There's a whole infrastructure that springs into action when a mass shooting occurs. There's the police and SWAT teams, the Red Cross, the Billy Graham prayer truck, therapy dogs.

Margus Morrison was a school bus aide, father of six.

Late at night on the evening Russia invaded Ukraine, Ira talks to two people who escaped to Lviv, near the Polish border: a woman we call Natalie, and the Ukraine Correspondent for The Economist, Richard Ensor. Natalie’s harrowing story about escaping Kyiv is not the sort of war story that makes you think, "I can't imagine what it'd be like to go through that.” In fact it’s just the opposite.

A group of 6th grade boys are bothered by their teacher’s behavior. They complain, but no one listens.

Reporter James Spring visits a refugee camp in Tijuana, Mexico filled with Ukranians fleeing the war.

Producer Chana Joffe-Walt tells the story of a woman who took it upon herself to do something in an effort to help, and was not well received. (8 minutes)

As a joke, Jessica Williamson posts a fake “CAT FOUND” poster with pictures of a possum instead of a cat. To her surprise, she gets hundreds of phone calls that ultimately shift her view on humanity.

Comedian Casey Wilson’s mom was a stabilizing force in her family. So after her unexpected death, both Casey and her father felt devastated and unmoored.

During her sophomore year in high school, Nevaeh was targeted in a secret text message chain by a handful of her peers. She’d come to learn the text chat was a mock slave trade where her photo and photos of other Black classmates were uploaded, talked about as property, and bid on.

Comedian Zarna Garg tells jokes onstage about the extreme ways she tries to control her daughter Zoya’s life.

An elections administrator in Texas, Heider Garcia, uses a radical approach to try to win over election skeptics: tactical patience.

In 2021, Ohio got a chance to take its new constitutional amendments out for a spin for the first time, and draw non-gerrymandered maps. Ira Glass tells the story of what went wrong, including an eleventh-hour Hail Mary vote.

Producer Alix Spiegel tells the story of a Lithuanian man who devises a plan to solve a problem related to the war in Ukraine.

As a new high school principal, Dr. Whitfield felt moved by the national renouncement of racism he saw all around him in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.

A man in Mississippi tries to get his right to vote back. The state constitution provides a way to do that.

There’s a group chat for Nigerian students living in Ukraine that got totally upended by the war.

David Kestenbaum desperately wants to set the record straight for everybody about whether aliens regularly visit earth. They don’t, he says.

Protestors came out across Russia after the Ukraine invasion. In this act, that we first broadcast in 2017, we hear from young people who attended anti-government protests that swept through Russia.

Host Chana Joffe-Walt talks to teachers and principals about the unique challenges the pandemic has created in their daily working lives. (7  minutes)

A person cannot be summarized in a sentence.

Host Ira Glass walks through possible next steps with a pro-life activist who worked on the Texas SB8 bill, that set a precedent for enforcement of abortion bans throughout the country.

Muskegon’s chief of police explains why he decided he couldn’t mention any of the stuff he found troubling about Officer Anderson’s treatment of Black people on the job.