This chapter explores the challenges faced by a team led by the speaker's dad in creating the Big Track toy truck, emphasizing the creative use of magnets to achieve precise movement. It showcases the toy's successful development, marketing strategies, and its impact on sales.
The things we break and the ones we can't fix.
- Prologue: Ira tells the stories of three things that broke–two of them in his own family. (8 minutes)
- Act One: A teenage whiz kid invents a new toy for Milton Bradley. Then the trouble starts. (28 minutes)
- Act Two: Reporter Dana Ballout sifts through a very long list—the list of journalists killed in the Israel-Hamas War—and comes back with five small fragments of the lives of the people on it. (10 minutes)
- Act Three: A skateboarding legend makes a final attempt at a high-flying trick. (6 minutes)
Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org