To end this show about parents and children at mealtime, a story about what happens when children have to become the parents. Dave Eggers' mother and father died when he was 21 and his brother Toph was 8.

Sarah Vowell tells the story of Page Smith and Eloise Pickard Smith. They were married for over five decades, and died a day apart.

Writer Scott Carrier in Salt Lake City tells the story of someone's life that improved with a huge insurance settlement—even though the money never arrived.

A story about a device that charts the world through smell — and only smell. TAL producer Nancy Updike visits Cyrano Sciences in Pasadena, California, where researchers are creating an electronic nose.

Writer Sarah Miller attends a class on how to walk and talk and act like a man. It's not easy.

Ian Brown of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on the normal struggle most people experience when they try to stay monogamous.

Writer Tobias Wolff reads his story "Bullet in the Brain" from his collection of stories The Night in Question, about a bank robbery and a man who's shot, and what he thinks about before he dies.

Seattle writer Dan Savage on how a windfall check he got in the mail is hurting his family life.

This is a story about an odd breach of trust between father and child, done unintentionally, and what happens next. Lawrence Weschler is an author and journalist. He and his 11-year-old daughter Sara tell the tale.

Ira reads from an editorial from a 1957 newspaper in Jackson, Mississippi. It tries to scare white southerners about the NAACP by describing a Chicago human rights campaign called "Take a Negro Boy Home Tonight." The idea behind the campaign? "Racism can be combated by intimate relationships between Negro boys and white girls." No such campaigns really existed in Chicago.

Reporter Scott Carrier does a story about Harvey "Job" Matusow.

What we want on the road — many of us — is adventure. And what is adventure but a moment you never could've predicted before you left home? Chicago writer Cheryl Trykv tells the story of one such moment.

In the early stages of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, there was a period when one of the questions raised by the whole affair had to do with monogamy. Around that time, Roy Romer, the Governor of Colorado and Chair of the Democratic Party, admitted that for 16 years he'd had a relationship with an aide that his wife and family knew about.

The story of a White House scandal from the year 1881. President James Garfield lay dying of a gunshot wound during that summer.

When Eustace Conway was 17, he abandoned his normal life and decided to move to the woods.

Ira talks about those ephemeral, thrilling radio moments that you happen to catch in passing on stations far away that you never find again. Flipping through the channels.

D. Travers Scott and his boyfriend spent six months gathering data on their own relationship and put together a report on it in the form of a corporate annual report.

A road trip can be a profound test of any relationship. It can save a marriage or destroy it.

A story by Jay Allison and Annie Cheney, from Jay's Life Stories series. Annie tells a story of eating and not eating, and a life seen through one meal.

Two brothers set out with a friend to cross America on horseback. They take a tape recorder with them to make a kind of audio journal of their trip.

Food writer Jonathan Gold tells what it's like to panfry a chicken—with a live chicken watching you the entire time.

Reporter Hanna Rosen did an investigation of those new antibacterial products—the antibacterial soaps and lotions, the antibacterial pizza cutter and linen and underwear. In her article, she mocked these products as ineffective.