This American Life contributor Jack Hitt uncovers a strange practice within the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service.

We hear from New York City school teachers about a secret room in the New York City Board of Education building. Teachers are told to report there, and when they arrive, they find out they're under investigation for something.

The New York advertising agency where Shalom Auslander works got an assignment from the State Department back in 2001: Sell American values to the Muslim world. Now they just have to figure out exactly what to say to millions of people they know absolutely nothing about.

Charles Johnson was living in St. Louis, married with a young daughter, and he had no job.

Charlie Brill and Mitzi McCall were a comedy duo back in the mid-1960s, playing clubs around Los Angeles, when their agent called to tell them he'd landed them the gig of a lifetime: They were going to be on The Ed Sullivan Show. The only problem was that their performance was a total fiasco, for a bunch of reasons, including one they never saw coming.

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

Jake Warga heads out with AGHOST, a Seattle group that's using whatever scientific principles they can find to hunt for ghosts. Jake's story got support from Hearing Voices and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and editorial advice from Barrett Golding.

We hear the secret recordings that ended mob control of New York garbage collection, and talk to Rick Cowan, the NYPD detective who went undercover for three years to make them.

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

Sometimes in the classified ads one person will be seeking something that another person will be offering. This is especially true of the musicians section of the classifieds, where there might be a drummer seeking a band, and on the same page, a band seeking a drummer.

Jen's mom Sheila does things like this: She buys a brand name at a discount store, and then returns it to a fancy store for a full refund. She thinks you're a sucker if you don't take advantage of opportunities like that.

The story of a man who committed a murder when he was a teenager. He got away with it, and didn't tell the police for twenty years.

Josh Noel reports with Alex Blumberg from Groom, Texas, 45 minutes east of Amarillo, on the largest cross in the Western hemisphere—it's 19 stories tall—the man who built it, and the people who stop at the cross to pray.

Writer John Hodgman in New York tells the story of how he dreamt of getting to know the B-movie star Bruce Campbell, and how his unlikely dream accidentally came true, partly to his delight, partly to his horror.

David Rakoff goes in search of the only existing mementos of a year-and-a-half of his life when he nearly died from Hodgkins Disease. The missing relics are his own pre-chemotherapized sperm — which reside somewhere in a Toronto lab.

Photographer Joel Meyerowitz decided to go on a last big trip with his father Hy, who has Alzheimer's. Joel also brought his own son.

A Hollywood TV producer tries to convince a church of evangelical Christians to sell out a member of their own congregation. Matt Malloy reads. He was one of the stars of the acclaimed independent film In the Company of Men.Also in this act: Dickens vs.

David Beers explains the gorgeous, modern vision that drew his family, and tons of other families, to California, and then what happened after they arrived.

Beau O'Reilly tells the story of a man who tried to run for President as a utopian nudist.

When a small town loses 100 people in just a few hours, kids come home to find their parents missing. Producer Lilly Sullivan talks to people trying to make sense of where they went and if they’ll come back.

Producer Lina Misitzis travels to Greece with her family to exhume the bones of her dead grandmother. (20 minutes)

An average Chinese citizen decides to go to Wuhan, the heart of the coronavirus epidemic, to see for himself what’s happening there.

Law professor Rebecca Allensworth has been studying another realm of civic-minded individuals charged with helping society function: medical licensing boards. They’re mostly doctors deciding whether other doctors should be allowed to keep practicing medicine.

Reporter Emmanuel Felton called up several Black Capitol Police officers in the days after the attack on the Capitol on January 6th to find out what it was like for them to face off with this mostly white mob. (13 minutes)You can find more of Emmanuel's reporting on race and inequality at BuzzFeed. The video of Eugene Goodman was filmed by Igor Bobic of HuffPost.