Ira goes to a crowded singles bar where it wasn’t hard to find serial ghosters — people who kiss and disappear.  (8 minutes)

Producer Zoe Chace and Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel spin through some greatest hits of their weekend in Iowa once more, and Weigel reflects on what’s about to come next in the presidential race.

A Democrat in Alabama watches helplessly as Russian internet bots play dirty with the 2016 election. But a year later, those same tactics inspire him to organize an election conspiracy of his own. Producer Ben Calhoun has the story.

Producer Emanuele Berry and her dad only talked about basketball. But they never talked about a game that her dad had botched.

New Yorker staff writer Kelefa Sanneh tells the story of exorcist Bob Larson’s trip into the world of heavy metal.

Scaachi Koul is trying to learn a language native to her parents, and heads back to Calgary to ask why they never taught it to her in the first place.  (21 minutes)

Reporter Dana Ballout tells the story of Radio Fresh, a community station in Syria that the local listeners depend on, and local militant factions try to shut down.

We turn to those who are truly spineless, and I mean literally, they are creatures that have no spines. Also featured in this story: the people who study them who, like us all, could sometimes use a little more spine.

Lilly Sullivan tells the story of the writer Robert Walser, who moved into a mental hospital and then seemed to disappear from the world. Until people looked more closely.

Maybe the most radical national experiment to avoid tribalism ever done, anywhere in the world. Of course the key moment two sides come together happens in a bar.

Guest host Neil Drumming wonders what it would be like to know exactly where he’s from.

Host Ira Glass gets his grandmother Frieda’s college files, which reveal a whole other side of this person he thought he knew so well.

Ira questions the motives of overly ambitious scientists and inventors. (2 minutes)

Weigel and Zoe drop in on two candidates desperately trying to break out of the one percent.

Host Ira Glass talks about our fascination with small things.

Religion professor Elaine Pagels explains the roots and evolution of Satan in religious texts.

After a difficult first week in therapy, Jaime starts to see progress. (21 minutes)

A strongman gets hired to take over the Amsterdam Fire Department. He’s a career police officer named Leen Schaap who has zero firefighting experience.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith tells the story of a woman who wants to know why she was taken away from her mom as a kid. A version of this story is in Eleanor’s book Stop Being Reasonable: How We Really Change Our Minds.

David Kestenbaum talks about his love of the number zero and its power to destroy. Among zero's victims: one of the most controversial laws in recent memory.

Writer Jelani Cobb travels to Missouri to talk to people in Ferguson about the troubling deaths of six activists there.

Producer Emanuele Berry plays Ira Glass some weird inside his head tape of presidential hopeful Cory Booker trying to walk two blocks.

What does God get out of us praising him? Or is it actually for us? (7 minutes)