Host Ira Glass describes the moment when black single mothers became a national political issue—and a national symbol. It was 1965, when a young Assistant Secretary of Labor named Daniel Patrick Moynihan issued a report calling for action on the issue of African-American single mothers, and black leaders, including the Rev.

Host Ira Glass lays out the premise of this week's show.

Ira takes us through a couple of occasions in which President Trump has evoked the brutal street gang MS-13. The President has lauded local law enforcement on Long Island on its efforts to stop the gang.

This clip is from what Ira calls “the beachiest show” public radio ever made.

Host Ira Glass reminds us that, before they change the country, all major Supreme Court cases start with just a person, in a place. (3 minutes)

Ira observes that we are in a moment of national reconsideration.

Most big grand transformations we go through really come down to a hundred little things that we change about ourselves. This recently happened for a refugee from Afghanistan, now living in Detroit.

The anti-government protests last month in Russia were surprising for a few reasons – including the fact that they included tons of young people. After the protests, teenagers started posting videos to the internet of their teachers lecturing them about the protests and the kids arguing back.

It's been a tumultuous week of protests and demonstrations in Egypt. NancyUpdike talks to two Egyptian men whose ideologies are completely opposite,except one thing unites them: Their anger at the United States.

Host Ira Glass tells the stories of two professors, each making a calculation that no one had made before. One gets acclaim.

Three days into the beginning of the new millenium, Kahari Mosley and Garcia Suzinko left home to do something they'd never done before: They took a twelve-hour bus ride to New Hampshire to volunteer for a Presidential campaign. What they saw...and what moved them to volunteer in the first place.

When Eustace Conway was 17, he abandoned his normal life and decided to move to the woods.

For years there was a word that Val’s mother did not want to use.

Ben Loory reads his short story about an unlikely friendship that forms between a moose and a man. It's from his fiction collection Stories for the Nighttime and Some for the Day.

Sarah Vowell identifies a phenomenon that's sort of a cultural rerun. It's an analogy that gets made over and over in different situations: people who often are not black, or women, or in any way involved with civil rights, comparing themselves to Rosa Parks.

Kathie Russo's husband was Spalding Gray, who was best known for delivering monologues onstage—like "Monster in a Box," and "Swimming to Cambodia." On January 10, 2004, he went missing. Witnesses said they saw him on the Staten Island Ferry that night.

We play excerpts from the documentary film Troop 1500. In the film, girl scouts from an Austin, Texas, troop visit their mothers, all of whom are in prison.

Host Ira Glass talks with NPR's Car Talk hosts Tom and Ray Maggliozi and a former employee of theirs, Joe Richman. Ray once fixed Joe's beloved '72 Plymouth Valiant, a repair job which hastened it to its grave...but probably got Joe a girlfriend.

David Rakoff tells a story about an actual pursuit—a scavenger hunt—that takes hundreds of hours to create ... done for the sheer pleasure of it.

How David Sedaris became a Christmas writer — and how he started writing stories about the holiday that are so dark that sometimes it seems that he's trying to single handedly destroy Christmas. We hear from members of David's own family, and from David, all of whom insist that David loves Christmas.

Jay Allison on people moving into their dream neighborhoods, and their new neighbors' reactions.

Writer David Sedaris remembers the days his mother and sister played armchair detective, and the odd crime wave that hit their own home. This story, titled "True Detective," appears in David's book Naked.

When writer Mariya Karimjee was a kid in Pakistan she heard about this elaborate ceremony at the border with India where soldiers on both sides performed perfectly synchronized sky-high kicks and steps. But she went to visit and it was not what she expected.