Susanna Kaysen reads from her account of living at McLean psychiatric hospital for about two years, starting when she was eighteen. Her book, Girl, Interrupted, describes daily life on the ward.

How an audience of children derailed Late Night with Conan O'Brien.

A family dreams of life in rural Maine, moves there, and then things get really complicated.

This American Life gets a return visit from Evan Harris, the woman who used to believe that quitting was the one thing at the heart of all human existence.

Host Ira Glass with Sarah, who did phone sex and nude dancing.

New York writer Camden Joy tells what happened when in a greasy spoon restaurant filled with cabbies and club kids when Frank's film The Manchurian Candidate came on television. The whole place got silent, watched the film, and choked up.

Jay Allison's story about Leo Brillo in Los Angeles who saves animals.

The day Lawrence Steger left the AIDS clinic for the big road trip.

A documentary by Cecilia Vaisman and Christina Egloff, with Jay Allison, about a white woman named Carolyn Wren Shannon, who grew up hating blacks in a Catholic neighborhood, and how her attitudes change.

Writer Sarah Vowell goes to Rock-n-Roll Fantasy Camp in Miami Beach.

Writer Dirk Jamison, who gave up a 9-to-5 job and succeeded in getting something for nothing: he decided he'd feed the family by diving into dumpsters for free food. His father's very zen attitude about this, and how it affected the family.

"Edison, New Jersey," a story about delivering pool tables from Junot Diaz's book Drown.

Independent producer Dan Collison, on Pilottown and a feature story that fell apart.

The people of Chicago speak out.

A former addict and a former prisoner discuss the developmental retardation their experiences caused.

Scott Carrier in Salt Lake City with a story about whether it's possible to be a good person if you're not a Christian.

In 1940, Jack Geiger, at the age of fourteen, left his middle-class Jewish home and knocked on the door of a black actor named Canada Lee. He asked Lee if he could move in with him.

A hemophiliac teenager who tries to set world records and to motocross.

David Rakoff on how he tried to pass as a local once he moved from Toronto to New York. He claims that there must be a chip in his head — or something like it — that automatically tells him when someone or something famous is Canadian.

A story by Larry Doyle.

Brett Leveridge reads from his column for Might magazine, which he turned into the book Men My Mother Dated and Other Mostly True Tales.

A history of the brief mayoral career of Harold Washington, and its lessons for black and white America, as told by people close to him. Many are activists and politicians: Lu Palmer, Judge Eugene Pincham, Congressman Danny Davis, then-alderman Eugene Sawyer.