The day Matthew Goulish saw Brigid.

A look at the Chicago political machine in the days before our story begins.

Writer Malcolm Gladwell, reads from a story that he first wrote for the New Yorker magazine about his cousins, who immigrated to the U.S. from Jamaica 12 years ago.

There can be consequences for reading other people's mail.

Or is that "Ooting?" 90210 expert Danny Drennan on the pro-Canadian bias in the hit TV show Beverly Hills 90210 now that Canadian Jason Priestly is not just a star of the show, but a producer and director as well.

Anthropologists agree that humans stopped being animals when they started walking upright, on two legs. But scientists don't agree on why our ancestors did this.

David Beers explains the gorgeous, modern vision that drew his family, and tons of other families, to California, and then what happened after they arrived.

David Sedaris, on his mother's lung cancer.

Jeff Dorchen reads Italo Calvino's short story All At One Point from Calvino's book Cosmicomics.

A Hollywood TV producer tries to convince a church of evangelical Christians to sell out a member of their own congregation. Matt Malloy reads. He was one of the stars of the acclaimed independent film In the Company of Men.Also in this act: Dickens vs.

Karl T. Wright's and Wendy Miller's game show wedding.

If you work for the post office and read other people's mail, you can lose your job or go to prison. Unless you work at a Mail Recovery Center.

We begin to hear a story by Scott Carrier.

Journalist Margy Rochlin on her first big assignment to do a celebrity interview. It was 1982.

Jerry Capeci, dean of the New York reporters who cover organized crime, on the decline of the mob in recent years. And Alec Wilkinson of the New Yorker magazine, who discusses a photo his wife took of his old neighbors, the Gambino crime family.

Andrea worked at a bakery under a convention hotel in Chicago. The conventioneers used to drive her crazy because people act so different when they're in a crowd of their own kind.

Julia Sweeney reads this story. She's a former Saturday Night Live cast member and star of the sad and comic memoir of life with cancer, God Said, "Ha!," which played on Broadway.

Mary and Manfred Rauer have been married 22 years. He's a devout Christian, goes to church every week, reads the Bible every day, was head of his congregation.

More than England, or Japan or Israel.... When we think of South Africa, it's a more interesting mirror of the United States than nearly any country, because we glimpse a distant echo of the most frightening parts of American society — and the most inspiring.

Ira with 19-year-old Claudia Perez at a furniture store in Claudia's Mexican neighborhood.

Ira visits the lottery stand in Chicago that sells more lottery tickets than any other: Hannah's Finer Food & Liquors. There he meets two men who want to get rich quick.

Actor Michael Stumm reads from fireman and fiction writer Larry Brown's book On Fire.

Ira and music contributor John Conners on Sinatra's worst songs. And a brief history of what makes that 1950s Sinatra sound so great, with Will Friedwald, author of the definitive book on Sinatra's music, Sinatra! The Song Is You: A Singer's Art.

A story by Bia Lowe.