After every school shooting a political debate reemerges about guns. Meanwhile, kids keep going to school.

Reporter Laura Beil tells the story of a kid named Kenneth Williams and an adult named Ton'Nea Williams (who share a last name but are not related).

Jasmine and Gabbie are best friends. BFFs! But there’s something major that they’ve never been able to talk about.

Manny Howard talks with Paul Tough about why he loved fighting in bars and on the street, and about how hard it is to quit. Manny is the author of My Empire of Dirt: How One Man Turned His Big-City Backyard into a Farm.

An Iraqi translator named Sarah has been trying to get to the U.S. for eight years. Finally, this fall, she got a call to come in for an interview for her visa.

Psychiatry used to be all talk. Then came a patient named Ray Osheroff.

Who among us has not wanted amnesia to help get over someone or something? But the problem with amnesia is that it happens a lot more in TV shows and movies and novels than it does in real life. We send reporter Scott Carrier to find someone who really has had amnesia.

We turn to those who are truly spineless, and I mean literally, they are creatures that have no spines. Also featured in this story: the people who study them who, like us all, could sometimes use a little more spine.

One evening last fall, Rachel McKibbens got a text from her younger brother, Peter. It read: “I’ve been too distraught to tell you, but Dad passed away today at 2:42 p.m.” She had no idea her father had even been sick, and no idea that her brother was also dying.

Daniel Kish says that through clicking, he forms mental pictures. He actually sees.

Ira Glass travels through Israel with Adam Davidson, who speaks Hebrew and has countless Israeli cousins and other family members. They find that the entire country has moved to the right in reaction to Palestinian violence.

Sarah Polley has always been reluctant to jump into challenging situations.

During her sophomore year in high school, Nevaeh was targeted in a secret text message chain by a handful of her peers. She’d come to learn the text chat was a mock slave trade where her photo and photos of other Black classmates were uploaded, talked about as property, and bid on.

Ben Calhoun tells a story of physical resemblance — not of a person, but of food. A while ago, a farmer walked through a pork processing plant in Oklahoma with a friend who managed it.

Two Americans moved to Eswatini when that country was the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic. With support from USAID, they built a clinic and started serving HIV+ patients.

The story of a hustler who wakes up every morning broke, hustles as much as $10,000, and then loses most of it by the time he goes to bed.

A young couple, excited to start a new chapter in their lives, is suddenly put on a very different trajectory. (30 minutes)

The president of the Black Student Union at the University of Utah fights to keep the B in BSU. (30 minutes)

Last summer when Nancy Updike was reporting in Iraq, Sarah, an Iraqi woman in her 40s, was her interpreter. But it wasn't the first time Sarah had had that gig.

Alex Blumberg takes us to an American classroom where students are reading a classic, The Education of Little Tree, by Forrest Carter. The book is marketed as a simple homespun autobiography of a Cherokee orphan.

Dante Nero has been involved in this group for years, since before it even had a name. He’s seen its evolution.

Back in the late 1960s, a wealthy tobacco heiress saw that integration was happening all around the country—except at prep schools in the South. So she set out to find the best Black students in neighborhood public schools—in hopes of teaching the white prep-school students to be less bigoted. Mosi Secret tells the story of how the first two Black students to integrate Virginia Episcopal School succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations.

Writer Michael Lewis tells the story of a man named Emir Kamenica, whose path to college started with fleeing the war in Bosnia and becoming a refugee in the United States. Then he had a stroke of luck: a student teacher read an essay he’d plagiarized from a book he’d stolen from a library back in Bosnia, and was so impressed that she got him out of a bad high school and into a much better one.

Last Summer, Alabama passed HB56, the most sweeping immigration bill in the country. It's an example of a strategy called "attrition through enforcement" or, more colloquially, "self-deportation"--making life so hard on undocumented immigrants that they choose to leave the country.