In the first book-length analysis of This American Life, Loviglio explores how this innovative and influential public radio program has carved out a space of affect and empathy in an increasingly fractured, individualistic world.

John L. Sullivan, Professor of Media and Communication, Muhlenberg College, USA

Empathy Machines is a smart, perceptive, and revealing account of how NPR, and especially This American Life, developed pioneering audio strategies that created an empathetic mode of address now widely imitated in the exploding universe of podcasts. With a vocal style that was more conversational, NPR broadcasts evoked feelings of intimacy and openness that produced compelling “structures of feeling” to which audiences powerfully responded. The enormous popularity of podcasts, Loviglio suggests, rests in part on these audio innovations. Highly revealing and a book very much of the moment.

Susan J. Douglas, Catharine Neafie Kellogg Professor, University of Michigan, USA, and author of Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (1999)

This book is an astonishing piece of scholarship – ambitious, erudite, insightful, and brilliantly readable. Jason Loviglio has surely produced the definitive study of NPR's This American Life; but more than that, his overarching analysis of how affect plays out across a century of public radio and transmedia shows should make Empathy Machines a standard reference work for anyone interested in the power of media in politics and everyday life.

Kate Lacey, Professor of Media History and Theory, University of Sussex, UK