“It’s not like I’mhanging around the Back of the Yards or something. I work 70 hours aweek. Sometimes it feels like I’d bedoing the same program if I lived on the space shuttle.”

4 CHICAGO READER | FEBRUARY 3, 2006 | SECTION ONE

Hot Type

By Michael Miner

I t was common knowledge thatIra Glass was negotiating withShowtime to do a TV version

of This American Life. What hisfans didn’t get was that Glasswould do it in New York. Theannouncements January 20 byShowtime and the next day byWBEZ, which co-owns the showwith Glass, omitted this detail,and even general manager ToreyMalatia’s January 20 memo to theWBEZ staff fuzzed the fact. It saidthe This American Life staff wouldwork on the TV show in New Yorkfor the next several months, theradio show would continue, andnext winter “This American Life isplanned to be relocated on thefourth floor” of WBEZ’s rehabbedstudios. That space will sit therewaiting for Glass the way bed-rooms at home sit empty waitingfor kids who have moved out.

News of the Glass-Showtimedeal broke on a Friday, to theannoyance of Sun-Times TV-radiocolumnist Robert Feder, whowasn’t scheduled to write againuntil Wednesday. But in the inter-im, he says, “I ran into somebodywho told me, ‘Did you know Ira’smoving to New York?’ And I wasflabbergasted. I was floored.” Noteven the long interview withGlass the Tribune posted onlineJanuary 23 reported that. Feder’scoverage brought up the rear onJanuary 25, but he had the scoop.

Mourners read Feder andgathered at gapersblock.com.“What a bunch of crap! LikeNew York needs it!” somebodyprotested. “I should kick Ira’s assI know where he lives.”

An elegiac discussion of ThisAmerican Life classics followed,peppered with outbursts. “NYC?It is such a different place,” some-one moaned. “It is almost impos-

exposed as an imposter. “We were not scheming to keep

it a secret,” the real one told me.Glass said the focus, when theannouncements were prepared,was on stressing that the radioshow would continue. “Therewould be consequences if our sta-tions didn’t understand that,” hesaid. “We have 500 member sta-tions carrying our show, and wedidn’t want them either to be tak-ing us off the air or moving us tobad times because they thought

we were going off the air.” Where This American Life

would originate was less impor-tant—though not inconsequen-tial. “I would just as soon down-play the fact we’re not in Chicago,”Glass conceded, “because I think,psychologically, if you know theshow is coming from Chicago itgives you a nice feeling—and notjust if you’re from Chicago. Peoplearound the country tell me that’spart of the show’s charm. It’s notcoming from New York, Los

Going CoastalCan you take This American Life out of the midwest and keep the midwest in This American Life?

sible that it will not change thefeel of the show.” Somebody elsereminisced about Friday after-noons spent shopping at MarshallField’s, followed by a sandwich atthe Berghoff and a mai tai atTrader Vic’s. “I’d be home in timefor the friday night broadcast ofTAL. . . . O, what a litany of loss.”

Even “Ira” was heard from.“Let me just say, we love thistown and we pack our bags withtears in our eyes and lumps inour throats.” But “Ira” was soon

hottype@chicagoreader.comwww.chicagoreader.com/hottype

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Comments, questions? Take it up with Cecil on the Straight Dope Message Board, www.straightdope.com, or write him at the Chicago Reader, 11 E. Illinois, Chicago 60611. Cecil’s most recent compendium of knowledge, Triumph of the Straight Dope, is available at bookstores everywhere.

The Straight Dope®by Cecil Adams

E xcuse me—did I hear somebodysay Monty Hall?

On first encounter this question,which has been showing up all

over the Net, seems inane because theanswer seems so obvious. However, as withthe infamous Monty Hall-three-doors-and-one-prize-problem, the obvious answer iswrong, and you, Berj, are right—the planetakes off normally, with no need to specifyfrictionless wheels or any other such fool-ishness. You’re also right that the questionis often worded badly, leading to confusion,arguments, etc. In short, we’ve got a topicscreaming for the Straight Dope.

