In this show, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Ira and David Hauptschein explored this now utterly quaint question: Are people having experiences on the Internet they wouldn't have anywhere else? Several hundred listeners sent in samples of what they were finding on the Internet. A guy offers a girl a late-night tour of Microsoft...and this actually makes him seem hot.

One Halloween, David Sedaris decides to skip all the fake monsters and ghosts and zombies and visit the real thing: dead people, in a morgue. (14 minutes)David’s latest book is Happy-Go-Lucky.

Host Ira Glass talks to Scott Shrake, who got hired for a job he was utterly unqualified for – as a German interpreter for visitors to Detroit. On his first assignment, Scott realized that not only couldn't he understand what the German tourists were saying, he didn't understand the English words he was supposed to translate.

In the 1930s, the designer of the U.S. Supreme Court made a frieze to adorn the courtroom walls.

Writer Bill Eville and his brother are picked up on the side of the road late at night, and not taken to their destination. (10 minutes)Bill Eville is the author of a collection of essays called Washed Ashore: Family, Fatherhood, and Finding Home on Martha’s Vineyard.

After years of neglecting their personal finances, Joel and his wife finally decide to sort things out. They hire a tax accountant named Len, whose casual manner is a real comfort, at first.

Reporter Brett Martin tries to use the tools of modern marketing to invent a new religion...one that would serve all the Americans who don't associate with any particular organized religion. It's a lot of people: Forty-three percent of the country says they don't consider themselves religious (according to a 2002 USA Today/Gallup poll).

This American Life producer Sarah Koenig tells the story of how her stepsister Rue bought a house on the cheap, with the understanding that the previous owner would soon move out. More than ten years later, she's still waiting.

Some of the scariest stories happen when fluffy, innocent creatures turn murderously evil. Producer Alex Blumberg tells one such story, about a raccoon gone bad.

Host Ira Glass talks to Jonathan Gold about the bully in high school who knocked Jonathan and his cello down the stairs one day as he was walking to history class—and why Jonathan felt a sudden surge of satisfaction about this almost three decades later.

When Gene Cheek was ten years old, his mother began dating a black man. It was 1961, in North Carolina.

Alex Kotlowitz reports on a woman with the power to change two people's lives...and at the height of her power, she doesn't even know she has it. Alex is the author of Never a City So Real and other books.

The New York advertising agency where Shalom Auslander works got an assignment from the State Department back in 2001: Sell American values to the Muslim world. Now they just have to figure out exactly what to say to millions of people they know absolutely nothing about.

A former heroin addict realizes that he wants to help other addicts kick their habits. The problem is, he wants to do this using a hallucinogenic drug – ibogaine – that is completely illegal, and which requires medical expertise he doesn't have.

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

Jon Ronson goes to his high school reunion to try to figure out why his schoolmates—his friends!—threw him in a lake when he was sixteen. The only trouble is, no one at the reunion seems to remember it quite the way he does.

When you're powerless, you think a lot about the powerful figures above you. Especially when their actions just make no sense.

Dan Savage made a pledge over a decade ago that he hoped would just vanish. But it somehow returns from oblivion.

Television comedy writer Tami Sagher describes what can happen when you sit on a joke for years, as she did, before the perfect opportunity to tell it comes along.

A couple uses a controversial therapy to train their son to love them.

Host Ira Glass talks with Rosie Schaap about an unlikely love affair between a dog and a parrot, and how the dog betrayed the bird's trust, never to regain it.

Writer Larry Doyle on a love that will not die, no matter how dead it is.

Jack Hitt explains how President Bush's War on Terror changed the rules for prisoners of war and how it is that under those rules, it'd be possible that someone whose classified file declares that they pose no threat to the United States could still be locked up indefinitely—potentially forever!—at Guantanamo. (26 minutes).Clarification: When Seton Hall professor Baher Azmy discusses the classified file of his client, Murat Kurnaz, he is referring to information that had previously been made public and published in the Washington Post.