Parents try to shape who we are in their own image. Producer Neil Drumming spoke to Adam Mansbach, who tried to make his daughter fall in love with hip-hop.

When Saidu’s friend Marcus-David Peters was killed by police, he wanted to figure out what to do with the weight of that loss. He began following three men who began protesting after the murder of George Floyd. They seemed to know what to do when faced with police violence. Saidu tells the story of their lives after they began protesting with the Warriors in the Garden.

There’s a museum in Baltimore that was created to memorialize the Black experience in America. It’s called The National Great Blacks in Wax Museum.

Cariad Harmon tells Elna Baker about what it was like to live through a literal embarrassment nightmare. (15 minutes)

Cindy and Dayana Carcamo are close. But recently, they’ve been struggling with this thing that happened when they were very young.

Fewer than 40 million Americans have gotten the vaccine so far, which leaves a lot of people jealous and wondering what happens inside those little rooms.

We continue our story about three members of Warriors in the Garden. After a summer of protest, the Warriors have to figure out what to do when their activism draws the attention of the police. (25 minutes)

Pavan Bivigou writes about having sickle-cell anemia.

Host Ira Glass talks to writer Mitchell S.

We put out a call for embarrassing stories and got back more than 1000.

Scott, who had worked as a guard at Guantanamo Bay, sees that the detainee he had been in charge of all those years ago, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, had finally been released. The two of them talk.

Producer Sean Cole has, unfortunately, experienced something known as “cumulative grief” this year. He writes about the multiple upheavals he’s been dealing  with.

Guest host Chana Joffe-Walt talks to a carpenter whose job output went from fixing doors to something more urgent in the last year. (9 minutes)

Ira remembers the time when his older sister, Randi, asked his mother where babies come from.

Producer Bim Adewunmi travels to the site in Minneapolis where George Floyd was murdered by a police officer. It’s become a huge, make-shift memorial, big enough to absorb the grief of all-comers who wish to pay homage.

Paul Zimmer at 83 years old is still haunted by something he saw in his teens. Something very few Americans have ever seen: The explosion of an atomic bomb.

A stranger moves to Pawlet, Vermont. At first, his neighbors aren’t sure exactly what to make of him.

Producer Aviva DeKornfeld was interested in the toll that having a wakeup-moment could have on a family, and she heard about someone who had a moment like that over a decade ago. He tried to pull his family into activism too, and what unfolded was the most extreme example of things going badly in a family that Aviva heard of.

Producer Sean Cole scrubs in to observe heart surgeon Dr. John Elefteriades, or Dr.

A teenage girl finds a wallet and has to decide whether to return it. That, and other stories of people trying to do the right thing, and it not working out the way they thought.

For years, producer Lilly Sullivan has wondered what goes on beneath the surface in the mind of one of her good friends and co-workers, Diane. This week, she tries to get to the bottom of it. (11 minutes)This was the story director Greta Gerwig gave to Margot Robbie, while Robbie was trying to figure out how to play Barbie.

Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi takes Ira to an annual tradition in his hometown of Santa Fe, where people have figured out a surprisingly effective way to deal with the problems of the world, large and small.

Reporter Katie Mingle wonders why the 211 hotline in the San Francisco Bay Area for people experiencing homelessness so often turns out to be a dead end for them.