In order to make foie gras — goose liver — the birds have to be treated inhumanely, strapped down and force-fed huge amounts of food. So when a chef named Dan Barber heard about Eduardo Sousa, a Spaniard who had supposedly found a way to make foie gras without mistreating the animals, Dan didn't believe it ... until he went to Spain to investigate.

Hyder Akbar was a teenager living with his family in the Bay Area when president Hamid Karzai asked Hyder's dad to return to Afghanistan and become an official in the new government. Hyder recorded audio diaries that became two episodes of our show, in 2002 and 2003, both produced by Susan Burton.

Unemployment is 9 percent, but it's worst among high school dropouts andpeople with only a high school education. Adam went to a place that'strying to help them find jobs: an organization called Pathstone, inRochester, NY.

Ira Glass speaks with several members of the Planet Money team, who all found themselves—in the course of their reporting—independently asking the same stoner-ish question: What is money? Ira and Planet Money producer Jacob Goldstein discuss a pre-industrial society on the island of Yap that used giant stones as currency. The book that Jacob read about Yap is called The Island of Stone Money.

We asked for your stories about amusement parks. Three hundred of youcalled in, with stories of fear, floating carnies and, um, vomit.

Sarah Koenig attended last weekend's Penn State game, the last home game of the season, with Michael Winereb and his parents. Weinreb grew up in State College, and has written several widely circulated columns for the website Grantland about his reactions to the recent scandal.

In Malawi, in southeast Africa, not gossiping can be worse than gossiping. Sarah interviews a young Malawian woman named Hazel Namandingo, who explains that because so many people have HIV and AIDS in Malawi, they often rely on gossip to figure out who's safe to date or marry.

When he was a kid, Josh Martin's mother Nancy told him that if anythingever happened to her, he needed to take care of his brother Ben. This confusedJosh, because Ben was his older brother, and he felt that if anything heshould be the one taken care of.

Last summer when Nancy Updike was reporting in Iraq, Sarah, an Iraqi woman in her 40s, was her interpreter. But it wasn't the first time Sarah had had that gig.

Back in 2004, a reporter named David Holthouse published a remarkable story in the weekly paper he worked for, Westword. It's about something he waited his entire life to do...since childhood.

NPR reporter Laura Sydell and This American Life producer/Planet Money co-host Alex Blumberg tell the story of Intellectual Ventures, which is accused of being the largest of the patent trolls. The investigation takes them to a small town in Texas, where they find a hallway full of empty companies with no employees.

Jeanne Darst was 16 when her parents split up. But it turned out they just weren't too skilled at the whole divorce thing.

Actor Michael Chernus reads Etgar Keret's short story "What Of This Goldfish Would You Wish?" in which a young man decides to make a documentary about the secret longings of everyday Israelis. But he's not prepared for what he sees in the house of a man named Sergei.

Chicago writer Rebecca Makkai bring us the story of a reality television producer attempting to gossip love into existence—and just how complicated that gets. This fiction story originally appeared in the journal Crazyhorse.

Chana Joffe-Walt visits a governor who first became famous for promising hisstate he'd create jobs: Scott Walker of Wisconsin. (Yes, he's famous forsome other things since.) Walker promised 250,000 new jobs and 10,000 newbusiness in his state by the end of his first term.

"Thug" is a very imprecise word. And as producer Nancy Updike explains, the subjectivity of its meaning has been particularly apparent during the recent revolution in Egypt.

Jyllian Gunther visits The Brooklyn Free School, where there are no courses, no tests and no homework, and where the kids decide everything about how the school is run, including discipline.

We hear excerpts from our 2009 episode that was recorded at Penn State. Though the focus of that episode was student drinking and partying, we hear how much of the culture of the school is organized around football and how deeply people loved the team and Coach Joe Paterno.

The number of wild turkeys in the United States has risen from 30,000 at thebeginning of the 20th century to an estimated seven million today. And it'scommon for them to get aggressive with people.

Some adventures you seek out on purpose, and others hunt you down. Producer Alex Blumberg tells this story, about the experience a guy had in China...which started out as first kind of adventure, then quickly turned into the second kind.

Sometimes it's hard to figure out if you're doing something of your own choice or because someone wants you to do it. Actor Matt Malloy reads "Guilt," a short story by Judith Budnitz.

Producer Sarah Koenig continues the story Terry Engelder and Dan Volz, their rival calculations about natural gas in Pennsylvania, and how each was treated by his university. She explains how Pennsylvania's universities, politicans and industry have united to develop natural gas.

Producer Ben Calhoun heads to his home state of Wisconsin, a place currently turned against itself in the form of Senate recall elections. Ben found that the old way of doing politics in Wisconsin has been flipped completely upside down.

Ira continues with Cole Lindbergh and the hundred teenagers who work for himin the games department at Worlds of Fun. We watch them compete againsteach other to see who can do the most business, in Cole's Sweet Sixteenbracket tournament, which pits all 32 games in the park against each other.