828: Minor Crimes Division

Ira Glass

Ladies and gentlemen, let's be honest about something. Most of us, we see wrongdoing out in the world, somebody breaking the law out in the open flagrantly, most of us do nothing. No matter how many movies we've seen with the big lesson is that it only takes one plucky, courageous person to make a stand, we've got stuff to do. People are expecting us. We don't go to the trouble, even if it would be so easy, if the crime that we're witnessing is minor and non-violent and sort of outrageous.

Ira Glass

Well, please meet Gersh Kuntzman, a guy in his 50s, gray beard, quick with a friendly smile. We're riding bikes around Lower Manhattan, looking for illegal license plates.

Ira Glass

A covered plate meaning it's in a little frame with some sort of plastic over the plate.

Ira Glass

Shaded with some special stuff so if you're in the car directly behind this car, it looks normal. But if you look down on the plate from above, the way traffic cameras do, it's black, unreadable. So those traffic cameras that catch you when you speed or run a red light, they do not deliver this person to justice with a ticket, or tolls, the cameras that read your plate and charge you $16 when you cross a bridge or tunnel into New York.

That doesn't work on this car. This person drives through for free every time. Taxpayers lose an estimated $194 million a year in lost fines and tolls because of unreadable plates. And most of the people Gersh catches doing this, evading the law this way, are cops.

Ira Glass

We're actually next to a courthouse in a detention center on a short block at Baxter and Bayard. And this car that Gersh has spotted, a gray Audi, is one of four that we see with obscured plates.

Ira Glass

If the owner of the gray Audi is an employee of the New York City Department of Corrections, they're supposed to live in New York. It's forbidden for them to live in Jersey. And so they seem to be evading traffic cameras. Maybe they're living illegally out of state.

And they've also got darkly tinted windows, which are illegal in New York, which means this is exactly the kind of scofflaw that Gersh has appointed himself to take action against. That's where Gersh is different from you and me.

Ira Glass

He looks again at the placard under the car's windshield.

Ira Glass

The four screws on the plate need an Allen wrench.

Ira Glass

He looks, but it turns out he doesn't have the right tool, so he leaves the license cover on the car. That's rare for Gersh, to not be able to fix the situation. Most times, what he finds is, drivers have painted over a letter or a number on the plate or bent the plate so it's unreadable. Or they've crammed leaves in the license plate holder. There are actually fake leaves with magnets you can buy online for this purpose.

Gersh removes the leaves, unbends the plates, repaints the letters and numbers with a paint marker, so in the end, the plate is perfectly legible again. He also shoots a video. Gersh always shoots a gleeful little video to post online.

Ira Glass

He pulls out his phone, selfie style, and hits record.

Ira Glass

He shows the viewers the plate cover and how it hides the plate from the cameras. He's done about 250 of these videos. Gersh's friends have tried to convince him to stop, scared some driver is going to freak out on him and really hurt him, so lately, he's agreed not to do this alone, though, sometimes, he says, he can't stop himself.

The way Gersh got into this, he's a journalist who writes about these sorts of issues. He runs a traffic and transit news site called Streetsblog. He says that when speed enforcement cameras went on 24/7 in New York-- this was back in August 2022-- and lots of people back then started defacing their plates to avoid the cameras.

He didn't get involved in the issue himself until a friend of his, a guy named Adam White, a personal injuries lawyer and a safe streets activist, decided to take action. Adam saw an SUV whose plate was obscured by a piece of plastic.

Ira Glass

To be precise, the guy was not a real NYPD cop. He was in a local neighborhood patrol.

Ira Glass

The first spin of the irony ball for Gersh was a kind of Dylanesque protest song that he wrote for his friend Adam.

(SUBJECT) JIMMY AND THE JAYWALKERS: (SINGING) The cops call it criminal mischief

Ira Glass

Then, maybe two days after Adam was arrested, Gersh started unvandalizing plates himself.

Ira Glass

That hasn't happened, not even close, though Gersh has seen some other responses by law enforcement to his videos. When he shoots one, he likes to send it to the agency that employs that particular car owner. So videos about scofflaw cops go to the NYPD, firefighters to the fire department, and so on.

And that's gotten occasional results. A former cop who was working with the DA's office resigned, and a guy that Gersh caught five times hiding his license plate with leaves resigned from the Department of Citywide Administrative Services.

