If you click on any of the candy hearts in today’s Google Doodle, you’ll get something a little more interactive than usual: The soothing voice of Ira Glass urging you to read some of his favorite love stories from This American Life.
Glass explains how this collaboration came together, how they went about bringing their stories to a much bigger audience, and why he liked the idea of Doodle-ing their stories:
“I’ve been a fan of Google Doodles for a while (though I only recently learned they had a name and that name is Google Doodles). I liked that they seemed able to do anything on their homepage—a crossword puzzle, a Dr. Who video game, a tribute to Saul Bass, a Les Paul guitar or a fully functioning Moog Synthesizer (with its own four-track tape recorder). It’s interesting that in this big global company, with millions or maybe it’s billions of dollars in computer servers everywhere, and all this tech and engineering, they have people doing something for their biggest product—their search engine—that’s so… handmade. And idiosyncratic.”
There are six stories on the Doodle, but there are even more here. If you don’t have a whole afternoon to listen to nine This American Life stories, make sure you click on the “Love Song” chocolate on their Valentine’s sampler. It leads you to frequent TAL contributor Starlee Kine’s amazing breakup story, which testifies to the true healing power of Phil Collins’s music. Kine actually contacts Collins to talk about her traumatic breakup, and ask for help writing a breakup song.
The Doodle is a nice alternative to creating your own Google poetry for your Valentine, though this stanza is certainly very telling:
Image via jamz196/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
