Producer Chana Joffe-Walt tells Ira about a man who decided to do a drag act at his child's elementary school talent show.

Producer Neil Drumming spends a couple days exploring Detroit, first with a quirky mayoral candidate running an Afrofuturist campaign, and then with a couple of locals.

Host Ira Glass talks to Mariya Karimjee about a college application essay question. Essay B asks students to imagine a person they might meet in college—someone from a very different background.

Host Ira Glass talks to a man driving to Washington, D.C.—with his brother, father and a whole lot of neckties—for his first job on Capitol Hill.

Our producer David Kestenbaum spoke with some people who are in the grand gesture business: skywriters.


We’ve all heard reports that voter fraud isn’t real. But how do we know that’s true? David Kestenbaum went on a quest to find out if someone had actually put in the work—and run the numbers—to know for certain.

Ira Glass' friend Lucy used to love listening to the radio psychologist Joy Browne, who she thought always had the best advice. But is it possible for someone's advice to just be too good? Ira Glass talks to Lucy to find out.

Ira discusses James Comey’s Senate testimony this week, testimony that called the president a liar. And producer Sean Cole talks with Theo Greenly about a lie that bothered him for a while, a lie involving his cousin, an artist named Kenny Scharf.

Among the things we tend to take for granted: The sun comes up and goes down like clockwork. Except when it doesn’t.

Kenia and her brother Henrri make a trip back to El Salvador, for the first time in 12 years, since they immigrated to the US. For the last few years they've been protected from deportation, but are worried things might change under President Trump. Seth Freed Wessler reports.

Vice News producer Reid Cherlin tells Ira about a party he attended in Washington in 2014. At the time he thought everyone there was on the fringe of the right wing, largely irrelevant.

Today's show came out of something we heard politicians saying.

Ira and producer Neil Drumming visit a comic book store in Philadelphia to try and help Ira understand Afrofuturism.

Ira talks to JetBlue pilot Anne Aldrich about the unusual speech she gives before take-off.

Disinformation and propaganda works differently in Putin’s Russia than it did during the Soviet Union. Instead of tamping down the opposition, the Russian government works to control the opposition.

Producer Zoe Chace attends the DeploraBall, a party for trolls and others who say they memed Trump into the presidency.

Earlier this month, North Korea fired an intercontinental ballistic missile… one powerful enough, news reports said, to reach Alaska. People were shocked.

We turn now to one of the loneliest experiences a person can have: marriage. Ira listens to two people trying to break through what’s going wrong in their marriage, an excerpt from a new podcast in which real couples have a real therapy session with a real therapist, Esther Perel.

Producer Miki Meek takes Ira back to her old high school in a town called Payson, Utah. They meet up with students who go above and beyond when asking dates out to school dances.

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is from Grand Rapids, Michigan. So is This American Life producer Susan Burton.

Producer David Kestenbaum became obsessed with one trick he loved as a kid—when David Copperfield made the statue of liberty disappear.

A judge in a suburban New Jersey courtroom wants the people who come before him to see the rules as fair. Including our reporter, David Kestenbaum.

In 2014, in the wake of losing the previous presidential election, the Republican Party had committed itself to immigration reform as its only path to winning elections in the future. Within two years, Donald Trump would be elected on the exact opposite platform, railing against immigration.

In 1980, deep in a nuclear missile silo in Arkansas, a simple human error nearly caused the destruction of a giant portion of the Midwest. Joe Richman, founder of Radio Diaries tells the story.  Eric Molinsky helped report this story.