Author David Sedaris on cell phone usage in restrooms.

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.

This American Life senior producer Julie Snyder found herself in a ten-month battle with her phone company, MCI Worldcom, which had overcharged her $946.36. She spent hours on hold in a bureaucratic nowhere.

Reporter Jack Hitt explains the alarming difference between theory and practice when it comes to computerized voting machines—specifically, those made by a company called Diebold.

Host Ira Glass tells the story of Chris Sewell, who was living on the street and yet somehow managed to find $610,940 of lost money that belonged to the city of New York, hidden away on the Internet.

Another story of someone using the word love as they try to make sense of things. Russell Banks reads an edited version of his short story "Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story," which appears in its full version in his collection The Angel on the Roof.

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.

If you're going to do a show about people who are lost, you pretty much have to include a story about adolescents. Jonathan Goldstein tells a story from his teenage years.

After 25 years at the same company, a man starts a new life with a new venture: a cable channel that shows nothing but puppies.

An act named after two TV shows, one where women sit around and talk, the other where men sit around and talk. If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, when you switch from one planet to another, what do you need to know about love? We hear from several transsexual men who've done exactly that.

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.

Two stories of communication where the words really don't matter: Elizabeth Gilbert tells the story of the worst wedding toast she's ever heard of. This story first appeared on the former website Other People's Stories.

Host Ira Glass explains how you can get away with anything if you claim you did it for love.

Susan Drury talks about "Swap and Shop," a local radio classifieds show that has become a low-tech, personable sort of Ebay.

What's French for French Fries? David Sedaris has been following the diplomatic fiascoes of the last few months from Paris, where he lives. Relations between France and the U.S. have been so horrible these days we asked him how it seemed from over there.

Ira and his friend Danielle, whose family says they're eating fish when in fact it's turkey or chicken, for an unusual reason.

Host Ira Glass talks with Michael Beaumier, who runs the personals section of the Chicago Reader, and who functions as a kind of guardian angel for many of the singles who advertise in his paper.

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.

In the 1960s, the adventures of "The Greatest Crimefighter the World Has Ever Known"—Chickenman—were heard on hundreds of radio stations. On today's show, the winged warrior flies again.

Katy Vine reports on yet another promising young person, Tye Thomas, and how he went through the rise and fall of a full political career, in just one year, at the age of 21, in the Texas town of Gun Barrel City.

We hear a brief clip of host Ira Glass talking to John Podesta, who as chief of staff under President Clinton helped institute that administration's policy of declassifying as many documents possible. The Bush administration's philosophy is very different.

The story of a typical American family, and how their family dynamic has reorganized itself around an imaginary duck, invented in childhood, who somehow stayed alive well into adulthood.  (14 minutes)

A two minute play called “Title,” written and performed by Greg Allen and Heather Riordan of the Chicago group, The Neo-Futurists.

Ira talks to historian Ted Widmer about two of the first pen pals in the New World. John Winthrop and Roger Williams were both Puritans in Massachusetts in the 1630s.