Mohamedou talks with Sydney, who still thinks he was a major player in Al Qaeda. She was an intelligence analyst, who spent weeks at Guantanamo, questioning him.

John Hodgman first encountered Cuervo Man on a press junket to Cuervo Nation, a small island owned by Jose Cuervo Tequila. Cuervo Man was wearing nothing but a Speedo, wraparound shades, and a red cape.

Banias talks about the war.

Clara’s anesthesia is not working.

Zach’s mother and sister weigh in on the agreement. (28 minutes)

Ian Brown tries, after decades of failure, to give his mother the perfect Christmas gift. He and his brother attempt something they haven't done since they were kids: Rehearse and sing her a program of Christmas carols.

Sometimes, a lore drop comes when you least expect it.  That happened to Jake Cornell and his grandmother. Producer Aviva DeKornfeld talked to Jake about it. (14 minutes)Jake told a version of this story onstage.

Dan Taberski takes us into the world of the TV shows Cops and Live PD. And talks to people about what it’s like to be caught by the police and caught on camera at the same time.

Zack McDermott was a lawyer who moonlighted as a comedian.

Producer Alix Spiegel reports on the city of Pacifica, California. A huge fight erupted there after it was asked to start planning for sea level rise.

Producer Zoe Chace has been following Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake for the last few months, reporting on the run-up to his re-election bid in 2018.

For some people, this election wasn’t just about choosing a politician. It was about choosing their new boss.

On September 29th a medical researcher in Philadelphia fired off a simple, well-meaning tweet, and then barely thought twice about it. Little did she know that by doing that, she was perpetrating covert propaganda on behalf of the U.S. government.

Ira talks to Rick Clark, director of undergraduate admissions at the Georgia Institute of Technology, better known as Georgia Tech. Clark says the latest trend in misguided college admissions efforts: parents emailing and calling the admissions office, pretending to be their own children.

To get a sense of what may be broken about our process for bringing these Iraqis into the US, the ones who worked with US forces and who believe their lives are now in danger because of that, Kirk Johnson tells Nancy Updike about one guy. Almost a year of his emails were forwarded to Kirk, who printed them out and started to realize that he was looking at a dead man’s attempt to immigrate to the U.S.

Julia Lurie is an American teaching English at an all-girls high school in Gwangju, a city in South Korea. When she first got there, some things struck her as strange: On every floor of the school there was a full-length mirror, as well as a scale.

We hear from the people in the land of the non-working: Fred Beaton on hislast shift driving a shuttle bus at Logan Airport before he retires; LincCohen and Sandi Weisenberg talk about what chores get done once retirementbegins; and Angela Jane Evancie tries to get her boyfriend, Morgan Peach, tostop relaxing quite so much.

Ira tells the story of how Oscar Ramirez, a Guatemalan immigrant living near Boston, got a phone call with some very strange news about his past. A public prosecutor from Guatemala told Oscar that when he was three years old, he may have been abducted from a massacre at a village called Dos Erres.

Host Ira Glass speaks with various people who regularly eat foods that give them severe allergic reactions, stomach cramping and trips to the hospital.

Corporate Personhood.

On every British nuclear submarine, there is a safe. Inside that safe is another safe.

Former Bush Administration official David Frum explains a very surprising fact about Bush's economic failure, as it relates to health care. Frum is a regular contributor to the radio show Marketplace.

More stories of travelers and workers at a highway rest stop. The competition between Plattekill and Maine continues.