A Midwestern family records a "letter on tape" to their son, who is in medical school in California. Three decades later, the recording somehow ends up in a thrift store.

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

This is the story of two people—one in his late teens, one in his late fifties. Both have good reasons to be mad at the world, but what they did with their anger—and what society did with them—are very different.

David Sedaris, on his mother's lung cancer.

Hilton Als reads an excerpt from his book The Women. (12 minutes)

Navy Pier's renovation was presented as a success in last week's show, but recent press reveals that the pier is bleeding money. WBEZ personality Aaron Freeman and his kids take Ira on a tour of the pier, looking at it from a child's perspective.

A family sits down to discuss one thing.

Host Ira Glass plays tape from the documentary TV series American High of a teenager fighting with his parents about which car he can take out that night. Every family has its own way of fighting and its own particular family dynamic, and if things go terribly bad, it's often hard to figure how the bad things could've been prevented.

Erin Einhorn grew up begging her mother to tell her all about the remarkable story of how she survived World War Two, thanks to a Polish woman named Honorata Skowronski, who risked her life. But her mother didn't like to talk about it.

Host Ira Glass talks to Eddie Schmidt about his Aunt Mary, the source of the best stories in his family—including how she was so cheap she stole azalea bushes from the side of the highway.

Julia Pimsleur travels to Alaska to spend some time with her brother, hoping he might change a little—just as he hopes that she'll change a little.

Riz Rollins tells a story about himself, his brother, his grandmother and a guy in a Chicago department store they hope has some pull with Santa.

Amy D'Addario had ferried her mother to the hospital dozens of times before.

Scott Carrier's wife and mother-in-law insist that Scott's three-and-a-half year old daughter enroll in swimming classes.

Nadia and Karen have been arguing over Russian-ness since they needed to pick a school for Luka.

Deborah Lott comes from a family that obsesses over health. And when they all get together for dinner, their banter goes on overdrive.

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.

Novelist Miriam Toews, author of The X Letters (which appeared in an earlier episode of the show), tells the story of a road trip she took with her 15-year-old son.

Sarah Vowell and her family.

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.

Radio producer Scott Carrier quit his job at a low moment in his life. His wife left him and took the kids.

Producer Miki Meek tells the story of a man named Will Ream who is trying to figure out what is best for his children, and having some regrets about how things worked out. To tell this story we collaborated with songwriter Stephin Merritt.