Back in 1999 there was a series of bombings of apartment buildings in Moscow and across Russia. 300 people died. It happened just as Vladimir Putin was coming to power.

In the early years, when immigrants first arrived in Albertville, the things that bothered the locals weren’t the things you usually hear about when people talk about immigration. Not jobs or wages or crime.

New York City has a paratransit service called Access-a-Ride for passengers who are disabled and elderly. But people who rely on the system refer to it as Stress-a-Ride.

Mohammed Aden was just a regular Minnesotan dad who unwittingly became governor of a region in Somalia. As governor, one of his main goals was to eliminate piracy.

In 2012, the fever broke, and the Albertville city council stopped targeting Latino residents. The mayor says he and the council are taking a cue from the public schools.

Magicians say it can take years to create and polish a new magic trick. Teller (of Penn and Teller) shows host Ira Glass how he invented one of his most beautiful and puzzling routines.

We hear the companies’ side—they have a totally different story to tell than the workers. We also go to one of the leading researchers on the economic effects of immigrants, Giovanni Peri, who chairs the economics department at UC Davis. He and researcher Justin Wiltshire did a study for us on what happened to wages and jobs in Albertville.

Two women attempt very different transformations. One wants to become a mother.

Earlier this month, North Korea fired an intercontinental ballistic missile… one powerful enough, news reports said, to reach Alaska. People were shocked.

Reporter Aaron Reiss found a woman that an entire community calls, in order to find out the names of the very streets they're walking on. She's the gatekeeper for a series of secret underground maps of New York City.

Producer David Kestenbaum became obsessed with one trick he loved as a kid—when David Copperfield made the statue of liberty disappear.

In the first half of the show, we documented a community that was worried about what might happen, theoretically, if undocumented immigrants arrived. In this act, Producer Zoe Chace looks at a community where the immigrants have already arrived – Rockville, Maryland.

Dante Nero has been involved in this group for years, since before it even had a name. He’s seen its evolution.

Host Ira Glass talks to producer David Kestenbaum about what it was like to be a kid magician.

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is from Grand Rapids, Michigan. So is This American Life producer Susan Burton.

One night Rosie’s father, busy working, told Rosie, then 9, to stop distracting him with her questions. She should write them all down, he said.

The Department of Homeland Security’s new policies on deportation have sown fear and confusion among undocumented immigrants. Ira Glass and Lilly Sullivan go to Chicago and meet a family trying to navigate the situation.

Brian Reed continues his story about the town of Homer, Alaska. He talked to all sorts of people involved in the debate over whether the town should welcome immigrants.

There is a four mile long bridge in Naan-jing China, famous for how many people jump off to die by suicide. In 2003, a man named Chen Sah began spending all of his weekends on the bridge, trying to single handedly stop the jumpers.

The Navy’s Seventh Fleet has seen a string of collisions and accidents, killing 17 sailors this year. Producer Stephanie Foo learned about a part of Navy life that investigators say played a role in these accidents.

Ira tells a favorite joke—about a popcorn-eating horse and a hat-wearing cow.

Ira talks to Australian novelist Gerald Murnane. He’s never left Australia.

A judge in a suburban New Jersey courtroom wants the people who come before him to see the rules as fair. Including our reporter, David Kestenbaum.