First the obvious-but-wrong answer. Theunwary tend to reason by analogy to a caron a conveyor belt—if the conveyor movesbackward at the same rate that the car’swheels rotate forward, the net result is thatthe car remains stationary. An aircraft inthe same situation, they figure, would stayplanted on the ground, since there’d be noair rushing over the wings to give it lift. Butof course cars and planes don’t work thesame way. A car’s wheels are its means ofpropulsion—they push the road backward(relatively speaking), and the car movesforward. In contrast, a plane’s wheelsaren’t motorized; their purpose is to reducefriction during takeoff (and increase it, bybraking, when landing). What gets a planemoving are its propellers or jet turbines,which shove the air backward and therebyimpel the plane forward. What the

Please, please, please, settle this question. The discussion has been going onfor ages, and anytime someone mentions the words “airplane” or “conveyorbelt” everyone starts right back up. Here’s the original problem essentially as itwas posed to us: “A plane is standing on a runway that can move (some sort ofband conveyer). The plane moves in one direction, while the conveyer movesin the opposite direction. This conveyer has a control system that tracks theplane speed and tunes the speed of the conveyer to be exactly the same (but inthe opposite direction). Can the plane take off?”

There are some difficulties with the wording of the problem, specificallyregarding how we define speed, but the spirit of the situation is clear. Thesolution is also clear to me (and many others), but a staunch group ofunbelievers won’t accept it. My conclusion is that the plane does take off.Planes, whether jet or propeller, work by pulling themselves through the air.The rotation of their tires results from this forward movement, and has nobearing on the behavior of a plane during takeoff. I claim the only differencebetween a regular plane and one on a conveyor belt is that the conveyor beltplane’s wheels will spin twice as fast during takeoff. Please, Cecil, show us thatit’s not only theoretically possible (with frictionless wheels) but it’s actuallypossible too. —Berj A. Doudian, via e-mail

SLU

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wheels, conveyor belt, etc, are up to islargely irrelevant. Let me repeat: Once the pilot fires up the engines, the planemoves forward at pretty much the usual speed relative to the ground—and more importantly to the air—regardless of how fast the conveyor belt is moving backward. This generates lift on the wings, and the plane takes off. All the conveyor belt does is, as you correctly conclude, make the plane’swheels spin madly.

A thought experiment commonly cited in discussions of this question is to imagine you’re standing on a health-club treadmill in rollerblades whileholding a rope attached to the wall in frontof you. The treadmill starts; simultaneouslyyou begin to haul in the rope. Althoughyou’ll have to overcome some initial frictiontugging you backward, in short order you’llbe able to pull yourself forward easily.

As you point out, one problem here is the wording of the question. Your versionstraightforwardly states that the conveyormoves backward at the same rate that theplane moves forward. If the plane’s forwardspeed is 100 miles per hour, the conveyorrolls 100 MPH backward, and the wheelsrotate at 200 MPH. Assuming you’ve gotIndy-car-quality tires and wheel bearings,no problem. However, some versions putmatters this way: “The conveyer belt is

designed to exactly match the speed of the wheels at any given time, moving in the opposite direction of rotation.” This language leads to a paradox: If the planemoves forward at 5 MPH, then its wheelswill do likewise, and the treadmill will go 5 MPH backward. But if the treadmill isgoing 5 MPH backward, then the wheels are really turning 10 MPH forward. But ifthe wheels are going 10 MPH forward . . .Soon the foolish have persuaded them-selves that the treadmill must operate at infinite speed. Nonsense. The questionthus stated asks the impossible—simplyput, that A = A + 5—and so cannot beframed in this way. Everything clear now? Maybe not. But believe this: theplane takes off.

Angeles, Washington. It comesfrom a place that most broadcast-ing isn’t done from.

“I cannot begin to explain this,but there’s something about thesound of the show, a feeling of‘Hey, there’s all these interestingpeople out there that we don’t usu-ally hear from.’. . . I felt that wayabout the Onion—well, of course itcomes out of the midwest.”

But that’s that. “In practice,”Glass said, “we are so very muchon our own path in terms ofstory selection that what deter-mines what gets on the show hasvery little to do with geographyand way more to do with whatwe’re interested in and who’spitching us. For the first four orfive years of our show, SarahVowell lived in Uptown. Thenshe moved to New York, and herstories sound basically the same.

“But we’re still a production ofWBEZ, so the word Chicago willbe all over the show. So my hope ispeople who hear about the newswon’t care that much—and lots ofpeople won’t be hearing about it.”Besides, he said, “It’s not like I’mhanging around the Back of theYards or something. I work 70hours a week. Sometimes it feelslike I’d be doing the same programif I lived on the space shuttle.”