Ira Glass

There are a handful of other people in New York who do this kind of license plate street justice, but Gersh is the most visible by far because of his videos. He's gotten the word out. At this point, Gersh's exploits have been written up in The New Yorker and The New York Times. He's been on TV.

Ira Glass

That said, the wrong that Gersh is trying to correct is so small in the grand scheme of things. Why is he the person who ended up leading the crusade for unobstructed license plates? He told me he's not this way with other petty crimes. He sees somebody jumping a turnstile, he doesn't care. But this got under his skin. A license plate seems like such basic accountability to him. But also--

Ira Glass

That's actually one of my favorite things about Gersh's videos. He looks like he's having so much fun.

Ira Glass

Well, today on our program, minor crimes and the people who appoint themselves to stop those minor crimes. I once read this great crime writer who said that what's interesting about a murder case is that a murder reveals so much about all the people near the crime. We see who they really are.

Today on our show, we demonstrate that this is not just true for a cold-blooded crime in the first degree, it's true for the tiniest human infractions, like kids stealing candy, or a man who twice violates the lowest level municipal offense that you can think of. We see so much about who they are. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, "Harriot versus Harriot." OK, so let's kick things off today with an entire system of justice set up to adjudicate the most minor sorts of crimes and misdemeanors. When Michael Harriot was a kid, growing up in South Carolina in the '80s, his mom set this up, a kind of courtroom in the house to try to teach her kids all kinds of life lessons. They called it Harriot Court, and when one of the kids did something wrong, the case would be heard, a judgment would be handed down.

This ran for many, many years with all kinds of cases. And Michael says that he and his siblings all credit Harriot Court with making them the people they are today, though, when I went to talk to them about it recently, he started to rethink that.

Michael Harriot

Harriot Court existed for a reason. We were bad. There were four of us, me and three sisters. Sean was the oldest.

Michael Harriot

I was the middle child, the nerd and the know-it-all, the sneakiest of the bunch. Then there were the two youngest girls, Comelita and Robin.

Michael Harriot

They were born months apart, and Robin passed away some years ago. But no one ever really thought of Comelita and Robin as individuals. They were one interconnected unit, like Tom and Jerry, Bonnie and Clyde, or Earth, Wind, and Fire. Here's Comelita.

Michael Harriot

And then there was my mom. My mom was not one of those "because I said so" kind of moms. She wanted us to know that we would be heard, and that logic and reason should govern the world and our household, so she created Harriot Court as a solution to our shenanigans. My mom was two people at once. She was part of a fundamentalist holiness religion, and she was this pro-Black, Black Panther-ish activist, who was almost obsessively adamant about our education.

She didn't really trust white people with her kids, so for a while, we were homeschooled. As a result, so much of what we learned came from TV, including Harriot Court proceedings. We hired each other as attorneys and used phrases like, "ladies and gentlemen of the jury," and "I beseech thee." We beseeched each other a lot.

One of the earliest cases was Comelita and Robin versus All This Candy. As a rule, we were not allowed to have candy growing up, except for once a week, usually on Fridays. That was tough for my sister Comelita, who was obsessed with candy.

Michael Harriot

Robin and Comelita put me on retainer as their defense attorney in exchange for them doing one of my household chores. We gathered in the den, which we call the middle room, where Chief Justice Dorothy Harriot presided. She would sit in the canary yellow La-Z-Boy, and we'd plead our case from the couch/witness box.

We swore each other in on a copy of our favorite book. Encyclopedia Brown was mine. And I came up with a defense that I still argue should have worked because, remember, we weren't allowed to eat candy.

I don't remember exactly, but mom would have cross-examined Comelita and Robin. She probably asked them if they understood why we couldn't have candy. It was because I had ADHD, which my mom believed got worse with sugar. After we'd made our arguments, our mom dismissed Harriot Court by saying, OK, make good choices. Then she'd deliberate before issuing a written opinion-- yes, a written opinion-- which would be taped to our doors.

Michael Harriot

The sentences were usually something like a week of extra chores or two weeks in solitary bedroom confinement, which happened so frequently, it eventually became known as being "on punishment." And because we didn't go to school and only had each other to play with, those in-room incarceration periods seemed unbearably long.

And that was the point. The punishment gave you time to learn from your mistakes. In the candy case, Mom came down hard on Comelita and Robin. They were on punishment for a long time, and they both never stole candy again.

