This American Life

If you've never listened to This American Life, there are a lot of amazing and powerful stories that you're missing out on. You can listen to all of their past episodes for free on the website, or put them on your ipod. What I like so much about this program is that I feel like I am getting something important and interesting out of it every time I listen. Some stories teach about important topics (like detailed explanations of what exactly caused the financial crisis), and others spark a lot of emotion from hearing about someone's story. Although I haven't had the chance to listen to all of the series (some of the recordings go all the way back to 1995), there are a few that I have heard that stick out vividly as the most compelling:

414: Right to Remain Silent

Stories about people who have the right to remain silent... but choose not to exercise that right—including police officer Adrian Schoolcraft, who secretly recorded his supervisors telling officers to manipulate crime statistics and make illegal arrests.

409: Held Hostage

A kidnapping victim in Colombia spends his nights listening to a radio station that plays messages from the families of the kidnapped. That and other stories of people held captive—by criminals, by paperwork, and in one man's case, his own body—and the ways they try to cope. 

423: The Invention of Money

Five reporters stumbled on what seems like a basic question: What is money? The unsettling answer they found: Money is fiction. 

394: Bait and Switch

Stories about people who take the bait, and those who place it. Including the story of man who tries to investigate a neighborhood crime and ends up in jail himself. And the story of the pitfalls of luring customers to a make-believe pizza delivery place. 

I Cannot Remember Learning About This American History in School...

When I think about many of the atrocities that have occurred throughout history - the Holocaust, for example - I think the ones that have happened in the U.S. for some reason tend to be overlooked.

Case in point: the Japanese internment during WWII. I hardly remember a mention of this fact during U.S. History. Ed Wakayama, one of the people born in these internment camps, has been a very close friend of my family since I was a kid; here is his story.

And something I really do not remember ever being mentioned during history class, is how minority, low income, and other people declared "unfit to breed" were forcefully sterilized in our own country, not all that long ago. As in, some of these people are my parents' age. BBC News has a very interesting article on this topic of eugenics in the U.S. currently.

Take a look at this list from the BBC article of people that the North Carolina Eugenics Board was petitioned to sterilize in 1950 - only a few years before my parents were born!

• An 18-year-old girl, separated from her husband who had "manifested anti-social behaviour"
• A black 25-year-old rape victim who showed "abnormal sexual tendencies"
• A 16-year-old girl who had earlier been committed to a state institution for "sexual delinquency" and whose aunt "signed consent"
• A white married mother of three, whose family had been "finally dependent for many years" and has "a history of inter-marriage with Indian and Negro"
• A 15-year girl deemed "feebleminded"; parents reportedly consented

These facts just make me very sad to think about the history of injustice in my own country.  It makes me really upset to think about what the Chinese government has done to the Tibetan culture and people, or what the Nazis did to the Jews, Gypsies, and others, but we also have our own history to remember. We have a lot of work to do in our own country to try and make up for these injustices.

Minty!

So I just got back into something I used to use which is very exciting.

If you have never tried Mint.com, you really must. It's an amazing way to organize your financial life, and it's free! Basically, you sign up and very easily and quickly add information so that Mint can aggregate all of your banking, investment, and loan information into one place. It's the best and most effective way I have found of making a budget and sticking to it.

Mint provides you with trend information based on your monthly spending, income, etc. There is also an associated [free] iPhone app, so you can check your budget and expenses on the go. I've also set it up to send me e-mails to remind me when I have a credit card payment due or if an account goes below a certain balance.

So I will say that it's not perfect. For a while, my primary bank [USAA] was not functioning properly on the Mint website, and therefore it became basically unusable to me. That's the main reason why I just got back to using it again. I randomly decided to check my luck, and it's been working! The thing that really made me realize how valuable Mint is for me is that my budget has definitely been off track ever since I stopped using it. I have been creating my own financial/budget list using a spreadsheet, but Mint is so much better.