Empathy Machines

<p><b>The first book-length treatment of <i>This American Life,</i> <i>Empathy Machines </i>contextualizes the influential show within the history of radio, looking back to radio’s golden era and the para-social connections that it encouraged, as well as the formation of NPR in the 1960s and the “Great Society Liberalism” that guided its programming and approach to the audience. </b><br><i>Empathy Machines </i>identifies <i>This American Life</i> as a central cultural institution in the evolution of empathy as a “liberal feeling” central to podcast storytelling and the neoliberal era in which it developed. <i>This American Life</i> revitalized the public radio traditions of investigative journalism and sonically inventive audio production. An early adopter of podcasting as a time-shifted delivery mechanism for its broadcast content, the program also ushered in appointment listening, a key innovation and disruption in the emerging chaotic attention economy of the 21st century. <i>Empathy Machines</i> centers <i>This American Life</i> as a model for prioritizing empathy as an affective and ideological<br> strategy for feeling liberal as liberal democracy’s precarious balance of opposites began to fracture into hypercapitalism, atavistic ethnonationalism, and new identity politics.</p>