For years, I've remembered the candy case as an example of the court working the best, but when I talked to Comelita about it recently, she made me look at things a little differently.

Michael Harriot

Comelita didn't stop misbehaving. I can just see her, sitting in her room, thinking over the lessons she learned from the candy case-- find a better hiding spot. So maybe it wasn't the perfect criminal justice system.

And the more I think about it, there seemed to be a lot of cases like this, ones that showed, in retrospect, that our beloved Harriot Court was kind of flawed, like the case of Sean versus the Big Lie, which started when my mom eventually allowed us to attend public school.

Michael Harriot

Sean's classmates raised money for her unnamed terminal illness and even signed a huge poster that was supposed to go in her casket. She kept this lie going for months, until my mom found out about it.

Michael Harriot

Lying was a big deal in our house. We weren't even allowed to say the word "lie." Sean called for a Harriot court trial, but really, it was just a delay tactic. She knew she didn't have a case. She was just trying to buy time, hoping my mom would cool off. It didn't work. The case went to trial, and my mom put her on punishment for weeks.

Sean never told another lie like that again, unless you count that time she lied about going to spring break in '94. But the thing I realized, when I talked to her, was she wasn't just acting out for no reason. This new school was a totally different environment. At home, she was the tough older sister. But at school, she was crying every day.

Michael Harriot

Looking back, I can't say that Harriot Court worked in this instance. Sean was lonely, and she needed attention, so she acted out by telling a lie. My mom punished her for the lie, but it didn't help her make friends. Like the real world criminal justice system, Harriot Court didn't address the root cause of the problem it was trying to fix.

Over the years, as we learned about the real world, Harriot Court became more complex. The "ass case" addressed the no profanity rule. We used the court to establish precedent, like "I was doing it first," which stated that you weren't breaking the no hitting rule, as long as you were moving your arm and yelling, "I was doing this first!" After all, it wasn't your fault if someone got clocked upside the head. You were doing it first.

We even used it to overturn previous verdicts, like the one that enforced our religion's ban against women wearing pants. In Harriot Court, we successfully convinced my mom to overturn the no pants rule, so Sean could play softball. And as with any justice system, over time, my sisters and I found loopholes that we could use to subvert our mom's strict rules.

We became a team of semi-crooked lawyers, the esteemed firm of Harriot, Harriot, Harriot, and another Harriot. Sometimes we faced each other in court, which brings us to the last case, which is about me, Michael versus Syrup. As the oldest, one of Sean's many responsibilities was operating the washing machine. She was the only sibling allowed to do it.

Michael Harriot

Sean always felt like I wasn't doing enough. And as the person whose sisters nicknamed him "the absent-minded professor," I was the only sibling who regularly forgot to give her my clothes. One day, she finally reached the tipping point and exacted her revenge.

I was furious. Sean's petty vengeance meant I wouldn't have my favorite shirt on one of the most important events on the elementary school calendar-- picture day.

And if you wonder why I couldn't just convince her to do another load, that wasn't even an option. Two loads? In one week? In the Harriot house? Does my mom look like Daddy Warbucks to you? So, because of my mom's one load per week rule, I had no choice but to find a loophole that could get me what I wanted.

Michael Harriot

I had snuck into her room with a bottle of Cane Patch syrup and poured it all over her clothes. Of course, she was upset, but this was all part of my plan. Now that we were both without clothes for Picture Day, there was only one place we could settle our differences-- Harriot Court. I argued that the solution was for my mom to grant a one-time special exemption from the one load rule. I won.

Michael Harriot

Sean had to pay for a crime that I committed, while I escaped without punishment. In the moment when I won, I felt great. I ran around the middle room, gloating about my superior legal skills.

But when I went to my bedroom afterwards, which was next to the laundry room, I could hear her sobbing to herself, as she tossed those clothes in the washing machine. I felt terrible. I hurt my sister just to get my way, and I'd done it in the worst way possible-- by weaponizing an institution that was created to give us justice. I was just another lawyer gaming the system. Perry Mason would never.

30 years later, my sisters and I have never really talked to our mom about Harriot Court. She was the person who wrote the rules and made the decisions, but I've never asked her if her system worked as she intended or why she started it in the first place. Turns out, she didn't just create it to keep us in check.

