On my drive home from Minnesota last Friday, I caught an episode of This American Life on Chicago Public Radio. The show was about pen pals. Most intriguing was “the story of a ten-year-old girl from small town Michigan named Sarah York, and how she became pen pals with a man who was considered an enemy of the United States, a dictator, a drug trafficker, and a murderer: Manuel Noriega.”
Entitled Who Put the “Pistol” in “Epistolary”?, the segment starts with an innocent letter to Panama asking about Noriega’s hat and ends with the aftermath of Sarah’s sensationalized visit to Panama after months of correspondence. [listen] (starts at about 5:45, 41 minutes long)
