Excerpted for radio: The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs

UPDATE: This American Life retracted the episode described below. See here.

– – – –

If you couldn’t make it to the Berkeley Rep or Washington’s Wooly Mammoth or New York’s Public Theater to catch monologist Mike Daisey’s brilliant, funny, disturbing report on working conditions in the Shenzhen factories where most of Apple’s (AAPL) products are assembled, Ira Glass has done you a favor.

He aired a one-hour audio version of The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs last Friday on This American Life and has now made it available as a podcast.

You can listen to it here.

For our January 2011 report on Daisey’s show, see A harsh light on Apple’s supply chain.

UPDATE: As if to underscore the thrust of Daisey’s report, 300 workers at Foxconn’s Wuhan Technology Park threatened to commit suicide en masse Jan. 2 by jumping off a roof, according to a report in Tuesday’s Want China Times.  The workers said they had been denied compensation promised by the company — the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer.  The crisis was averted when the mayor of Wuhan arrived to talk them down.