Michael Harriot

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, my mom, the honorable Dorothy Harriot.

Michael Harriot

My mother says, honestly, for her, Harriot Court was partly for her own enjoyment. She loved arguing with me, although she told me, I wasn't the young legal eagle I remembered, which stung. In my head, I thought I was one of the most persuasive attorneys.

Michael Harriot

Come to think of it, my sisters and I never really changed that much. Comelita is still the most rebellious. Sean is still the snitch who will tell Mom, you know that's whiskey in Mikey's cup.

And me, I'm still the same "let me explain why I'm correct" know-it-all, who my mom once called a right supremacist. But the court did one thing. It turned me and my sisters into a team. It was us versus the judge, us trying to outthink Mom.

Michael Harriot

Talking to her, I realized that Harriot Court was not some genius institution that fit perfectly into my mom's master plan. Like most parents, she was just making it up as she went along. But to us, my mom tried this amazingly ambitious thing. Because of it, we still have this almost unreasonable faith in logic and justice. And whenever we talk, our conversations end the exact same way my mom ended each session of Harriot Court-- OK, make good choices.

Ira Glass

Michael Harriot, he's a writer for The Grio. His latest book is Black AF History, The Un-Whitewashed Story of America. His story was produced by Emmanuel Dzotsi. Coming up, a thief steals something very rare to build a spaceship. 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, Minor Crimes Division, stories of tiny acts of wrongdoing, what they say about the people who commit them and about the people who've devoted themselves to catching and punishing these acts.

We've arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, "Alternate Side." Well, sometimes, there's a disagreement over whether a tiny act of wrongdoing is, in fact, an act of wrongdoing at all. One of our producers, Aviva DeKornfeld, has such a tale.

Aviva DeKornfeld

Caveh Zahedi had just moved to San Francisco. He hadn't even really moved there yet. He'd just driven there with a car full of stuff and crashed at a friend's house while he looked for an apartment. He didn't have a permit to park in his friend's neighborhood, which meant he had to move his car every two hours.

Aviva DeKornfeld

He does this all day, every day. It's extremely annoying, but he's diligent about it. And then one day, he comes out to find a parking ticket tucked under his windshield wiper.

Aviva DeKornfeld

It was an expensive ticket, around $300. He decides to contest it.

Aviva DeKornfeld

Caveh was upset. He turned to leave.

Aviva DeKornfeld

This is the kind of person Caveh is. When he sees something in the world that seems wrong or ill-conceived or unfair, it's very hard for him not to point it out. This is either a strength or a personality defect. He sees it as both.

Caveh majored in philosophy-- still reads it sometimes-- which is why, on his way out of the courtroom, he stopped, turned back to the judge, and-- I know how this sounds-- said this, do you know the distinction between legalism and essentialism in Chinese philosophy? No surprise, the judge said, no, she didn't.

Aviva DeKornfeld

This all happened years ago. It turns out the fine Caveh had to pay was smaller than he remembers, and the number of feet for parking was larger, but the spirit of the story remains the same. Anyway, Caveh finally gets an apartment of his own and a parking permit for his car, so he doesn't have to move it every two hours anymore. But it's still hard to find a place to park.

Aviva DeKornfeld

Seriously, all across the world, on any given day, how many people actually take the time to listen to what a complete stranger has to say, consider it, change their mind, and then admit to it? Hardly ever. And the fact that this doesn't happen more often, that's a crime, and not a minor one.

Ira Glass

Aviva DeKornfeld. Caveh Zahedi told this story on his podcast, 365 Stories I Want to Tell You Before We Both Die.

Ira Glass

Act Three, "Jewel Intentions." So sometimes small crimes can be hard to solve because they are so small. This next story is about a scheme that had been going on for a very long time, right under everybody's noses. It was brazen, but nobody could figure out who was behind it. Micaela Blei told the story of what happened on stage at The Moth.

Micaela Blei

In the elementary school where I teach, there are LEGOs that are very valuable and LEGOs no one gives a shit about.

[LAUGHTER]

The ones you don't really care about are the ones there are thousands of-- the gray two by fours, the black two by fours, anything that's red. For some reason, all we have are red LEGOs. And the ones that are valuable are the things that you can't really find.

