Very few Palestinians speak Hebrew, and very few Israelis speak Arabic, even though most Palestinians and Israelis live a short drive from one another. Nancy Updike has this story about Nasser Laham, a Palestinian TV journalist in Bethlehem who has a nightly show where he translates Israeli broadcasts into Arabic.

We hear the story of someone trying to help all sorts of people who absolutely do not want his help. Nancy Updike reports on Dror Etkes, who has taken it as his personal mission to document the spread of Israeli settlements in the West Bank: Every shack, mobile home, housing cluster, bypass road and town.

Jonathan Goldstein, host of Wiretap, brings us this story about The Penguin as a young man.

A few times every summer, for complicated scientific reasons, thousands of live fish, crab and shrimp wash up onto the beaches of Mobile Bay, Alabama, on the Gulf Coast. It's a natural event—like a hurricane, but good.

Jessica Riddle reports on how, as a teenager, she and her friends would pick up the phone and dial the letters of the name "Heather" and talk to the old man who'd pick up the phone. At first they'd just prank call him.

Host Ira Glass talks to Anthony Swofford, a former marine sniper and author of the Gulf War memoir Jarhead. He explains what he's seeing when he watches this new war with Iraq on television.

Jonathan Goldstein interrogates the girls, now grown up, who terrorized him and his classmates years ago in school—and finds they can be just as scary as ever. Jonathan Goldstein is the author of the novel Lenny Bruce is Dead.

For months Bill and Liz have gone around New York City with a sign that says "Talk To Me." It works. In subways and bars, on the street or in office lobbies, people come up and talk to them about any old thing.

The story of a hustler who wakes up every morning broke, hustles as much as $10,000, and then loses most of it by the time he goes to bed.

When you get to know someone, really know them, you can almost predict their behavior. It's comforting, this intimacy.

Tice Ridley is a first lieutenant in the Army. He's been sending regular emails from Kuwait City, where he's stationed, about what it's like to wait for the war to begin, and what it's like to actually fight it.

The story of a man who might have a better grip on what's going on in the economy of middle-class America than all the experts you ever read in the paper or see on TV. Dave Ramsey hosts a call-in radio show about personal finance, but he ends up answering questions about more than money.

Sarah Vowell tells the story about the first time the United States attacked a country that hadn't attacked us first. It was also the first time the U.S. went to a foreign country to force a regime change.

Yet another testimony to the power chickens have over our hearts and minds.  Jack Hitt reports on an opera about Chicken Little.  It's performed with dressed-up styrofoam balls, it's sung in Italian and, no kidding, able to make grown men cry. (14 minutes)The official website for the opera "Love's Fowl" by Susan Vitucci and Henry Krieger is pulcina.org.

Issam Shukri is an Iraqi man living in Canada. He lived in Baghdad when it was bombed during the first gulf war.

The people who pick up our trash don't call themselves garbagemen. They're san men ("san" being short for "sanitation").

Michael Bernard Loggins, a developmentally disabled man in his 50s, tried to battle his fears by listing them, and came up with a list 138 items long. With the help of an arts program, Creativity Explored, he published his list in two zines called Fears of Your Life and Fears of Your Life: A Whole New One.

In the war on terror, the government is rounding up foreigners, checking their immigration status, and then, sometimes, deporting them. It won't give out their names.

A few years back, a writer named Lee Sandlin wrote a story for the weekly paper The Chicago Reader about what makes wartime different—how a country's perceptions and logic during war are fundamentally different than during peace. It was a massive historical article, exhaustively researched.

Patrick Wall was a special kind of monk. He was a fixer.

The story of a preventive act of war committed 3200 years ago, in the land that's now Turkey, not too far from Iraq. Seneca's The Trojan Woman takes place at the end of the Trojan war.

For over two decades, there's been a secret court in the United States called the FISA court (short for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act). Its job is to authorize wiretaps on possible foreign spies and foreign agents.

When Janice Powell's husband went to prison, he wrote her a letter every day for eight years. When he was at home, he'd drink and get violent, but Janice said that the years in prison were the best of their relationship.