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Act Three: I Am Curious Yellow

A story about a guy named Steven who wants in on a group he definitely was not born into — and seems very unlikely to be accepted by. Filmmaker Debbie Lum tells the story, which is excerpted from her documentary Seeking Asian Female.

Act Two: The Missionary

Once the Fair Housing Act became law in 1968, there was some question about how to implement it and enforce it. George Romney, the former Republican Governor of Michigan and newly-appointed Secretary of HUD, was a true believer in the need to make the Fair Housing Law a powerful one — a robust attempt to change the course of the nation's racial segregation.

Prologue

Andrew Forsthoefel sets out to do something that usually doesn't work as a radio story. After losing a job, he decided to try walking across America from his home in Philadelphia all the way to the Pacific.

Act Two: Car Pool

Sierra Teller Ornelas tells a story about the time as a 10 year old she went on a very short, but memorable adventure in a car with the coolest girl she knew. Sierra's story was recorded live at the L.A. storytelling series Public School and aired on the CBC radio show WireTap with Jonathan Goldstein.

Act Two

Reporter Annie Correal hangs around with Sol Saltzman, a demolition guy who’s scrambling for bids around Oklahoma City, to help clean up damage from the recent tornados. It’s a cutthroat business, and Sol explains to Annie how he works all the angles.

Act Three: Game Day

By early October, it's been pretty quiet at Harper, as far as gun violence goes. But on the day before the homecoming game, during a pep rally, a senior named Damoni who is both on the football team and nominated for Homecoming King, gets word that a good friend of his, James, has been shot.

Act One: Weeds of Discontent

A recording of a very unusual conversation that came about in an unusual way. Filmmaker named Eugene Jarecki made a documentary about the drug war, prisons and the criminal justice system called The House I Live In.He’s been taking it around the country and showing it in prisons, and producer Brian Reed went to one of these screenings where an inmate and a corrections staff member ended up talking face-to-face.

Act One

Julie Snyder talks about a favorite passage from Sarah Vowell's story in episode 107: Trail of Tears. Then she talks about Alex Blumberg's interview with Griffin Hansbury in episode 220: Testosterone.Robyn Semien talks about Ira's interview with Denise Moore, who was trapped in the New Orleans Convention Center after Hurricane Katrina.

Prologue

Ira talks to 15 year old Jada who, when she was in third grade, moved from Akron Public Schools in Ohio, to the nearby Copley-Fairlawn schools in the suburbs. After two years, Jada was kicked out by administrators who discovered that her mother was using Jada's grandfather's address in Copley, instead of her own in Akron.

Prologue

Ira talks with Producer Nancy Updike about when she first met Kirk Johnson in 2007. At the time he was mulling a crazy plan that involved Iraqi refugees, the Coast Guard and a boat.

Act One: Photo Op

Producer Nancy Updike goes to the West Bank to investigate why Israeli soldiers routinely wake up Palestinian families in the middle of the night, to take photos of the teen boys in the house.

Act One: The Old College Try

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.

Act Two: Emails from a Dead Man

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.

Prologue

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.

Act One: Reluctant Sailor

Kirk sleepwalks through an open window and into a completely different life. He explains how he starts compiling a list of Iraqis who’d worked with the U.S. government after the invasion, whose lives were now in danger because of that.

Act Two: Wonder Woman

Kelly McEvers with the story of Zora, a self-made superhero. From the time she was five years old, Zora had recurring dreams in which she was a 6'5" warrior queen, who could fly and shoot lightning from her hands.