Writer Greil Marcus explains what rock fans use dead rock stars for.

Chris and Sylvere, and how they tried to contain a marriage-threatening crush, and how difficult that is.

Denis Wood talks with host Ira Glass about the maps he's made of his own neighborhood, Boylan Heights in Raleigh, North Carolina. They include a traditional street locator map, a map of all the sewer and power lines under the earth's surface, a map of how light falls on the ground through the leaves of trees, a map of where all the Halloween pumpkins are each year, and a map of all the graffiti in the neighborhood.

What happens when being on the road is your job, and has been your job for decades? Reporter Margy Rochlin recalls a trip she took with 92-year-old George Burns and his tiny entourage.

Los Angeles writer Sandra Tsing Loh on the first day of a relationship. A failing relationship.

Alex Melamid and Vitaly Komar hired a polling firm to investigate what people want to see in paintings. Then, using the data, they painted what people want.

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.

Richard Bausch reads his story Letter to the Lady of the House.

Writer Anne Lamott presents an example of what we can learn from music outside of formal classes. She tells the story of an airplane trip, a song, and a small miracle.

Margy's a reporter. When she told her dad that she wanted to write a story about him, he said sure.

Jack Hitt talks about a radio station he chanced upon while on a long drive. The station seems to ignore the last six decades of broadcasting history and convention.

Linda Howard and Richard Bloom, in Boca Raton Florida, had been married years when she started flirting with another man.

Robert Krulwich's stories, on NPR, CBS and ABC, are neither wacky nor pompously serious. He explains, though, that if you try to occupy the territory between wacky and serious, there are dangers.

Host Ira Glass explains why some old answering machine messages from a decade ago have such power for him: there's a special power to recordings of phone conversations. The phone is intimate — more intimate than a photograph.

Ira with Elizabeth Joseph, who is in a polygamous marriage with eight wives and one husband. She says polygamy is the ultimate feminist lifestyle.

This American Life producer Julie Snyder reports on a three-day competition called "Color Days." It's most kids' favorite time at camp — despite the fact that the girls, at least, spend most of the three days crying and screaming. It's thrilling to be part of a team at this level of intensity.

Mary Kay Prucha tells her story about the lies she told herself to deal with cystic fibrosis.

Tamar Brott, on growing up with two music prodigies, and Sandra Tsing Loh's sister Kaitlin, a ballet prodigy.

A man tries to calculate what love costs. From Lydia Davis's book Break It Down, read by actor Matt Malloy.