The podcast for This American Life allows listeners to download the the shows and listen to them at their discretion. The This American Life team contracts with a site called audible.com to distribute the shows to listeners who want to hear them. Despite calling their offering a podcast, however, it is not, at least in the normal sense of the word. A podcast refers to an online setup with an RSS feed that is regularily updated, can be subscribed to, and provides links to sound or video files that can be downloaded and watched by the subscriber. Audible.com and This American Life do not offer that. Instead, the show’s team allows audible.com to receive money for allowing listeners to download the sound files to the computer from audible.com’s web site. The only RSS file involved is one specific to the user which allows that user access to the shows they are interested in. Even odder than charging for a supposed podcast, the sound files downloaded are tied to the specific user who downloads them. Unlike the vast majority of podcasts, which allow the files to be distributed and redistributed as the end user wishes, without placing limitations on such, the This...