Rennie Sparks from the band The Handsome Family.

Howard Rabinowitz and The Truth About Cats and Dogs. (4 minutes)

South Carolina native Jack Hitt discusses the Confederate Flag's prominent place over the statehouse.

Ira with Lloyd Natoff, on killing chickens.

Professor Stephen Pyne.

A story by Margy Rochlin.

Producer Nancy Updike with Ki Kim, who's not afraid of walking on coals. But maybe he should have been.

Michael Lewis on duck hunting.

Andrea worked at a bakery under a convention hotel in Chicago. The conventioneers used to drive her crazy because people act so different when they're in a crowd of their own kind.

Story of a romance that began in a mental hospital. Sometimes, the line between crazy and not crazy is blurry; certain behavior could mean either thing.

A con man named Nick Ward who's so good he's thanked.

Host Ira Glass reads from a letter Benjamin Franklin wrote, and discusses it with Jack Hitt.

John Perry Barlow, a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and former rancher and Grateful Dead lyricist, on an experience that began at the boundary of two conventions.

Susan Bergman and the Christian convention. Susan is the author of Anonymity.

Foreign correspondent Jim Biederman reports from a cell phone inside the Louvre, in front of the Mona Lisa, on what people say while they're standing in front of some of the world's greatest works of art. It turns out to be pretty banal.

Ira with chicken photographer Tamara Staples.

Chicago Playwright Bryn Magnus with a quintessential gun story from his childhood in Wisconsin.  It contains both the fear of guns and the pleasure of shooting one.

Ira with a girl gang member about the day she nearly died.

Tapes from the Apology Line and interview with "Mrs. Apology," Marissa Bridge.

David Sedaris, on his mother's lung cancer.

Gay Talese reads from his classic 1966 Esquire article, in which he followed around Sinatra at the height of Sinatra's power.

Hilton Als reads an excerpt from his book The Women. (12 minutes)

Danny Toro, a member of a Chicago street gang for ten years, explains what gangster movies he liked most in his gang years and why. Scarface, with Al Pacino, was a good movie to get him pumped up to go out with his boys. A Lucky Luciano film taught him a lesson in how to be more compassionate with members of his own gang.

How journalist Philip Weiss came to agree with some Clinton conspiracy theorists but not to follow their cause. With Paul Tough.