"Slow to react" is usually an insult. But in this case the things that are slow...are cancer cells.

Painter Schandra Singh usually sells her paintings to wealthy art collectors. So when she gets a letter from a father of a boy with autism, saying his son loves her work, she decides to do a trade with him, one of her sketches for one of his.

A family dreams of life in rural Maine, moves there, and then things get really complicated.

A teenager runs away from home to move in with someone he's never met, his idol, the person he respects most of all — a fantasy writer named Piers Anthony. Logan Hill reports.

David Sedaris reads one of his funniest and most affecting stories from his book Naked before a live audience. As an adolescent boy, David feared he might be a homosexual.

Daniel Alarcón takes us back to the early 90’s when Keiko lived in an adventure park in Mexico City, swimming with human friends. (43 minutes)

Paul Zimmer is eighty-three years old now, and he’s still haunted by something he saw in his teens. Something very few Americans have ever seen: The explosion of an atomic bomb.

Before Sinatra died, Sarah Vowell appeared on this radio program and made a prediction about how network news would cover Sinatra's death ... and she made a simple plea. We hear whether her prediction came true.

In preparing for this show, we started reaching out to Americans living in China and asking for their stories. A shocking amount of the expats came back with stories about different times they were on Chinese television.

Kara instructs some of her male friends on the proper ways to treat a girl.

We head to deep inside the natural habitat of frenemies: Reality TV. Rich Juzwiak is a full-time blogger for VH1 and his own pop-culture blog which means he's spent a lot of time watching and dissecting reality TV shows.

It seems apples for the teacher is a bygone tradition. Host Ira Glass talks to Mindy, a first-grade teacher, about the rather racy gifts her students give these days at Christmas.

Adam Felber explains how legalized gay marriage are ruining his marriage with his wife. (His comments first appeared on his blog felbers.net.) And Ira talks about legal strategies with Matt Staver, the head of the group defending traditional marriage in the California lawsuits; and with David Cruz, a law professor at the University of Southern California.

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.

Host Ira Glass explains that when you name names, when you whistleblow, when you tell on someone, you often do it anonymously. We hear from one anonymous squealer, who was done wrong by her doctor—he messed up a procedure and then refused to fix it.

We hear from two Americans who live in Paris about what it is that draws the people who love France so much.

How California Governor Pete Wilson's anti-immigrant policies found some supporters among immigrants themselves. We hear an explanation of the profoundly idealistic notion of "self-deportation" from its main proponent, Daniel D.

Professor Glenn Loury from Boston University and John Simpkins on basketball, hockey, and what makes a real black person.

Writer/performer Danny Hoch performs a monologue taken from his one man show, Jails, Hospitals and Hip-Hop. It's a story about a guy who's been locked up for doing the most American activity possible: Selling stuff on the street (in this case Bart Simpson/O.J. Simpson t-shirts).

Danny Toro, a member of a Chicago street gang for ten years, explains what gangster movies he liked most in his gang years and why. Scarface, with Al Pacino, was a good movie to get him pumped up to go out with his boys. A Lucky Luciano film taught him a lesson in how to be more compassionate with members of his own gang.

Before Sinatra died, Sarah Vowell appeared on this radio program and made a prediction about how network news would cover Sinatra's death ... and she made a simple plea. We hear whether her prediction came true.

Michael Stumm on the uses of chickens in South African sangoma (witch doctor) culture.

Host Ira Glass talks to Congressman Mark Pocan and Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal about a bold bill they sponsored last week.

Emanuele Berry and Ira Glass watch a Soviet film from 1936. A bizarre cameo of an African American baby in an all-white crowd makes Emanuele wonder about what it’s like to be Black in a country with so few Black people.