons from now on? Ha, ha, ha. I'm just kidding. I want to curse at you, but we're living in a war. Too bad. OK, I love you. Bye."

A few hours after he shared that letter, Sari and his coworker, Hassouneh Salim, were at Sari's home when they were killed by an Israeli airstrike that hit his house. His wife and kids, who weren't there, survived.

Gaza's tiny, and the journalist community is really close. Reading the list, you can see all the connections between people, like with Ibrahim Lafi. Ibrahim was a photo journalist, one of the first journalists to die. He was killed while reporting on October 7. He was just 21, still new to journalism.

On his Instagram, you can see that in his posts just a few years ago, he was still practicing his photography, taking pictures of coffee cups and flowers. Then he started doing beautiful portraits and action shots. You can really feel him starting to become a journalist.

Clicking around on Instagram, I found a tribute post about Ibrahim from his coworker, Roshdi Serraj. In this photo, Ibrahim's staring intently at the back of a camera, his face lit up by the light from the viewfinder. He looks so young. The caption reads, "My assistant is gone. Ibrahim is gone."

Roshdi himself was a beloved journalist and filmmaker. And I know that because he's also on the list. He was killed just two weeks after Ibrahim. I read the tribute post to him too. I saw this over and over again, journalists posting tributes, who were then killed themselves soon after. And a tribute goes up for them. And then the pattern continues.

Something else I saw over and over on the list, journalists-- later in the war-- who'd become aware that they could be making their last reports. They'd say it at the beginning of their videos. And those were the hardest to watch, especially when it was true.

One video like that was posted by Ayat Khadoura. Ayat was a freelance journalist and video blogger. Her videos before the war covered a wide range, from what I can tell-- interviews about women in politics. She even appeared in a commercial for ketchup-flavored chips. She clearly liked being in front of the camera.

Once the war started, Ayat pivoted to covering bombings and food shortages. On November 20, she posted a video report from her home. You can hear the airstrikes hitting very close to where she is. It's scary.

Dana Ballout

She's saying, this is likely my last video. Today the occupation forces dropped phosphorus bombs on Beit Lehia area and frightening sound bombs. They dropped letters from the sky ordering everyone to evacuate. Everyone ran into the streets in the craziest way. No one knows where to go.

Dana Ballout

My family and I are split up. Myself and a few others are still at home, but everyone else has evacuated. They don't know where they're going. The situation is so scary. What's happening is so tough, and may God mercy on us.

Dana Ballout

And then she begins to cry and the video stops. She was killed later that day.

Targeting journalists, in case you didn't know, is a war crime. So far, the Committee to Protect Journalists has found that three of the journalists on the list were explicitly targeted by the IDF, the Israeli military. Investigations by the Washington Post and Reuters, Human Rights Watch, and the United Nations have also raised serious questions in these three cases. And the Committee to Protect Journalists is investigating 10 other killings.

When we reached out to the IDF for comment, they said, quote, "The IDF has never and will never deliberately target journalists." That's the answer they always give in these situations.

Meanwhile, dozens of seasoned reporters have fled Gaza-- journalists who worked for Al Jazeera, the BBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Reuters, Agence France Presse. So many media offices were demolished in Israeli airstrikes that the Committee to Protect Journalists stopped counting. It's not just individual lives that have been destroyed. It's an entire infrastructure.

The name on the list that was hardest for me to look at was Issam Abdallah because I'd crossed paths with him once. Issam was a Lebanese journalist, a video journalist for Reuters for many, many years. He had just won an award for coverage of Ukraine. I'm Lebanese and still report there sometimes. And I'd worked with Issam a couple of summers ago.

He helped me film a sort of random story in Beirut. I was interviewing this entrepreneur who had started a sperm-freezing company after an accident where he spilled a tray of hot coffee on his private area, burning himself. I know-- ridiculous. It was a really silly shoot.

Right after we said cut and started to wrap, Issam started this whole bit about being in his late 30s, reconsidering his own sperm quality, and everything he now realized he was doing to hurt it. And no one could stop laughing. It was a really good day. That felt good to remember-- and to remember him that way.

Issam was killed by the IDF on October 13. His death was one of the three that the Committee to Protect Journalists has identified as a targeted killing. He was fired upon by an Israeli tank while standing in an empty field on the Lebanon-Israel border with a small group of other journalists. Everyone was wearing press vests with cameras out. They were covering the Hezbollah part of this war. A few other journalists were injured in the attack, which was captured on video.

The IDF says they were responding to firing from Hezbollah, not targeting the journalists. But multiple investigations, including by Reuters, the United Nations, Amnesty International, and the AFP found no evidence of any firing from the location of the journalist before the IDF shot at them. The journalists in the group and video footage confirmed that there was no military activity near them.

I'd only met Issam once, barely knew him, but it affected me so much when he died. I know that he understood the risks of his job. But somehow, it still felt so random and unfair that he would be struck down like that, following the rules, wearing his press vest and helmet in a pack of reporters on a sunny day in an open field. I find myself thinking about him all the time.

His last Instagram post was commemorating another journalist, this iconic reporter, Shireen Abu Akleh, who'd been killed by the IDF. When I first saw that post in October, I thought, how ironic. Because a week later, Issam also was killed by the IDF. But then after spending time reading the list, I realized how common this had become.

I still haven't finished going through the list and looking up the people on it. I keep finding things that stick with me, like the funny way this one radio host would cut off a caller who was rambling on for too long, a tweet from reporter Ola Atallah that quoted Sylvia Plath. It read, "What ceremony of words can patch the havoc?"

I'm going to keep going down the list even though this radio story is over now, just for myself, my own way of bearing witness, which is, in the end, all that these journalists were trying to do.