Showtime and Killer Films,which will shoot the TV show, areboth in New York. “When we weredoing the pilot,” Glass told me, “Iinsisted for a while that everyonecome here [Chicago], the editorsespecially. It turned out to be veryexpensive, and we wouldn’t beable to get some of the people wewanted.” That spiked any idea hehad of fighting for Chicago.“When the series planning startedI didn’t even bother to bring it up.”

WBEZ already has a smallworking space—a converted laun-dromat in Brooklyn Heights—shared by three This AmericanLife producers. Now the station

will have to find something bigger.“I don’t think it’ll hurt for us tohave a presence in New York,” saysMalatia. “It’ll be modest by anymeasure, but a place where we canhang our hat and people can seeus if they need to. The staff is verymuch our staff. Ira’s optimisticthat we can get some radio donewhile the TV is being done.”

Malatia’s not so sure. He thinksGlass might find out that a betteridea is to do all six shows he owesShowtime this year before switch-ing back to radio. At any rate, if agun’s pointed at Glass’s head,Glass is the one holding it. A cou-ple of years ago, after negotiationswith Showtime got under way, thecontract between This AmericanLife and its distributor, PublicRadio International, was rewrittento let Glass deliver only 20 newshows a year instead of 26 if hefound himself trying to create aTV pilot at the same time. Lastyear he created the pilot and didthe full 26 shows anyway. Now,says Malatia, PRI has agreed to letGlass go 12 months without creat-ing any new radio shows at all.“The pressure’s not coming fromsome contractual agreement,” saysMalatia, “but from Ira’s desire tokeep a radio presence going.” And,it seems, from his need never tocatch himself working less than 70hours a week. (He and a collabora-tor are also doing a screenplay forWarner Brothers.)

The radio show’s a “dream situ-ation,” Glass told me. “We’re fullyfunded forever if we want to be.The funding is an engine thatdrives itself. We have this massiveaudience—1.6 million people aweek—and we have complete edi-torial control. There’s seven of us,and when we decide we wantsomething on the radio we put iton the radio.” His TV audience—and this is something Glass didn’tat first understand about cable—continued on page 6

Hot Type

will be a lot smaller than what he’sused to. “A show on Showtime willbe seen by half a million to a mil-lion people,” he said. If he becomesfamous on TV it’ll be because hewas already famous on radio.

Showtime can pull the plug afterthe first six shows, and if that hap-pens Malatia will want ThisAmerican Life back in Chicago. Butthe contract is for 30 shows overfour years. Money from Showtimewill cover WBEZ’s expenses in NewYork and pay the station about$100,000 a year on top of that—serious compensation for no longerbeing able to brag that ThisAmerican Life is being createddown the hall. “For anyone who’s areporter or editor,” Glass said, “NewYork is where the people are in theway that the movie business is inLos Angeles and chicken produc-tion is in North Carolina. I know somany people in New York. So manywriters on our show and so manyeditor friends.”

Is this a day he knew wouldcome? “It doesn’t feel inevitableat all,” Glass said, “but I’m goingto move there and be in a com-munity immediately.”

News BitesaWe were at war, the Senatewas torn in two over who SamuelAlito was and what he believed—but the American media foundmassive resources to throw at astory where the truth was at stake.

Shame on you, said OprahWinfrey to James Frey on liveTV. The next morning front-pageheadlines in the Sun-Timesshouted: “Oprah: ‘I Feel Duped.’”“Roeper: It Was One of HerFinest Hours.” Even so, the Sun-Times was waxed by the Tribune.

Tribune banner headline:“Oprah shreds Frey in a millionpieces.” Page two: John Kass onOprah. Editorial page: “Don’tmess with Oprah.” Back page ofsection one: nothing but Oprah,including columns by Internetcritic Steve Johnson and mediacolumnist Phil Rosenthal, whonormally don’t show up in sec-tion one. Front page of Metro:Mary Schmich on Oprah. Online:Eric Zorn and Charles Madigan.That’s six Tribune columnists.Why? Because Frey had jerkedOprah around, she looked bad,and now she wasn’t happy.

Back in the 60s LyndonJohnson said he knew he’d lostthe Vietnam war when he lostWalter Cronkite. There aren’tmany guests of the stature ofJames Frey for Oprah to pick on,but maybe she could lower hersights a little and invite somebodylike Donald Rumsfeld.

aAt the Reader we knew that a deal between Ira Glass andShowtime would mean a move to New York because his wife,Anaheed Alani, works as an edi-tor here. She'll continue editing a bit for us from there, but we’resorry to see her go. v

continued from page 5

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