60 Words
Radiolab

60 Words

B2Upper-intermediateSeptember 4, 202658 min

We’re coming up on the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and it had us thinking about an episode we produced in 2014. It’s the story of one sentence, written in the hours after September 11th, 2001, that has led to the longest war in U.S. history. We examine how just 60 words of legal language have blurred the line between war and peace. In the hours after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a lawyer sat down in front of a computer and started writing a legal justification for taking action against those responsible. The language that he drafted and t...

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I'm Matt Kilti.

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B2

B2 · Upper-intermediate

Comfortable if you already follow TV news

A1 47%A2 31%B1 14%B2 6%C1 2%
  • 92% of the words are B1 or easier.
  • 169 words a minute: natural, fairly fast speech.
  • 208 harder words (B2 and up) in the whole episode.

Transcript

The opening of the episode. The whole transcript is in the player.

0:00

Hey, this is Radiolab. I'm Matt Kilti. So we are coming up on the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Actually a week from today, it'll be the 25th anniversary.

0:12

And a while back, I co-produced a story that was about the legacy of 9-11. Only it wasn't about any aspect of 9-11 that I had ever heard before. It's about one single sentence, 60 words long, written in the panicked, grief-stricken days right after 9-11 that ended up defining America for decades.

0:33

And the story, it's a sort of like strange side door into this legal world behind the longest war in our country's history. We have a couple of updates for you at the end, so stick around for that. But for now, we're just going to jump in.

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