Al Drucker used to work for the IRS doing tax enforcement. One thing he found really helpful in the job was when someone from the public would give a tip on who he should look into.

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.

Producer Nancy Updike takes some personal questions about death and dying to a place where they're happening all the time.

Comedian Sasheer Zamata stages a radio play, complete with sound effects and comedians Nicole Byer, Chris Gethard, and Frank Garcia Hejl. It’s a true story about a recent bus accident.

In Iraq, everyone from the militant group known as ISIS to the government security forces and shiite militias have been putting on such a deliberate show. Each faction has its own videos, parades, flags, propaganda and counter-propaganda.

Ira talks to Grantland writer David Hill about the board game Diplomacy. He had a couple experiences that made him believe that maybe he didn't understand how to play properly.

Rachel has two kids. Elias, age seven, is a vegetarian.

Ira brings up a story that got a lot of attention last year, in the New York Times and also on a lot of morning news shows. A couple was sailing across the Pacific Ocean with their two small children, and after three weeks of sailing they signaled for help — which came in the form of four National Guardsmen and a navy vessel.

Ira explains that in May 2013, the FBI shot a guy named Ibragim Todashev in his living room in Florida. Supposedly, right before he died, Todashev implicated himself in a crime, a pretty gruesome one, a triple murder of three drug dealers in Waltham Massachusetts, a Boston suburb.

Seth Freed Wessler reports on people going the opposite direction over the US/Mexico border. Each year hundreds of thousands of people are deported from the US to Mexico — tens of thousands more choose to leave on their own — and lots of them make the journey after years and years living in the states.

Yale psychologist Paul Bloom tells Ira about his research into the morality of babies and young children.

Producer Alex Blumberg interviews the writer Jon Mooallem, who just wrote a story for the Atavist about a period in the early 1900’s when meat was scarce in the United States. A group of forward-thinking men had a plan to fix that problem.

Producer Chana Joffe-Walt talks to her 13 year old sister Maya about Maya’s most important friendship to date. In fact, it’s her first real friendship.

In 2009, a U.S. soldier contacted our show and offered to send audio dispatches from his deployment in Afghanistan, to do a story about what it's really like to go to war. But what he learned when he was over there was way more personal and honest than we, or he, expected.

Jacob Goldstein and David Kestenbaum of NPR's Planet Money tell the story of two guys who decided that the CEO of a small tool company was paid too much and wanted to wake people up to that fact - They wanted to cut the CEO's pay. The two people happened to be investors in the tool company.

Ira talks to "Cheryl," an anonymous blogger who's been documenting life with an 8-year-old son who seems to take pleasure in causing chaos. He's tried to kill his little brother more than once.

David Sedaris comes from a big family, who for many years growing up, took annual vacations to the same beach house. In this story, David tells us about losing a sister last year, and how her death prompted a family reunion back at the beach.

This American Life staffers Brian Reed and Bianca Giaever explain to Ira this thing they've found online called WakeUpNow. It's a company but they can't tell exactly what it does, and what its product is.

David Hill's story about what happened when he took U.S. Ambassador Dennis Ross as his coach to the World Championships for the board game Diplomacy.

Earlier this year, a cheerleader named Lacy T filed a lawsuit against the Oakland Raiders for failing to pay her minimum wage. NFL cheerleaders did the same right after... cheerleaders generally make about $1,500 for the entire season.

When it comes to disciplining young people, teachers are winging it. We ask middle school teachers all over the country to walk us through how they get a kid to take his hat off.

Ira talks to reporters John Diedrich and Raquel Rutlidge, from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. They got a call from a landlord who said agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had trashed his place.

Reporter Mary Wiltenburg tells the story of a little boy stymied by the question "Where do you come from?" (8 minutes)You can read more of the family’s stories on Mary’s website.

Host Alex Blumberg talks about New York City’s long-standing ban on ferrets. And how, after years of forbidding them, the city is now poised to lift the ban.