Mind Games

心灵游戏

This American Life

2025-09-29

1 小时 0 分钟
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Stories of people who try simple mind games on others, and then find themselves way in over their heads. Visit thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners to sign up for our premium subscription. Prologue: Host Ira Glass interviews Lori Gottlieb about the time she sent a letter to a writer in a magazine, a letter packed with white lies. (5 minutes)Act One: Lori Gottlieb's story continues. One complication led to another, and before long, the writer seemed to be lying to her. Or maybe he wasn't. It was hard to tell. Years later, she still isn't sure what happened. (8 minutes)Act Two: A group called Improv Everywhere decides that an unknown band, Ghosts of Pasha, playing their first ever tour in New York, ought to think they're a smash hit. So they study the band's music and then crowd the performance, pretending to be hard-core fans. Improv Everywhere just wants to make the band happy—to give them the best day of their lives. But the band doesn't see it that way. Nor does another subject of one of Improv Everywhere's "missions." (31 minutes)Act Three: Scott Carrier and his family live in the same Salt Lake City neighborhood as Elizabeth Smart, the fourteen-year-old whose 2002 kidnapping made international news. Though Smart's picture was plastered everywhere throughout Salt Lake City and thousands of volunteers searched for her, her captors brazenly brought her back to the very neighborhood from which she'd been taken. They walked freely through the streets with her in broad daylight, yet no one recognized her. Scott talks with his neighbors and his son Milo—who had attended grade school with Smart—about what was going through their minds that prevented them from seeing what was right there in plain sight. (12 minutes)Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org This American Life privacy policy. Learn more about sponsor message choices.
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  • The first thing you need to know about Lori is that normally she's not the kind of girl who does this sort of thing at all.

  • She doesn't write to strangers.

  • She doesn't do fan mail.

  • But she was looking at,

  • you know the page in certain magazines where they have the little pictures of the people who write for the magazine?

  • She was looking at that.

  • And she saw the photo of this writer who she liked.

  • The picture was blurry, but he had this intense look in his eye.

  • And you could tell he was smart and cute, both at the same time.

  • But I saw this picture and I was like, That guy's my soulmate.

  • I know that's completely insane,

  • but I knew that I could not not contact him because I would always regret it if I didn't.

  • So I wrote this letter to the magazine, you know,

  • to him, care of the magazine, and I made up a story.

  • I said, I think that, you know, I know this is going to sound really weird,

  • but I saw your picture on the contributors page and you look exactly like this guy that I met in the airport years ago.

  • This is, this is a complete lie.

  • Right.

  • So I said, you know, we,

  • I was changing planes and you were going into one gate and I was going into another and we struck up this conversation and you were talking about how you wanted to become a writer.