In Tehran in 2004, Omid Memarian confessed to doing things he'd never done, meeting people he'd never met, following plots he'd never heard of. Why he did that, and why a lot of other people have confessed to the same things, is all in the fine print. This American Life producer Nancy Updike tells the story.

Very few Palestinians speak Hebrew, and very few Israelis speak Arabic, even though most Palestinians and Israelis live a short drive from one another. Nancy Updike has this story about Nasser Laham, a Palestinian TV journalist in Bethlehem who has a nightly show where he translates Israeli broadcasts into Arabic.

Radio reporter Adam Davidson went to Iraq to report on the war. He decided that rather than living in some journalist compound in the Green Zone or in a big hotel—places insurgents were more likely to attack—he'd fly under the radar, and keep safe...by renting a house in a residential Baghdad neighborhood.

Elena Kostyuchenko tells the story of how she was probably poisoned after reporting on Russian’s invasion of Ukraine, and how she kept not believing it was happening. Bela Shayevich translated this story from Russian and reads it for us. (21 minutes)We adapted this from an article in n+1 magazine.

Four years ago, Matt Frerking started having attacks where he simply couldn't move his body.

Back in 2004, a reporter named David Holthouse published a remarkable story in the weekly paper he worked for, Westword. It's about something he waited his entire life to do...since childhood.

Host Ira Glass describes the thing that we all do at some point: Talk expertly about something we don't actually know anything about. It's so common, explains This American Life contributing editor Nancy Updike, that some friends of hers invented an imaginary magazine devoted to such blathering.

Two-and-a-half years after Jack Hitt wrote the story that makes up Act One of our show, he returned to the tale of Dawn Langley Simmons.

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.

Eight-year-old Betsy Walter goes on a campaign to understand her parents' divorce.

Robyn Forest thought she'd gotten her big break when a magazine assigned her to write about a famous Japanese pop singer. Instead, Robyn ended up on Japanese television denying that she and the singer were having an affair.

Adam Sternbergh, the co-editor and co-founder of Fametracker.com, dissects the issue of People magazine which is now on newsstands — an issue which chooses the most beautiful people in the world, allegedly through purely scientific methods, somehow ending up with a list of people who have movies coming out this summer. This story first appeared at Fametracker.com.

A few years back, a writer named Lee Sandlin wrote a story for the weekly paper The Chicago Reader about what makes wartime different—how a country's perceptions and logic during war are fundamentally different than during peace. It was a massive historical article, exhaustively researched.

Cedric Jennings grew up in Southeast Washington, in one of the poorest communities in the country. Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind followed him for over two-and-a-half years, as Cedric tried to make it through high school and work his way into an Ivy League university. Once he gets there, he discovers that all the qualities that got him out of the ghetto make him an outcast in the Ivy League.

Before Sinatra died, Sarah Vowell appeared on this radio program and made a prediction about how network news would cover Sinatra's death ... and she made a simple plea. We hear whether her prediction came true.

The Lancet's new study of deaths in Iraq, by the same research team that did the earlier study, yielded an astounding number—650,000 civilian deaths. Producer Alex Blumberg talks to Ira about the debate over this new study.

Michael Lewis’ story continues, and he figures out why Emir Kamenica insists on remembering, and telling, the story of his life the way he does — even when he finds out that some of the facts may be wrong.

Independent producer Dan Collison, on Pilottown and a feature story that fell apart.

Producer Lisa Pollak learns some of the things people in Chattooga are talking about, thanks to a Summerville News column called "Soundoff." (7 minutes)

Writer Sandra Tsing Loh on how she staged stunts to get press attention. She was wildly successful, featured in the Wall Street Journal, NPR, People Magazine, CNN, and in a Tonight Show monologue.

Isaiah Thompson tells the story of the Julia Tuttle Causeway in Miami, a bridge that became home to a population of sex offenders, after a powerful lobbyist named Ron Book helped make it illegal for them live almost anywhere else in the city. Isaiah Thompson is a reporter and columnist for the Philadelphia City Paper.

Writer David Rakoff travels to a place where everyone seems to be looking at him, a place where no one follows the customs people follow back home in New York City, a place called...New Hampshire.

Joshuah Bearman tells the story of Pete's ridealong with the PI Moms, and how strange things started to happen. As he dug deeper into their operations, he learned about cases like the Candyman, where everything gets oddly and unnecessarily complicated.

Malcolm Gladwell is a best-selling author and famous journalist at the New Yorker magazine. But not always.