Scott Carrier tells the story of how the environmentalist that ranchers hated the most—whom they tried to run out of town and hanged in effigy—came to take the ranchers' side of things. Some funding for this story comes from Hearingvoices.com and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Host Ira Glass plays parts of a speech by George Ryan, former Governor of Illinois. When he was a state senator in 1977, Ryan was part of a successful coalition that voted to reinstate the death penalty in Illinois.
David Sedaris tells a story about how, as a teenager, he was scared of certain people...until he made them scared of him, one fateful night. Sedaris is the author of Me Talk Pretty One Dayand other books.
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.
The story of a man who might have a better grip on what's going on in the economy of middle-class America than all the experts you ever read in the paper or see on TV. Dave Ramsey hosts a call-in radio show about personal finance, but he ends up answering questions about more than money.
Anthony Swofford reads an excerpt from his memoir, Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles, about his experience fighting in the first Gulf War in 1991, as a Marine sniper.
A few years back, a writer named Lee Sandlin wrote a story for the weekly paper The Chicago Reader about what makes wartime different—how a country's perceptions and logic during war are fundamentally different than during peace. It was a massive historical article, exhaustively researched.
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.