Producer Sean Cole tells the story of a former foster kid who was finally adopted in his mid-30's,and the reason he was taken away from the foster family he loved more than 20 years ago.

Simon Rich reads his short story "History Report," in which a father explains the sex robots of the future.

Reporter Joe Richman visits a program in Richmond, CA that is trying a controversial method of reducing gun violence in their city: paying criminals to not commit crimes. Sounds crazy, but the even crazier part is…it works.

Any adventure show would be incomplete without some swashbuckling, dinosaur-chasing, time-traveling madness. So we asked a few of our favorite writers to offer up short stories. Dave Eggers, Jeanne Darst, Wendy McClure, Fiona Maazel and Neil Gaiman answered the call.

A retired millionaire tries to understand the reality of a tough, seedy, inner city neighborhood. But what if the neighborhood is none of those things? Ira Glass evaluates the claims of this millionaire, Steve Poizner, who is also running for governor of California.

Roger Dowds won several hundred thousand pounds on the Irish version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire, which is why Ronan Kelly, the host an Irish public radio program, first went to interview him. During their talk together, it became clear that Roger was a very unlikely game show champion.

Washington Irving Elementary School became a model of school reform in Chicago a decade ago. The school did it without adding a ton more money.

Jack Hitt begins his story about a group of prisoners at the Missouri Eastern Correctional Center who are rehearsing and staging a production of Hamlet. The man who plays Hamlet gets in character by recalling times he's wanted to hurt people, like the crime that sent him to prison, in which he shot two people and left them for dead.

Here in America, here's how we interact with our political candidates: We dispatch middlemen to the scene, they listen to what the candidates say, they research the candidates' backgrounds, and they tell us what they think is most important. Those middlemen, of course, are journalists.

Sandy Tolan interviewed Susan's friends and family to make an unusual and powerful documentary about who she was and about the world she inhabited.

In the second half of the show, she talks about her own cancer — cervical cancer that was diagnosed six months after her brother got sick. Julia eventually turned some of these vignettes into a one-woman show called God Said, Ha!, which Quentin Tarantino made into a movie and Julia released as a book.

A group of kids is told that “education is the door to their futures.” But these kids are in jail, facing adult sentences. Why learn algebra when you’re facing 25 years? Eli Hager reports.

A few weeks ago, Jessica and Moisés found themselves hiding in an attic. Reporter Kevin Sieff talks to them about how they got there.

In Richard Brautigan's novel "The Abortion," he imagines a library where regular people can come and drop off their own unpublished books. Nothing is turned away.

Gabe Mollica had something important he needed to discuss with his friend  — stewed about it for eight years. But rather than go to that friend, he talked about it with everyone other than that one person. (28 minutes)Gabe Mollica’s “Solo: a show about friendship” re-opens in October for runs in New York, Los Angeles, Boston, and Chicago.

In the wake of a break-up, writer Starlee Kine finds so much comfort in break-up songs that she decides to try and write one herself—even though she has no musical ability whatsoever. For some help, she goes to a rather surprising expert on the subject: Phil Collins.

A private basketball coach teaches a young student some things his parents don't agree with. David Kestenbaum has the story.

Amy Bloom tells the story of her husband, Brian, getting Alzheimer's and wanting assisted suicide. Her search to find a way to do that led her to Dignitas, in Switzerland.

A politically divided couple searches for a news source they both can trust. (26 minutes)The original version of this story first appeared on Question Everything, a co-production of KCRW and Placement Theory.

One day in January Alex French got a call from his mom, saying that she'd been laid off. A few hours later she called to say that so had his dad.