Ira Glass

Reporter Dana Ballou is journalist and documentary filmmaker. Her story was produced by Diane Wu.

["RECORDING 801" BY LINA MAKOUL]

This song is by Lina Makoul, a Palestinian musician it's called "Recording 801."

Ira Glass

Act 3, A Great Fall. OK, so there are lots of ways to break something. And skateboarding is a pretty good one. David Kestenbaum-- who, of course, you heard earlier in the show-- has been obsessed with this one short video of a skateboarder that he keeps watching over and over.

David Kestenbaum

The skateboarder stands at the top of a ramp. The wall of the ramp goes straight down at first, then curves into a flat section, then up again on the other side. It's like an enormous U. You could easily break something from that height. He leans forward. It's 13 and 1/2 feet down. One other number you should know-- 52. That's how old he is in this video-- 52 years old. It's Tony Hawk trying to land a trick that he used to do all the time when he was younger.

He goes down the ramp, up the other side, spins in the air and--

[CRASH]

--falls onto his knees. He's wearing pads, slides to the bottom, then climbs the stairs to try again. But same thing.

[CRASH]

I was never a skateboard kid-- they were too cool for me. I know Tony Hawk is the most famous skateboarder in the world, but I've only gotten into him now that he's over 50. On social media, he writes these funny little scenes from his life, like this one.

Kid at skate park. Are you Tony Hawk? Me-- I am. Him-- no, you're not. OK, I'm not. But are you, for real? I am, for real. I thought you'd look younger. Me too.

So the trick he was trying to do in this video, it's called an Ollie 540. Basically, you go down the ramp, up the other side of the U, then down again-- that a couple times until you get enough height. Then, through some kind of magic, at, like, 15 feet in the air, you spin one and a half times with the board turning underneath you but without grabbing the board. You don't touch it with your hands. Like, you and the board are just rotating it exactly the same speed. And then somehow, you try to land on your skateboard without breaking any bones.

[CRASH]

David Kestenbaum

Hip, I think he says there. He's written that the trick has gotten scarier as he's gotten older, just committing to the landing at the end. He wrote, "My willingness to slam unexpectedly into the flat bottom has waned greatly over the last decade."

One of the things I like about this video is it's basically a collection of failures over and over. It's edited so you can't see how many tries, but it's a lot. He looks tired and just so human. After one fall, he sits there on the ground, looks up, and swears.

David Kestenbaum

The next attempt literally goes sideways. He slides out the end of the ramp and takes out a camera there that's filming.

[CRASH]

[CLATTERING]

David Kestenbaum

Shy grin, he checks to see if his finger is OK. Cut to Tony Hawk at the top of the ramp again. Deep breath, skateboard over the void again. Plunges down, up the other side, down, up into the air, around--

David Kestenbaum

--and he lands it. Lets the board go flying, covers his face with his hands, drops to his knees and says this.

David Kestenbaum

The title of the video when it got posted was "Tony Hawk lands his last ever Ollie 540, aged 52."

I tear up every time I watch this-- in part, because we're basically the same age. He's one year older. Something happens when you're around 50. You can't do things you used to do because stuff hurts. I used to love to run, really love it. I can't anymore-- four knee surgeries. And walking around, I notice things I didn't used to. So many people with little hitches in their steps, working around some bit of pain in a knee, a hip.

I reached out to Tony Hawk back when the video came out. I wanted to talk about it. Apparently, he did not-- declined my interview request. So this is going to be a short story. I'll just say this.

A friend told me recently about a doctor who'd gone to work in a small town, ended up treating a lot of older people. And he noticed that the way it would go is that, first, one thing would go wrong. You'd fix it. Then a different thing would go wrong. You'd fix that. Then two things would go wrong at once and then another. Eventually, enough things would break that that's the end. He also said something else. That's the good version, he said. That's the one you want, the one where you get to keep going long enough that all the parts break.

Ira Glass

David Kestenbaum is still making radio stories at 54. Tony Hawk-- a year after that video-- broke his femur. But after surgeries, he's still skateboarding.

["ALL THE KING'S HORSES" BY SAM GELLAR]

Ira Glass

Our program was produced today by Phia Bennin and Lilly Sullivan and edited by Laura Starecheski. The people who put together our show today include Bim Adewunmi, Chris Benderev, Zoe Chace, Sean Cole, Michael Comite, Aviva DeKornfeld, Bethel Habte, Cassie Howley, Valerie Kipnis, Rudy Lee, Seth Lind, Tobin Low, Katherine Rae Mondo, Nadia Reiman, Safiyah Riddle, Ryan Rumery, Alissa Shipp, Christopher Swetala, Marisa Robertson-Textor, Matt Tierney, and Nancy Updike.

Our managing editor is Sarah Abdurrahman, and our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emanuele Berry. Sam Geller wrote the song that you're hearing right now for this episode.

Special thanks today to Sherif Mansour, Rushdi Aboualouf, Youmna El Sayed, Anan Quzmar, Raja Abdulrahim, Ahmed Maqadema, Carrie Law, Clayton Law, Howard Politzer, Randi Murray, Karen Glass, James Bennett II, Matthew Snyder, Michelle Cann, and everybody who wrote to us about Humpty Dumpty trauma, including Anne Mostue, Heidi Shin, Brandon Shiflet, Sky Wenhold, Kelly Gartside, Julie Davidson, and Isabella Gower.

Our website thisamericanlife.org, where you can stream over 800 episodes of our show for absolutely free. This American Life is delivered to local public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's cofounder, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, he has started saying my name so much-- like, at the end of every sentence he says. I told him, Torey people do not usually talk to each other this way. He said--

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life.