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Selected Shorts · Symphony Space

The New You

·59 min·5 clips
Farrah secretly uses her phone as a bookmark, revealing their struggle to escape digital addiction.
What would you do to become a new you? Meg Wolitzer starts with that question and lets it get less shiny as the hour goes on. This is a Selected Shorts episode about transformation, but not the easy, fresh-start kind. The mood is warm, with a little warning tucked inside it. The opening turns the usual fantasy of escape into something more awkward: if a person could trade the old self for another life, what would get lost in the swap? Wolitzer is clear that Selected Shorts is not self-help, though she still gives literature credit for nudging listeners toward empathy. The first frame touches the internet, where the same tool that helps people work also keeps tugging them away from it. Then the episode takes a weirder step. Wolitzer introduces the second and final story as a friendship story changed by something permanent. Rachel Kong's fiction is described as light and funny, but willing to go near hard things without sanding them down. Katrina Lenk reads D-Day. The story begins with God looking again at what he has made after an immense count of days. Human beings may not make it through the revision. What comes instead is a world of species without races, wealth, personal grievance, or the human urge to turn difference into superiority. The setup is funny, then suddenly not. Transformation here is no makeover. It is a correction, and nobody gets to control the consequences. Wolitzer gives the story enough runway, then gets out of the way. The episode leaves a quiet sting: becoming new can sound freeing until the familiar ground starts disappearing underfoot.

As heard by us

Selected Shorts turns the wish to become someone else into a focused hour about change, overload, and uneasy transformation.

Selected Shorts builds its hour around the wish to become someone else, then keeps testing that idea against digital overload, real friendship, and the awkward side of change.

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want fiction that asks what you'd trade to become new.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →
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