We drop a hot mic into a hot mess of a rats’ nest. You’ll never believe what happens next.

There are certain jobs where thinking about someone else’s life is just built into it. Aviva DeKornfeld has a theory that petsitting is a job like that.

LA writer/performer Sandra Tsing Loh discovers that a local rock band has recorded a song about her own father, wildly misinterpreting who he is. They think he’s a free spirit; she believes he’s a worried, miserly grump.

A new resident in Berlin is greeted like a minor celebrity wherever she goes.

Etgar tells Ira about his mother’s experience in the Holocaust and why she didn’t like people seeing her as a "survivor" or being defined by those terrible years. (5 minutes)

Over the last few years, producer Chana Joffe-Walt has been checking in with someone who wears the mantle of being “it” well. She’s a school principal named Teresa Hill.

Ira talks with his father and co-host for this show, Barry Glass, about his own early days working in radio.

Guest Host Sean Cole gets some scary news about his health, and decides to quit smoking. (5 minutes)

Guest host Bim Adewunmi talks to her cousin Kamyl about a funny thing Kamyl did when she was small, regarding a dog named Foxy. (4 minutes)

Contributor Samuel James thought he knew what happened to his mother. But he was wrong.

Saddam Sayyaleh’s job right now is trying to get trucks filled with aid into Gaza and he knows it’s nowhere close to what’s actually needed.

A middle schooler really wants to trust the adults have her best interests in mind. But some of the most powerful people at her school begin to make that very difficult.

We get a tip that an entire town is consumed by a huge, elementary-school-style crush on a local veterinarian.

Producer Emmanuel Dzotsi has a tale about something he avoids at all costs, even though it seems to follow him everywhere he goes. (8 minutes)

Nadia remembers the times that Luka’s father would suggest going to Crimea for vacation, as if it wasn’t Ukrainian land occupied by Russia.

One of our producers, Chana Joffe-Walt, had a series of conversations with a man in Gaza over the course of one week.

What happens when an emergency room nurse has an emergency? Kelsay Irby did something that landed her in the headlines. (9 minutes)