This American Life Journal

I chose to read and listen to the Valentine's Day 2013 This American Life. I noticed that the questions that the interviewer asked that worked the best were open-ended questions. And they were questions that the interviewee was interested in, which meant that the interviewer, Ira Glass, did a lot of research on his subjects before interviewing them. In the first interview, he starts out by having David Kestenbaum, the interviewee, do math to figure out the likelyhood of him finding a girlfriend in Boston where he lives. I think this was a really smart thing to do. It got him more comfortable with Mr. Glass because they were doing math, which as a physicist, he has to enjoy somewhat, and they were doing math to figure out what the likelihood of him finding a girlfriend in Boston was. He was obviously interested in finding out the answer because the whole series of interviews were about love and relationships and he wouldn't of done the interview if he hadn't wanted to. The questions he asked were really just to move the subject along or to get them on track. Most of them seemed eager to talk, so he really just had to prod them with a "what happened?" or ask them to clarify something every once in a while. In general, I think that love and relationships are a topic that mostly people can talk a lot about without ever really going into specifics. Mr. Glass asked just the right questions to get her interviewees to tell their personal stories.