Host Ira Glass goes to the Federal Express hub at Memphis to watch 1.2 million pieces of overnight mail get sorted in one night and to talk to the adrenaline junkies in the FedEx Command Center.

Scott Carrier visits a courtroom where teenagers are tried and convicted by their teenage peers in Tucson, Arizona.

Ellery Eskelin never met his father but always heard he was a musical genius. Years after his father's death, Ellery started finding recordings of his musical output: he was the king of "song-poems." These are the songs that result when people answer those ads in the backs of magazines that say, "Send us your lyrics, and we'll write and record your song." Ellery's father's musical output was prodigious — and very odd.

We told Chicago playwright Jeff Dorchen about what the three boys in Act One said, and he created a brief original radio play picking up where they left off.

A contest held every year by a Nissan dealership in Longview, Texas in which twenty-four people stand around a $15,000 hard body pickup truck. When the starting whistle blows, each person puts one hand on the truck.

Sarah Vowell and her family.

Susanna Kaysen reads from her account of living at McLean psychiatric hospital for about two years, starting when she was eighteen. Her book, Girl, Interrupted, describes daily life on the ward.

Anthropologists agree that humans stopped being animals when they started walking upright, on two legs. But scientists don't agree on why our ancestors did this.

Jerry Capeci, dean of the New York reporters who cover organized crime, on the decline of the mob in recent years. And Alec Wilkinson of the New Yorker magazine, who discusses a photo his wife took of his old neighbors, the Gambino crime family.

We begin to hear a story by Scott Carrier.

Binjamin Wilkomirski and New York writer Blake Eskin try and figure out if they are related. NOTE: A few years after this interview aired, Binjamin Wilkomirski and his Holocaust memoir Fragments were shown to be fabrications. Blake Eskin chronicled this story in his 2002 book A Life In Pieces: The Making and Unmaking of Binjamin Wilkomirski.

A former addict and a former prisoner discuss the developmental retardation their experiences caused.

Scott Carrier in Salt Lake City with a story about whether it's possible to be a good person if you're not a Christian.

David Rakoff on how he tried to pass as a local once he moved from Toronto to New York. He claims that there must be a chip in his head — or something like it — that automatically tells him when someone or something famous is Canadian.

Ira with Clarence Hicks, who picks up dead animals for a living.

Claudia Perez talks about how her 21-year-old brother was shot and the family thought he'd die.

Writer Sarah Vowell explains why she watched The Godfather every day while she was in college. The film, she says, depicted a world with an understandable moral system to it.

Thomas Lynch reads from his book The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade.

The small town dilemma.

Geoffrey Canada, author of the book Fist Stick Knife Gun: A Personal History of Violence in America, talks about what it's like to carry a gun. He also talks about what poor neighborhoods in New York were like before the proliferation of handguns among young people.  When he grew up in the South Bronx, kids had fistfights in a very formal arrangement with formal rules that everyone lived by. He reads from his book and talks with Ira.

Alix Spiegel in Colorado Springs, where a massive prayer project is underway to pray for every person, business, and school. When she arrives, she finds the Christians speak a kind of Christian jargon she does not understand.

After all this doom and gloom about the difficult lives of artists, we end the show with a more hopeful story from Joel Kostman, a New York City locksmith, who tells us about an incident that happened to him on the job. Joel is author of Keys to the City: Tales of a New York City Locksmith.