Brothers Wes and Jeff spent a winter tagging black bears in Bryce Canyon National Park. One of the bears they needed to tag decided to hibernate at the end of an usually long tunnel.
There are certain jobs where thinking about someone else’s life is just built into it. Aviva DeKornfeld has a theory that petsitting is a job like that.
When to leave Twitter is a question lots of executives faced when Elon Musk took over the company — those who weren't immediately fired, anyway. We hear an insider’s account from the man who ran Trust & Safety at the company, until he couldn’t stand it anymore.
The musicians in the orchestra for Phantom of the Opera tell reporter Jay Caspian Kang about what it’s like to play the exact same music every single night—for decades.
Over the last few years, producer Chana Joffe-Walt has been checking in with someone who wears the mantle of being “it” well. She’s a school principal named Teresa Hill.
Ira introduces us to Santa Allen. A man who is NOT the real Santa Claus but who will – for the first time ever – be sitting in a chair, dressed as Santa, asking little children what they want for Christmas this year. He’s nervous.
Producer Aviva DeKornfeld accompanies Santa Allen to his first “chair gig” to see whether all of his hopes, or all of his fears, or a little of both, will be realized. (16 minutes)
A teenage girl finds a wallet and has to decide whether to return it. That, and other stories of people trying to do the right thing, and it not working out the way they thought.
When you need to retrieve all manner of treasures secured behind steel doors and complex locks, there’s one man you can count on: safecracker Dave McOmie.
The pandemic forced restaurant server Shelly Ortiz to put on her “Covid Goggles.” What she saw through them made her reevaluate her ideas of what’s important.
What does “thank you” actually look like? And who gets one? For Flato Alexander and other essential workers, all sorts of symbols that hadn’t bothered them much before suddenly became unbearable.
When Adele wrote into our show last summer, she described herself as “the worst phlebotomist in the whole hospital.” Producer Diane Wu couldn’t resist calling her up to find out exactly what she meant by that.
We heard about these fire camps from Lizzie Johnson. She’s a reporter at The San Francisco Chronicle and spends most of the year chasing fires around California.