Frankie Cruz Junior takes on all contenders at a nightclub in Chicago, and nearly always wins. It's a terrible job that pays badly and has no insurance or other benefits.

Will Powers — his real name — decided to try to use all the tools of modern brand marketing to sell himself to his own wife. It turned out to help their marriage.

Dishwasher Pete tells the story of his first day washing dishes on an oil rig off the coast of Louisiana. He'd heard he'd get a hazing when he stepped foot on the rig.

In Vietnam, Jeffrey Harris, with one year of grad school, judged which soldiers stayed and which went home.

What happens when being on the road is your job, and has been your job for decades? Reporter Margy Rochlin recalls a trip she took with 92-year-old George Burns and his tiny entourage.

Sarah Vowell with Jim Nayder, host of Magnificent Obsession and The Annoying Music Show, who personifies our culture's split between seriousness and wackiness as well as anyone.

Dishwasher Pete, an itinerant dishwasher and author of the book Dishwasher: One Man's Quest to Wash Dishes in All Fifty States, loves taking the bus as he moves from city to city every few weeks. In this act, he takes a tape recorder with him, hoping to capture the stories he always hears from his fellow passengers.

A story of guys who wear real masks, like superheroes, in their jobs as costumed wrestlers in a kind of Mexican wrestling called Lucha Libre. Writer RJ Smith has them talk about how much smaller they feel, how humiliated, when they have to take the masks off.

How the science of radio enabled V103 to become tied for number one in the Chicago market. And how it cost DJ Ida Hackele her job.

In which we tackle the biggest possible how-to we could think of: how to make your life worth more. And we get answers — real, practical answers — from the people whose job it is to think about this issue: insurance adjusters.

Ira with Elizabeth Joseph, who is in a polygamous marriage with eight wives and one husband. She says polygamy is the ultimate feminist lifestyle.