Catherine and John, two college undergrads, do a babysitting gig together.

Two stories of communication where the words really don't matter: Elizabeth Gilbert tells the story of the worst wedding toast she's ever heard of. This story first appeared on the former website Other People's Stories.

Jeffrey Brown wrote a comic novel called Clumsy, a beautiful and intimate account of his relationship with his ex-girlfriend. He talks with Ira about the relationship and why he chose to draw cartoons about it after it ended.

Teenage girls from a detention center perform a song for their parents.

There's a book called Prisoners' Inventions, by a California inmate who publishes under the pseudonym Angelo. He describes the ingenious devices prisoners build out of the rudimentary materials at hand.

A case study in every word from a friend meaning its opposite.

This story wasn't originally made to broadcast on a radio show. It's a tape made by a guy named Jake Warga, who'd never put anything together for radio.

A short story, "Fatso," by Etgar Keret. A woman reveals to her boyfriend that she's not always what she seems.

Host Ira Glass tells the story of Chris Sewell, who was living on the street and yet somehow managed to find $610,940 of lost money that belonged to the city of New York, hidden away on the Internet.

Host Ira Glass talks with This American Life producer Julie Snyder about a personal regime change that happened when she was a kid, after her parents got divorced and her stepdad came on the scene. She says that by the time her parents separated, literature on what to tell the children was everywhere, and the kids took it relatively well.

We hear kids recorded at Chicago's Navy Pier and at a public swimming pool discussing their mean friends. And Ira Glass interviews Lillie Allison, 15, about the pretty, popular girls who were her best friends—until they cast her out.

You can divide all living creatures into two camps. We humans are in one camp, along with lots of other things like dogs and birds and trees and caterpillars.

Veronica Chater explains the conflict in her house between her love for her pet macaw—a kind of parrot—and her love for her husband and three kids. The macaw wreaks a sort of low-level chaos in the house, because it wants Veronica all to itself.

Host Ira Glass reminds the audience about the old TV series MacGyver, about the guy who stops bad guys without a gun. He uses science and sheer ingenuity to invent solutions.

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.

Author David Rakoff worked at an advertising agency, and could see exactly where its technology was going.

Ira accompanies photographer Tamara Staples as she attempts to photograph chickens in the style of high fashion photography. The chickens are not very cooperative. (15 minutes)Tamara's photos have been collected in a book, The Magnificent Chicken: Portraits of the Fairest Fowl.

Host Ira Glass talks to two people about their real-life stories of theory and practice. Subject 1: Michael.

There are at least two American citizens being held without charges, unable to see lawyers, in military jails in the U.S. There may be more.

Ira Glass introduces the idea of doing 20 stories in one hour.

Davy Rothbart reads from letters, notes, scraps of paper and school papers, which have been lost by their original owners. He collects and publishes things like this in his magazine, Found Magazine.