829: Two Ledgers
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The Serpent Queen is back and better than ever. Samantha Morton returns as Catherine de Medici, the new queen region to France. This season finds the court in chaos as her adversaries vie for control, and the rise of Protestantism threatens to tear the country apart. As France falls into political and religious turmoil, Catherine struggles to maintain her power, which makes her more determined than ever to keep it. Don't miss the season premiere of the Serpent Queen, July 12th, only on Stars and the Stars app. A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, disamericanlife.org. From WBEZChicago, it's "This American Life," I'm Eric Glass. I want to play something for you today, and before I do, I want to get it in front of something. The story is about Guantanamo. And I think lots of us here at Guantanamo at this point, and we think, "It's heavy, and it's complicated, and is it really still going on, and don't I really know everything I already need to know about Guantanamo?" Maybe you've heard our co-workers, Sarah Kane, and Gondana Chivas over at Serial. They've been rolling out season four of Serial, and it's all about Guantanamo. And the premise of the show is, enough time has passed that all these people who were there in its heyday could finally talk publicly about what really happened, what it was like to work there, what it was like to be imprisoned there. And you hear all these ordinary people who are thrown into this extraordinary situation where there were guards, and interrogators, and commanders, and detainees, and this invented offshore prison with its own weird, brand-new rules, and you finally get a very clear sense of what it was like in there. But there are two episodes that they made that are about stuff that's just happened down there in the last couple of years, and about stuff that is going to happen, that's going to be in the news. And honestly, when I heard these two episodes, I thought, and I know this sounds kind of grand, that really every American should hear these, that the kind of stories that when you hear them, it totally changes how you understand the news after that. And they're also just amazing stories. And so what we're going to do this week and next, we're going to do something we've never done, we're going to run these two episodes from serial, two full episodes on our show. Until right now, today, here is the first of those two episodes. Danny Chivas calls this season of serial, and she does this one. Majid Khan was 16 when his family moved to Baltimore from Pakistan. He went to Owings Mills High School, smoked weed, worked at his dad's gas station and thought about becoming a DJ under the stage name Bob Dacey.
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