Guest host Emmanuel Dzotsi talks to Leroy Smith about how one high school basketball tryout forever changed Leroy’s relationship to a childhood friend. (7 minutes)

Editor Bethel Habte examines video evidence of two parents trying to get to the bottom of a minor crime committed in their own home. (7 minutes)

Every year, thousands of teenagers come from all over the world to experience American high school. Last year, thirteen students from Palestine came to the US on a program sponsored by the US State Department.

Reporter Ben Austen continues the story.

Zoe Chace and Ben Terris follow Abbas Alawieh as he fights to broker a deal at the DNC – a way to potentially satisfy the people who voted “Uncommitted” in the primaries as a protest vote against Biden’s handling of the war in Israel and Gaza.

Over the course of one week in December, Yousef tries to get his sisters to safety, in Rafah. (29 minutes)

Why are people asking me if my mother recognizes me, when it’s totally beside the point? (14 minutes)Janelle Taylor originally wrote about her mother in an academic paper for Medical Anthropology Quarterly.

Yousef does not even want to think about leaving Gaza. (18 minutes)

Reporter M. Gessen talks to Russians living in America and elsewhere about the lists the Russian government has put them on in the last few years.

Host Ira Glass bikes around Manhattan with Gersh Kuntzman, in search of illegal license plates.

Producer Zoe Chace with a political fable that she noticed playing out last week in North Carolina. (11 minutes)Zoe covered Mark Harris’ election fraud case in the podcast The Improvement Association by Serial Productions and The New York Times.

Ira interviews David Wallechinsky, who wrote a wildly popular book in the 1970s called The Book of Lists, full of trivia and research, gathered into lists like "18 Brains" and "What They Weighed." The book sold millions of copies and had four sequels and a brief spin-off TV show. The list books were like the internet, before the internet.

Reporter Alix Spiegel talks to two people with good reason to fear a second Trump administration. Former White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham spent six years with the Trumps but resigned after January 6th and wrote a scathing tell-all book about her experience.

Chen talks about what it was like to walk around the streets of Gaza in disguise and their eventual release, 51 days after they were taken from their home. (13 minutes)Excerpts from interviews conducted by Lee Naim and produced by Echad Bayom.

Daniel Alarcón takes us back to the early 90’s when Keiko lived in an adventure park in Mexico City, swimming with human friends. (43 minutes)

The Iowa State Fair awarded coveted slots to just nine new food vendors this year. All of them are run by people who already own restaurants or who’ve done other big fairs.

Since the beginning of the war in Gaza, Yousef Hammash has decided where to go next and when. In Rafah, he is out of options and faces his toughest move yet.

Elena Kostyuchenko tells the story of how she was probably poisoned after reporting on Russian’s invasion of Ukraine, and how she kept not believing it was happening. Bela Shayevich translated this story from Russian and reads it for us. (21 minutes)We adapted this from an article in n+1 magazine.

Trump has claimed that he will be able to deport between 15 and 20 million people. But neither he nor his team have spelled out exactly how they’d do it.

Two college friends try to stop Donald Trump’s primary season momentum by convincing New Hampshire voters to vote against everything they care about. Producer Zoe Chace follows along.

Yousef is managing a camp of 60 people in Rafah, including his youngest sister, who is 8 months pregnant. Every day there’s talk that Israel will launch a ground assault in Rafah. Yousef and his sister make a plan for her to give birth safely, but it doesn’t go according to plan. And all 60 people in the family are looking to Yousef to tell them where they should go next and how to stay safe.

The story of a woman from Gaza City who ran out of words.

The parole board members puzzle through the pros and cons of releasing Henry Dee from prison and cast their votes. (26 minutes)