So there's a second grade, a third grade, and a fourth grade. Everyone's got bins. And in these bins, the things you very rarely see are anything lime green. I think once upon a time, we had a set that was lime green. Anything that has a picture on it, it's kind of magical. And then these jewels. There are these little, plastic, clear-colored LEGOs, and they really look valuable. And I mean, I'm kind of psyched about them, too.

[LAUGHTER]

And every class has, especially my class, has what I like to call the "black hole boys." They are the boys who sit anytime there's choice time and put together LEGOs and discuss theories of outer space and infinity. And they build spaceships, and they're like, well, OK, but could there be a black hole that would be strong enough to pull other black holes in? And they all think about that for a while. And they're my boys. I like them. I'm really into them.

And most of playing LEGOs in anywhere in my school is really mostly just pawing through, looking for the valuable ones. I mean, of course, you could build with them, but that's not the fun part. The fun part is, I found this orange jewel, or whatever. So that's always a big deal, and all the bins are outside, underneath the cubbies. So every class has their bins near their class's cubbies.

I teach third grade. The second graders come to me one day, and they say, we need your help. We think someone's been stealing our jewels. Now, they have to dismantle all their LEGOs at the end of every week so that it's really fair, so you have a chance to paw through and find the jewels anew every Monday. And they have been noticing that over the course of several weeks, they find fewer and fewer jewels, and they suspect my class.

And I say, you know what? That's not really fair. I'm sure that it is not my guys who are doing that. And they say, well, we think you should look through their bins, at their spaceships, and find out if they have got our jewels.

And I said, you know what? That's not what we're going to do. We're going to trust them. We're going to ask them, did you take those jewels? And if they say no, we're going to believe them. Because secretly, I'm thinking, A, there's no way my boys did it, and B, I don't really want to get in the middle of that if that's what's going on.

So we asked my boys. And the sort of ringleader, the head of the black hole boys, Edward is this very smart, very sour kid whose spaceships are amazing. I mean, they look like they could really go. And he says, no, we have not. Have you tried the fourth grade? Because those guys think they're so big.

And so me and these three little second graders go to the fourth grade. And we say to some of the fourth graders who are playing with LEGOs, Did you guys take these jewels? And the fourth graders say no, and then later, privately, they say, Are you sure the second graders are telling the truth? Because they think they're so cute.

[LAUGHTER]

There's a culture of fear developing across all three grades. No one trusts each other. Everyone's sort of looking at each other's things that they're building. And the teachers are picking up on it, too. I'm sort of watching everyone's spaceships, being like, I don't remember that orange one and that green one and the blue one in the second grade of 2A. I don't know if that's right.

And I'm sort of getting there, too, but we're all kind of watching each other. And then I am getting homework. Edward does his homework and does more homework than he needs to, but he always forgets to hand it in. And so I just randomly-- I go into his cubby just to grab the math homework that I know is in there. Under the math homework is a jewel encrusted spaceship.

[LAUGHTER]

Dazzling. The wings have wings, and those wings have other things. And there's a glass window that I have literally never seen before. In the six years that I've been teaching there, I have never seen this glass window. It's beautiful, but I'm stuck with a dilemma. What do I do with this? If I accuse him, then number one, the second graders are kind of intense, and I'm a little worried about what they would do.

Number two, I already told the second graders it couldn't have possibly been my boys. This is my reputation on the line as well. I don't want it to have been him. I could, it occurs to me, just steal it back. I could just take it. Because if he tried to say someone stole my jewel encrusted spaceship, that would be on him. That would be his-- that's a dilemma he would have.

But then I realized that that could possibly be framing another kid, and I do have-- I have my line I will not cross. So I'm not going to frame a kid. So instead, I wait for a Friday, when we should be taking apart our things. And he has not been taking apart this spaceship.

And I wait till Friday. I get him alone, and I say to him really casually, so don't forget to take apart your spaceship. And he looks at me, and he knows I know. And he says something really ballsy. He goes, I did. I already did.

[LAUGHTER]

I sit down with him. I open the cubby. I show him the spaceship. And I say, this is an amazing spaceship. You did a really great job. But you got to let it go. And we cut a deal. And over the course of several weeks, we dismantle the spaceship very, very slowly. I can't just smash it. I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to just take the whole thing apart.

And I start secretly putting those jewels back in other people's cubbies for him, so that he can still be the head of the black hole boys and not lose that reputation that he has that he loves, and so that I don't have to go back on my word that my boys didn't do anything. I was an accessory to a third grade crime. There's no way around that. That's it. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

Ira Glass

Micaela Blei lives in Portland, Maine.

