Ira plays excerpts from a 1966 episode of Studs Terkel's WFMT radio show, with guest Mike Royko talking about a scandal.

Producer Sarah Koenig talks to the people behind survey results—whose answers determine so much of political news.

What happens when seventh graders become an angry mob? Karen Bernstein reports on her own seventh grade class from small-town Connecticut. In 1973, a teacher turned them into an angry mob, an event they all remember decades later.

Modern-day fables of two different kinds of do-gooders during and after the 1994 genocide in the African country of Rwanda. Philip Gourevich, author of the book We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, tells first about international relief workers who served as "caterers" to some of the Hutu powers as they continued their policy of ethnic cleansing after fleeing to refugee camps.

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.

Rany Jazayerli was thrilled when one of his closest friends, Mazen, was hired by the Obama campaign as the liaison to the Muslim community, in the months before the presidential election. It only took 3 weeks for a newspaper to attack his character, and for Mazen to resign from the job of a lifetime.

Back in November, two weeks after he was elected president, Barack Obama delivered a pre-taped speech to an international conference on global warming that was convened in Los Angeles by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. It wasn't Obama's most important speech, but the effect it had on the audience was profound—mostly because they heard it through the haze of the last eight years.

Writer Thomas Frank went on the radio show On Point to talk about his book What's the Matter With Kansas? The book is about how people in his home state keep voting for Republicans even though Republican policies aren't helping them economically. But the people who called in to the radio show didn't exactly see it his way.

Ira talks with Chicago Public Radio reporter Shirley Jahad about white Chicagoans and Arab-American Chicagoans facing off, each side waving American flags and shouting "U.S.A."...and how each means very different things when they do it.

To understand how Cicero reacted when Hispanics started flooding into town, you have to understand how it dealt with conflict in the past. For a period the town was run by Al Capone, and the mob was connected to Town Hall for most of the twentieth century.

Judges give their opinions of the drug sentencing laws. Terry Hatter is the Chief U.S.

A look at the Chicago political machine in the days before our story begins.

The first part of Josh Seftel and Rich Robinson's documentary about South Africa. Josh meets people who may be distant South African relatives.

Webmaster and Beverly Hills 90210 expert Danny Drennan on the convention. Danny runs the site Inquisitor Mediarama.

Ira Glass brings us back to the moment of celebration when the anti-gerrymandering constitutional amendment was passed in Ohio.

Florida is now the fastest growing state, and DeSantis says people are moving there from all over because of him.

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

Reporter Sam Black visited factory workers in Indiana to see how they were feeling.

Among the big items in DeSantis's run for president is medical freedom. Producer Zoe Chace wanted to understand its appeal and its growing popularity.

No one much likes to talk about it out loud, but everyone knows it's true: There are a lot of people out there who say they won't vote for Obama because he's black. To fight this problem, Richard Trumka, secretary treasurer of the AFL-CIO, has been traveling around the country giving a speech to fellow union members.

There's probably no house more famous for the bad behavior of its denizens than the U.S. House of Representatives.