Ira talks to reporter Jake Halpern about a scene he saw take place in a Georgia courtroom where a couple uttered some magic words that seemed to make their debt disappear completely. Jake describes the scene in his new book, Bad Paper: Chasing Debt from Wall St. to the Underworld.

Note: This story only appears in the podcast version of the show.This clip is from what Ira calls “the beachiest show” public radio ever made. It’s a segment from NPR’s 1970’s show, Ocean Hour.

We start out exploration of discipline and schools at the very beginning … in preschool. Tunette Powell is a writer in Omaha and mother to JJ and Joah.

Producer Sean Cole tells the story of a former foster kid who was finally adopted in his mid-30's,and the reason he was taken away from the foster family he loved more than 20 years ago.

Reporter Anna Sale tells the story of the high profile politician who came to her with an issue that had nothing to do with politics and nothing to do with him. Instead it had everything to do with Anna and the state of her love life.

Producer Jonathan Menjivar tells the story of a bad baby who stopped being bad. At two years old, Comedian Chris Gethard had a knack for dancing on his mother's last nerve.

When we started putting together this week's show, we assumed we'd be using the phrase "tarred and feathered" as a metaphor for when someone is publicly shamed. We didn't think we'd find a story about someone being literally tarred and feathered, especially not recently.

Susan lays out her theory of what the truth is in this case. And she explains what we still don’t know.

When Elna Baker was a kid, she hit her younger sister on the head with a broom, then lied and said it was an accident. So Elna’s dad held a family trial to find the truth.

Ira finds out more about what Eric and Charlotte Kaufman’s sailing trip was meant to be, how prepared they were for such an extensive trip, and exactly what went wrong on their sailboat that led to the dramatic rescue for which they were so roundly criticized.

Ayelet Waldman says her dad is a bookish man ... a very smart man ... but no man is everything his kids want him to be.

Producer Chana Joffe-Walt talks to a woman named Karen Stobbe and her husband Mondy about a plan they've recently enacted in their family. Karen's mother lives with them and she has dementia.

Sarah Koenig tells the story of her father, Julian Koenig, the legendary advertising copywriter whose work includes the slogan "Timex takes a licking and keeps on ticking" and Volkswagen's "Think Small" ads. For years, Sarah has heard her dad accuse a former partner of stealing some of his best ideas, but until recently, she never paid much attention.

After John and Raquel published their story, the U.S. Congress got involved.

Comedian Wyatt Cenac tells the story of the first time he ever tried marijuana. He didn't smoke it.

Host Ira Glass talks to business professor Pino Audia and Fast Company magazine columnist Dan Heath about corporate creation myths and why so many of them involve garages.

If you haven't spent much time in the southwest, you may not know about this, but there are these border patrol checkpoints that are just in the middle of interstate highways and other roads... not at the border. They're as far as a hundred miles away.

Producer Ben Calhoun talks about how the truce in East Ramapo fell apart, and plumbs the depthsof the neighbor-vs-neighbor political war that emerged. Also, we learn that it can, in fact, be a massive deal when you change lawyers — at least when you're a school board.

Producers Jonathan Goldstein and Sean Cole were fascinated by a recent Pew Research statistic stating that 9% of Americans want to travel through time.

Producer Chana Joffe-Walt talks to her 13 year old sister Maya about Maya’s most important friendship to date. In fact, it’s her first real friendship.

In 2009, a U.S. soldier contacted our show and offered to send audio dispatches from his deployment in Afghanistan, to do a story about what it's really like to go to war. But what he learned when he was over there was way more personal and honest than we, or he, expected.

Sarah Carr is a reporter and blogger in Cairo, Egypt. Her blog inanities.org is regularly cited as one of Egypt's best blogs and English language news sources coming out of Egypt.

Ben tries the good guy discount, to see if he can pull it off, as Ira tags along.