Speaking of being so terribly destitute and actually considering those Spam recipes at the top of our Gmail: Like its banks, America's marketers are facing hardships they've not encountered for decades.

No, they're not finally having a collective attack of conscience about their job being nothing more than a parlor trick to relieve hardworking people of their money. What the admen and women are struggling with is this: How does one go about selling bullshit to a public tightening its purse strings after being slapped awake by financial ruin?

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Before we start this, for the record, we like Malcolm Gladwell. His books and articles are always interesting. When he met him at the Moth Gala last year, he recommended a book to us and pointing out a bug scampering on the floor, which for the sake of symbolism, might as well have been a moth.

At the event, Gladwell told a story about his mischievous days at the Washington Post, which was used on a recent episode of This American Life. While he was at the Post, as Gladwell puts it, he had a “Jayson Blair moment,” when he realized mistakes he put in the paper could have a major impact on the world. He went on to goad the National AIDS Conference to hold their annual meeting in Sydney, Australia because he hadn’t been there before.

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Last year, This American Life, the radio show became This American Life, the premium cable show.

The program that The O.C. once described as "that show by those hipster know-it-alls who talk about how fascinating ordinary people are” might come to the silver screen:

We're planning a This American Life stage show that would be filmed and sent live — live! — via satellite to movie theaters across the country. It would include Ira performing a radio piece, never-before-seen stories and outtakes from the second season of our TV series, audience Q&A, and more.

No other public radio program has tried this before, and we're very excited about it. But to make it happen, we need to know if you're interested. We'd also like your input on how to craft the event. Please take this short survey; it'll take about two minutes. Thanks!

We’d like to mock thier insecurity, but we love This American Life to the point that even its trepidation appeals to us. We approve of Ira Glass in any form.

Before Ira Glass became the big shot host of This American Life, he was a just a regular public radio nerd. At a lecture, we heard him recount a story he reported for NPR. A middle school teacher had taken his class to the Lincoln Memorial for Martin Luther King Day. He brought a recording of the famous “I Have A Dream” speech and played it from the stairs of the memorial. To Ira Glass, it seemed like a truly inspirational moment. To the kids, it was boring:

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Everything you’ve heard about Canadians is true. They’re all nice, and even with a population of over 32,000,000, they all seem to know each other.

We discovered this at Louisa McCormack’s party for her new book, Six Weeks To Toxic, last night. The Canadian author was the kind of nice you don’t find this side of the 44th parallel. She reminded us of a simpler country, where health care is free and Queen Elizabeth is on the twenty-dollar bill.

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Dwight Garner, senior editor of New York Times Book Review and author of their earnestly titled blog, Paper Cuts, has this to say about This American Life:

Admirers talk about how, blinded by show’s minor-chord epiphanies, they’ve pulled over to the side of the road to listen to a story’s conclusion. Detractors think This American Life is the most pretentious and self-absorbed mewling they’ve ever heard.

I tend toward the latter view; there have been times when I’d have gladly totaled my car just to make This American Life go away.

Try not to alienate your audience, Dwight. Who would read a blog about books but fans of This American Life?

Related: Kasper Hauser’s parody of This American Life is right on point.