Ira Glass

Act Four, "Occam's Toilet." OK, so earlier in our show, we had a mom who invented an entire courtroom to teach her kids some lessons and some values. In this act, we have parents doing something so much simpler. They're simply trying to level with their kids and reason with them, together. And in this case, they recorded what happened. We've actually changed everybody's names at the kids' request. Bethel Habte tells the story.

Bethel Habte

Todd and Amy live in a house in New Jersey. It's an old house. And one day, they noticed they've got a plumbing problem. There's liquid pooling in this hole in their basement floor around a sewage pipe. They call a plumber, who snakes the drain and charges them $500. And then, a few weeks later, the liquid reappears.

A second plumber comes in. He can't find any other problems with their sewage system. His professional opinion is that there isn't anything wrong with their sewage system. He thinks what's going on is much simpler. The liquid in the hole is actually pee. Someone in their house is peeing in the hole.

What the plumber suggested seemed entirely possible. Amy and Todd have three boys, eight-year-old twins, Ryan and Lawrence, and their younger brother, Hugh. He's six. And so they gather the kids together to find out who peed in the hole. Amy, their mom, records a video of the meeting on her phone.

Bethel Habte

That's Ryan, twin number one. They're all sitting on a navy blue sectional. Todd keeps calmly laying out the facts. Yes, they think there's pee on the basement floor.

Bethel Habte

The one who just said "not me," that's Hugh, the little one. Lawrence, twin number two, hasn't said anything yet. He's quiet, with a blank expression on his face. Then Ryan asks a question.

Bethel Habte

He wants to know if it's possible that the dog did it.

Bethel Habte

That "I promise" there, that's Lawrence, the quiet twin. He breaks his silence. So now, all three children have denied peeing in the hole. Their dad tries to explain to the kids, someone peeing in the hole is actually the best possible scenario.

Bethel Habte

It was me, Ryan says. But then, it turns out, he was just trying to get the interrogation over with.

Bethel Habte

They ask every child again, starting with twin number one, Ryan.

Bethel Habte

Next, Hugh, the youngest. He's been fidgeting with a rainbow bookmark, fanning himself with it.

Bethel Habte

Finally, Lawrence, twin number two. He answers the question with the directness of a politician caught up in a scandal.

Bethel Habte

The twins, Ryan and Lawrence, are in, but Hugh, the little one, lets out a nervous giggle.

Bethel Habte

Hugh shoots his hand in the air. His eyes are wide, and he's smiling.

Bethel Habte

Listeners, there is a bathroom in the basement. There are 25 steps that separate the bathroom from the play area, maybe a few more if your legs are short.

Bethel Habte

Case closed. Court adjourned. Hugh's mom told me the point of this whole thing was, yes, to solve the crime, but also to bring these kids into the adult world for just a moment, see the situation the way they do. But she knows it was probably too much to ask. Kids live in their own world. It's a world without plumbers who charge $500. It's a world where a hole in the ground looks like a perfectly good place to pee.

Ira Glass

Bethel Habte is an editor at our show.

Ira Glass

Well, today's program was produced by Aviva DeKornfeld. The people who put together today's show include Bim Adewunmi, Phia Benin, Jendayi Bonds, Zoe Chace, Sean Cole, Michael Comite, Chana Joffe-Walt, Rudy Lee, Katherine Rae Mondo, Nadia Reiman, Safiyah Riddle, Ryan Rumery, Frances Swanson, Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney, Julie Whitaker, and Diane Wu. Our managing editor is Sarah Abdurrahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emanuele Berry.

Special thanks today to Kate Emmerich, Penelope SS Wong, Jaki Reis, Noah Lanard, Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi, Jameka Brown, and Cathleen Conte. Our website, thisamericanlife.org, where you can stream our archive of over 800 episodes for absolutely free. Also, there's videos. There's lists of favorite shows if you're looking for something to listen to. Lots of other stuff there. Anyway, thisamericanlife.org.

This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's confounder, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, he went on trial this week for stealing 15 pairs of shoes. His defense, I got to say, was not the strongest.

Ira Glass

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

["CRIMINAL MISCHIEF (FOR ADAM WHITE)" BY JIMMY AND THE JAYWALKERS]