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.

Two years ago, a Johns Hopkins University study published in The Lancet estimated the number of civilian casualties in Iraq. It came up with a number—100,000 dead—that was higher than any other estimate at the time and was mostly ignored.

Serry and her husband's love story began in a place not usually associated with romance: The West Bank. That was where the couple met, fell in love and decided to get married.

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

Host Ira Glass talks to ordinary Iraqis about life in their country since the U.S. invasion. Every one of them has friends and relatives—civilians—who've been killed in the violence there.

Will Seymour reads letters he and his grandmother exchanged when he was in high school. He was miserable at the time—his parents had just gotten divorced and he had no friends—and so was his grandma.

Michael Beaumier tells a story about a family member who keeps vanishing and returning. This is an excerpt from Michael's book I Know You're Out There.

Captain Ryan Gist was given a particularly tough assignment in Iraq: To build relationships with a town where U.S. bombs had killed twelve innocent people. But first he has to apologize to the families of those who were killed.

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.