We hear the story of someone trying to help all sorts of people who absolutely do not want his help. Nancy Updike reports on Dror Etkes, who has taken it as his personal mission to document the spread of Israeli settlements in the West Bank: Every shack, mobile home, housing cluster, bypass road and town.

What's French for French Fries? David Sedaris has been following the diplomatic fiascoes of the last few months from Paris, where he lives. Relations between France and the U.S. have been so horrible these days we asked him how it seemed from over there.

Katy Vine reports on yet another promising young person, Tye Thomas, and how he went through the rise and fall of a full political career, in just one year, at the age of 21, in the Texas town of Gun Barrel City.

Hyder's story continues. He and his convoy of American soldiers run into trouble on their way back home.

Alex Blumberg spends three days with Michigan state representative Steve Tobocman. He ran for office because he thought that would be the best way to change things for his neighborhood in Detroit.

Host Ira Glass plays parts of a speech by George Ryan, former Governor of Illinois. When he was a state senator in 1977, Ryan was part of a successful coalition that voted to reinstate the death penalty in Illinois.

When Hyder was 17, he went to Afghanistan. This place that he'd been hearing about his whole life.

The story of a band of libertarians with a plan to take over a state. They call it the Free State Project and it goes like this: They pick a state with a low population, 20,000 of them move to it, establish a voting majority, and run it according to libertarian principles.

Andrea Morningstar tells the story of a ten-year-old girl from small town Michigan named Sarah York, and how she became pen pals with a man who was considered an enemy of the United States, a dictator, a drug trafficker, and a murderer: Manuel Noriega.

Reporter Jack Hitt explains the alarming difference between theory and practice when it comes to computerized voting machines—specifically, those made by a company called Diebold.

For many years, Israeli citizens learned a sanitized version of what happened during their War of Independence in 1948. They learned that 700,000 Arabs fled the country on their own accord.