Ira Glass talks to journalist Jochen Bittner about a political lie from 1920s Germany and the lessons it holds for 2020s America. His op-ed about this ran in the New York Times. Bittner’s one of the people who runs the Opinion section of the German newspaper Die Zeit.

There’s a museum in Baltimore that was created to memorialize the Black experience in America. It’s called The National Great Blacks in Wax Museum.

Ira Glass talks to Sam Ashner, whose debilitating fear of spiders was ruining his life. So he opted for an extraordinary treatment — the nuclear option — to deal with it.

Reporter Emmanuel Felton called up several Black Capitol Police officers in the days after the attack on the Capitol on January 6th to find out what it was like for them to face off with this mostly white mob. (13 minutes)You can find more of Emmanuel's reporting on race and inequality at BuzzFeed. The video of Eugene Goodman was filmed by Igor Bobic of HuffPost.

When Executive Editor Emanuele Berry’s friend pitched her a show about Black Lives Matter activists, she was not sure. He made it anyway and it’s really good. Today we are featuring some of Saidu Tejan-Thomas Jr.’s reporting from the podcast Resistance. He’s captured a story about Black Lives Matter that has always been there but nobody ever tells. (4 minutes)You can hear Resistance from Gimlet, a Spotify company.

We hear a phone call from this week between Kirk Johnson in California, and Ajmal, a man standing in a canal outside the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Mohamedou talks to a man he only knew as Mr. X and who still gives him nightmares.

Producer Aviva DeKornfeld was interested in the toll that having a wakeup-moment could have on a family, and she heard about someone who had a moment like that over a decade ago. He tried to pull his family into activism too, and what unfolded was the most extreme example of things going badly in a family that Aviva heard of.

The story of one woman’s mission to bring people together everywhere by eliminating small talk forever. Starlee Kine has been going around lecturing audiences on the subject.

Jaime Amor does yoga storytelling for kids at Cosmic Kids Yoga and on YouTube. We ask her to try taking on a film for grownups.

The discovery of 30 century-old postcards written in old Yiddish by a distant family member challenges David Kestenbaum’s ideas about the unimportance of blood ties.

Reporter Katie Mingle wonders why the 211 hotline in the San Francisco Bay Area for people experiencing homelessness so often turns out to be a dead end for them.

A teenage girl finds a wallet and has to decide whether to return it. That, and other stories of people trying to do the right thing, and it not working out the way they thought.

Paul Zimmer at 83 years old is still haunted by something he saw in his teens. Something very few Americans have ever seen: The explosion of an atomic bomb.

Host Ira Glass talks to writer Mitchell S.

Carmen Maria Machado tells the story of being stuck in an abusive relationship as a “Choose Your Own Adventure” tale.

For the last five years or so, Johnny Dark has kept up a very specific, unusual, and labor intensive daily practice.

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.

You can’t get herd immunity until you deal with the herd, and get enough of them moving together in the same direction. That’s been difficult this past year, in a way it’s never been during any other epidemic in our history.

Producer Neil Drumming talks with the rapper Breeze Brewin about a toy car they both loved playing with as kids: The General Lee from the hit TV show The Dukes of Hazzard. Breeze went on to record a song called “Generally” about The General Lee with his group the Juggaknots.

David Kestenbaum follows one person as they try to find something—a set of words, some facts, a story—to convince Trump Republicans to get themselves vaccinated.

Shamyla always loved books. Like lots of other eleven-year-olds back in 1989, she loved The Babysitters Club.

To cope with the COVID pandemic, producer Sean Cole finds himself turning to a movie about a pandemic. But the virus in this movie isn’t like any you’ve ever heard of.