Brady Udall tells the story of the time he helped a stranger get his car out of a ditch. In exchange, the man promises to help him any time, for any reason—legal or not.

A husband and wife face a decision about their autistic son's future, and whether he should continue to live with their family. 

One day Virginia Holman's mother announced she was taking Virginia and her little sister to their cottage at the beach. At the time, Virginia didn't realize they were being kidnapped—that they'd be held for months, hostage to her mother's mental illness.

People don't want to stop driving, no matter how old they get. This American Life producer Lisa Pollak talked with Rosyna Salerno, a 91-year-old widow, who recently gave up her license after she had a stroke. And Dan Neil, automotive critic for the Los Angeles Times, tells the story of Stirling Moss, the race car driver who, at 75, still holds the world record for completing a 1,000-mile race called the Mille Miglia.

Host Ira Glass talks about the surprising way apologies tend to play out in couples when one person has cheated on the other, based on stories his mother, Dr. Shirley Glass, told in her book Not Just Friends. And contributing editor Sarah Vowell tells us about the time she couldn't stop apologizing.

Some family legends are most notable for their absence. They're too disturbing or scandalous to tell.

Jo Giese's husband, a doctor named Douglas Forde, had spent his life caring for other people. But then he had some strokes and developed a kind of dementia.

Gregory Warner reports on a program that solves a problem that's been plaguing prisons for years. But there's just one catch...prison guards hate it, because it gives inmates special treatment.

Therapist Scott Miller tells the story of a patient who thought he was Arnold Schwarzenegger. Solving the problem required unusual treatment.

Jonathan Goldstein, for once in his life, gets to suspend time itself. He gets to freeze the hands of time, and finally come up with the right thing to say in all sorts of situations.

Nubar Alexanian was forced to give up one thing—and then gave up another thing by choice. This story was put together by Nubar and his daughter Abby, with help from Jay Allison, for Transom.org, with funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

This story wasn't originally made to broadcast on a radio show. It's a tape made by a guy named Jake Warga, who'd never put anything together for radio.

The story of what happens to an average American family, when a perfectly normal, rational and funny mom starts spending every day in the company of an ancient Buddhist monk named Aaron, who no one else can see. Davy Rothbart is one of her three sons, and also the reporter for this story.

Brent Runyon tells the story of the day in eighth grade that he set himself on fire...and what led to that. He wasn't a loner, he had friends, his mother was a teacher, his parents took an interest in his life.

Veronica Chater tells the story of her developmentally disabled brother Vincent, who one day quit his job and then quit everything else, mystifying everyone in his life. Veronica is author of the memoir Waiting for the Apocalypse.

The story about what happens when you discover the medical reason your mother was such a bad parent all your life.

At a fairly bleak time in his life, Scott took a job driving all over the state of Utah, interviewing people who were diagnosed with schizophrenia. His job was to administer a standard test, which measured mental health.

Myron Jones and his sister Carol Bove explain what happened when they were teenagers, and they ended up babysitting children who didn't exist.

Our story about ADM and Mark Whitacre continues. The FBI finds out that their star cooperating witness Mark Whitacre has been lying to them for three years about some rather serious matters.

What happens when you want your dad to change—and he wants to change, too—but there's literally nothing that can be done to change him. Jon Sarkin was a chiropractor with workaholic tendencies.

Producer Blue Chevigny used to have a job that was all about Moving Day—and people who didn't want to move. She worked for an agency in New York called Project Reachout, part of Goddard Riverside Community Center, that moved homeless, mentally ill people into their own homes.

Wendy Dorr, an assistant producer at Radio Diaries, has this story of what happens to you if you break one of the cardinal rules of a hospital, over and over, for years.

The story of Jug Burkett, a businessman in Dallas and a Vietnam vet, who years ago routinely started checking the bona fides of anyone in the news who claimed to have served in the Vietnam war. He says he's found hundreds of fakers, and he says that one of the tricky things about the fakers is that they often seem more like The Real Thing than real vets do.