Reporter Hanna Rosen did an investigation of those new antibacterial products—the antibacterial soaps and lotions, the antibacterial pizza cutter and linen and underwear. In her article, she mocked these products as ineffective.

How the science of radio enabled V103 to become tied for number one in the Chicago market. And how it cost DJ Ida Hackele her job.

Writer and nationally syndicated sex columnist Dan Savage explains what actually happens in non-monogamous couples, how they make it work, and whether they're happy.

Los Angeles writer Sandra Tsing Loh on the first day of a relationship. A failing relationship.

How one woman learned to stop worrying and start spending. Liz Gilbert and her husband Michael Cooper explain how their different ideas about handling money always divided them—until they stumbled into a $10,000 windfall.

Los Angeles Times food writer Jonathan Gold goes to the places on Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles that he visited back in the early 1980s. He tells the story of how he decided to map an entire street using his sense of taste, and how doing this changed his life.

Jack Hitt talks about a radio station he chanced upon while on a long drive. The station seems to ignore the last six decades of broadcasting history and convention.

Barry Miller, a Cincinnati millionaire who robbed a bank — and was caught. Alex Blumberg reports.

Alex Melamid and Vitaly Komar hired a polling firm to investigate what people want to see in paintings. Then, using the data, they painted what people want.

Last year, a woman named Karen Davis started a national letter writing campaign to try to get This American Life to stop the very program we are broadcasting today—the annual Poultry Slam.

Writer Greil Marcus explains what rock fans use dead rock stars for.

Ira reads from an editorial from a 1957 newspaper in Jackson, Mississippi. It tries to scare white southerners about the NAACP by describing a Chicago human rights campaign called "Take a Negro Boy Home Tonight." The idea behind the campaign? "Racism can be combated by intimate relationships between Negro boys and white girls." No such campaigns really existed in Chicago.

Camp kids explain how their non-camp friends and their non-camp loved ones have no idea why camp is the most important thing in their lives. Most of this hour takes place at a pair of camps in Michigan—Lake of the Woods, a girls camp, and Greenwoods, a boys camp.

Chris and Sylvere, and how they tried to contain a marriage-threatening crush, and how difficult that is.

Durrell was a professional musician. He toured Asia, Brazil, Canada, gigs in Paris.

Ira and the movie Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. Advertised as wacky, it is anything but.

Poet Donald Hall reads about his wife Jane Kenyon, who contracted leukemia, went through treatment, and died. His book is also called Without: Poems.

Ian Brown of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on the normal struggle most people experience when they try to stay monogamous.

Writer Tobias Wolff reads his story "Bullet in the Brain" from his collection of stories The Night in Question, about a bank robbery and a man who's shot, and what he thinks about before he dies.

In which we tackle the biggest possible how-to we could think of: how to make your life worth more. And we get answers — real, practical answers — from the people whose job it is to think about this issue: insurance adjusters.

Jerry Davidson has been keeping a list of everything he's done since 1955 when he was ten years old. What makes it on the lists is very odd, and what isn't included is most of his feelings.

Richard Klein of Cornell University explains that the way we view love really began with love poems in the 13th century — an illusion.

Then Chicago-radio-listener and writer Alex Blumberg (he's now one of our producers) tells the story of encountering a corporation on its first day. It made all the human errors anyone does on a first day: exhibiting false confidence, pretending it wasn't the first day, trying too hard.