Sometimes the inner voice telling us to do the wrong thing actually sounds like a voice. TAL producer Nancy Updike talks to people about the voices in their heads that persuade them to go astray.

Radio reporter Adam Davidson went to Iraq to report on the war. He decided that rather than living in some journalist compound in the Green Zone or in a big hotel—places insurgents were more likely to attack—he'd fly under the radar, and keep safe...by renting a house in a residential Baghdad neighborhood.

This American Life producer Nancy Updike tells the story of Conrad Crane, the head of the U.S. Army Military History Institute.

This American Life producer Nancy Updike talks with a man, Eric Molinsky, about a weirdly heated argument he got into with a good friend, over corporate tax loopholes. Midway through, they both stopped to think: Why were they getting so upset over an issue they didn't really care about that much? And then they realized: Eric's ex-girlfriend was a political activist, and Eric's friend's ex-boyfriend was a hedge fund manager.

It's one thing to wonder what other people really think of you. It's quite another to go out and ask them.

Host Ira Glass talks with Lauren Waterman, who's in the middle of a break-up right now and grappling with totally contradictory feelings. (5 minutes)

Dr. David Kalenberger is the head of a fertility clinic in Oklahoma City.

Rachel North was on a train that got blown up during the London subway bombings. After writing a very popular blog about her experience and her recovery afterward, Rachel became a spokeswoman for a survivors' group.

What divorce looks like from the dog's point of view. (5 minutes)This monologue was performed by Merrill Markoe and recorded at Un-Cabaret in Los Angeles.

Joe had lived alone in his big house in Brooklyn for decades. Then one night he saw a few people—prostitutes, actually—shivering outside in the cold, and he opened up his home to them.

Jack Hitt explains how President Bush's War on Terror changed the rules for prisoners of war and how it is that under those rules, it'd be possible that someone whose classified file declares that they pose no threat to the United States could still be locked up indefinitely—potentially forever!—at Guantanamo.

Yet another testimony to the power chickens have over our hearts and minds. Contributing editor Jack Hitt reports on an opera about Chicken Little.

Eight-year-old Betsy Walter goes on a campaign to understand her parents' divorce.

Robyn Forest thought she'd gotten her big break when a magazine assigned her to write about a famous Japanese pop singer. Instead, Robyn ended up on Japanese television denying that she and the singer were having an affair.

When the U.S. government sent out a call for volunteers—regular, non-military people—to go to Iraq and help rebuild the country, Randy Frescoln signed up. He believed in the cause of the war and in the promise of its mission.

Host Ira Glass talks to Rachel Howard, whose father, Stan, was murdered when she was 10 years old. His case was never solved.

Josh Bearman grew up in California with his dad, stepmom, and brother. But they're not his whole family.

Ron Mallett was ten years old when his father died unexpectedly of a heart attack. A year later, after picking up a comic book based on H.G.

Jason Minter lived through the worst trauma you could imagine: He was at a friend's house, a gun pressed to his head, while his mother and another woman were raped and shot to death in the next room by robbers. He was six.

A man who we're calling "Dennis" inherits his father's job as a landlord of a big apartment building. His dad had warned him that bad tenants could drive even a good man to become heartless, but Dennis vowed that would never happen to him. He's tested on this point when he tries to help a couple that falls behind in their rent.

Growing up, Clevins Browne moved all over New York with his mother, in different apartments and homeless shelters. But that all changed when he was 12, and they got an apartment in a public housing complex in Brooklyn.