As a teenager, Sarah Vowell was not casual about music lessons — music became her life. She was in marching band, jazz band, Band One, symphony band, pep band and the Bozeman Recorder Ensemble.

Dishwasher Pete, an itinerant dishwasher and author of the book Dishwasher: One Man's Quest to Wash Dishes in All Fifty States, loves taking the bus as he moves from city to city every few weeks. In this act, he takes a tape recorder with him, hoping to capture the stories he always hears from his fellow passengers.

When Francois Mitterand knew he was about to die, he decided that the last food to cross his lips would be poultry...a tiny bird that is actually illegal to eat in France. It's a bird that, by tradition, is eaten with a napkin covering your head.

David Himmel is a college sophomore and a former camper who became a counselor. He says all the best experiences of his life have been at camp or with camp people.

Richard Bausch reads his story Letter to the Lady of the House.

Alix Spiegel reports on an entire community that's turned its back on easy money—for now. Nine years ago a native American community in Minnesota—the Mille Lacs band of Ojibwe—built a casino.

After years of covering stories about medicine, NPR Reporter Rebecca Perl enters the hospital as a patient. She moves from the world of healthy people into the world of sick ones.

David Sedaris with a parable of the pressures on modern women, and how one woman — his sister — responded. David's father thought it was very important that his daughters be thin.

Ira teaches Sarah Vowell how to drive with some advice from Tom and Ray Maggliozi, the hosts of NPR's Car Talk. It turns out that although we think of how-to's as the most rational thing in the world — follow the simple instructions and you'll learn — in real life, they're anything but simple.

A road trip can be a profound test of any relationship. It can save a marriage or destroy it.

Host Ira Glass talk with Claire, who obsessed over a Chilean friend — and then started to tell people she was Chilean herself.

Ira talks with Josh Glenn, editor of Hermenaut, who explains the difference between Good Wacky and Bad Wacky.

Host Ira Glass with Jan Tomare, who spent three years in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Deb Monroe's two daughters as they fight.

When she began working as a temp secretary in San Francisco, learning the computers, wasting time, Andrea put together a graph with Microsoft Excel. Its title: My Love Life: A Ten Year Span. It made her feel good.

A story of guys who wear real masks, like superheroes, in their jobs as costumed wrestlers in a kind of Mexican wrestling called Lucha Libre. Writer RJ Smith has them talk about how much smaller they feel, how humiliated, when they have to take the masks off.

What we want on the road — many of us — is adventure. And what is adventure but a moment you never could've predicted before you left home? Chicago writer Cheryl Trykv tells the story of one such moment.

The burden of keeping germs from hurting us in our everyday lives has fallen mostly on women, from the time science fully understood about the existence of germs. After all, women had to keep the home clean, had to prepare food safely.

Rich Robinson's father is black, his mother is white. They married during the civil rights movement, believing the whole nation was moving toward greater and greater integration.

Denis Wood talks with host Ira Glass about the maps he's made of his own neighborhood, Boylan Heights in Raleigh, North Carolina. They include a traditional street locator map, a map of all the sewer and power lines under the earth's surface, a map of how light falls on the ground through the leaves of trees, a map of where all the Halloween pumpkins are each year, and a map of all the graffiti in the neighborhood.

Sarah Vowell and her twin sister Amy re-trace the Trail of Tears. They visit the town in Georgia that was the capital of the Cherokee Nation before the Cherokee were expelled.

A high school student named Rebecca tells the story of a friend of hers who changed over the course of four years from a preppy alternative kid to a member of the Latina clique to a ghetto girl to a Clueless girl (a girl who models herself after the girls in the film and TV show Clueless). It's hard to imagine many boys changing style this quickly, this willfully, this many times.