Producer Sean Cole visits Chad's Trading Post in Southampton, Massachusetts. One person who works there wears a shirt that says "Chad's Brother;" other shirts say "Chad's Best Friend," "Chad's Cousin," and "Chad's Father." Pictures of Chad are everywhere.

Paul Tough visits Catherine Chalmers. She raises small animals and insects in her apartment, feeds them to each other, and photographs them eating each other.

This American Life contributor Paul Tough visits Catherine Chalmers. She raises small animals and insects in her apartment, feeds them to each other, and photographs them eating each other.

The Navy’s Seventh Fleet has seen a string of collisions and accidents, killing 17 sailors this year. Producer Stephanie Foo learned about a part of Navy life that investigators say played a role in these accidents.

The next-to-last day of the month. Deals fall apart, but not all of them.

Wendy Dorr, an assistant producer at Radio Diaries, has this story of what happens to you if you break one of the cardinal rules of a hospital, over and over, for years.

Back in 1999 there was series of bombings of apartment buildings in Moscow and across Russia. 300 people died. It happened just as Vladimir Putin was coming to power.

David Kestenbaum desperately wants to set the record straight for everybody about whether aliens regularly visit earth. They don’t, he says.

A small-town mayor tries to keep a developer from building in his town...and it results in the kind of snowballing fiasco by the end of which the town literally doesn't exist anymore. Alix Spiegel tells that story, which she produced with funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

LA writer/performer Sandra Tsing Loh discovers that a local rock band has recorded a song about her own father, wildly misinterpreting who he is. They think he’s a free spirit; she believes he’s a worried, miserly grump.

A staffer at St Joseph Medical Center in Houston finds a patient shot on the floor of his room. He is unarmed, and has been shot by the cops in the hospital.

Thanh Tan was a TV reporter in Boise, Idaho, when her boss passed along what seemed like a hot news tip: A sex offender was working with kids at a local ice rink, as a hockey referee. But when she looked into it, she found out the crime was more than a decade old.

Sherman Alexie's story "Because My Father was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play the Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock." (15 minutes)

The last day of the month ends.

At the start of the year, Warren Carpenter was a Kristina Karamo supporter; helped her get elected.

When Starlee Kine was a kid, she wanted to be a child star so badly that she signed up for an acting class with a famous acting teacher named Kevin McDermott. One of the class's exercises was to develop a character with a troubled past, and a real psychologist would come in for a session of character group therapy.

Chana Joffe-Walt spent six months reporting on the rise in people on disability. She spends time in Hale County, Alabama, talking to the only general practitioner in town, the main person who okays so many of the county's residents for disability.

As the ferris wheel goes dark and the fair is closing down, one game is racing to meet their quota.

Gillian's story continues.

Our story from the prologue continues.

Reporter Julia Preston goes to a mass hearing in McAllen, Texas where 74 immigrants are being charged in a federal courtroom as a result of zero tolerance. Julia is a contributing writer for The Marshall Project, which published a print version of this story.

Host Ira Glass talks to Governor Jay Nixon of Missouri on a press conference he held to announce the creation of just one job.

In 2012, the fever broke, and the Albertville city council stopped targeting Latino residents. The mayor says he and the council are taking a cue from the public schools.

In 2022, Michigan Republicans ran anti-establishment candidates who claimed the last presidential election was stolen. And they lost big.