A high school boy explains how prom is the culmination of his effort to get in with a cool group of people.

When he was just a kid, Davy Rothbart and his family visited the most famous neighbor in America—Mr. Rogers—at his summer cottage on Nantucket.

After the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, U.S. diplomats had to start working the phones to assemble a coalition of nations to combat this new threat. Some of the calls, you get the feeling, were not the easiest to make.

Writer David Brock gives us the inside story of how we got to this point of bitterness. It is not a pretty story.

A father and daughter (Adrian LeBlanc and his daughter Adrian Le Blanc) decide to write his obituary—together—not really thinking very seriously at first about the real meaning of what they were doing.

More stories like the one in the prologue, where kids look at something going on around them, observe it carefully, think about it logically, and come to conclusions that are completely incorrect. Includes a story set at Christmastime, where a father tells his daughter about the baby Jesus being born, and all the "good stuff." Then the daughter notices a picture of Jesus on the cross, and asks why they killed him.

Ira Glass talks with Paul Feig, who, as a sixth-grader, read the Dale Carnegie classic How to Win Friends and Influence People at the urging of his father.

The story of a clandestine radio station the CIA set up back in the good old, bad old days of the 1950s, to overthrow Guatemala. The coup succeeded because of the immense power of radio.

Writer John Hodgman in New York tells the story of how he dreamt of getting to know the B-movie star Bruce Campbell, and how his unlikely dream accidentally came true, partly to his delight, partly to his horror.

You can't do a radio show about worshiping false gods without a story about money...or real estate...or hipness. Fortunately for us, Iggy Scam supplies a story that's about all three.

Kelly McEvers with the story of Zora, a self-made superhero. From the time she was five, Zora had recurring dreams in which she was a 6'5" warrior queen who could fly and shoot lightning from her hands.

Julie Hill with a story about her six-year-old son, and how he tries to make sense of his father's terminal illness.

Bill Lychak reports on what it's like to be a factory worker in the Epiphany Plant, bringing news of miracles to Christians in a magazine called Guideposts. It's a good job, he says.

Adam Beckman tells the first part of his story, about how, back in the 70s, he and his friends broke into an abandoned  house in the small town of  Freedom, New Hampshire. The home turned out to be a perfect time capsule, containing the furniture, letters and personal effects of an entire family — abandoned for decades.

Larry Keeley explains why the Pentagon wants to see things from another perspective...and how hard that is to do.

For a few days after the attacks on September 11th, it seemed like we were just on the verge of bombing and retaliation. But two weeks went by, and no military action had begun.

Reporter Alix Spiegel tells the story of the Ostwind, the boat that came to be known as "Hitler's Yacht." (25 minutes)

In Seattle, Dan Savage and his boyfriend adopted a son, DJ. It was an open adoption, so the birth mother could keep in touch with her kid.

An excerpt from Nicholson Baker's novel The Everlasting Story of Nory, which is narrated, more or less, by a ten-year-old. In this excerpt, we return to what Kayla Hernandez talked about in the prologue to the show: The narrator discusses the difficulty of remembering what happens on any given day.

Ira talks with journalist Jason Bleibtreu about Luther and Johnny Htoo, twelve-year-old twins, and the leaders of a rebel army of Burmese separatists called God's Army. Everyone around them, both their own forces and their enemies, believed they possessed superpowers, that they could not be harmed by bullets, that they had the power to command ghost armies.

Susan Burton reports on Prom Night 2001 in Hoisington, Kansas, a town of about 3,000. While the seniors danced, a tornado hit the town, destroying about a third of it.

Myron Jones and his sister Carol Bove explain what happened when they were teenagers, and they ended up babysitting children who didn't exist.

Josh Noel reports with Alex Blumberg from Groom, Texas, 45 minutes east of Amarillo, on the largest cross in the Western hemisphere—it's 19 stories tall—the man who built it, and the people who stop at the cross to pray.