When Larry leaves his old life behind and joins a monastery, Ethan struggles to understand his best friend's decision.

As a teenager, Sarah Vowell was not casual about music lessons — music became her life. She was in marching band, jazz band, Band One, symphony band, pep band and the Bozeman Recorder Ensemble.

Reporter Alix Spiegel and playwright David Kodeski tell stories about Niagara Falls. During the hour we hear from Paul Gromosiak, a man who's obsessed with the Falls, writes about them, thinks about them all the time, but never goes there, because "they've ruined the falls." We hear a man who went over the falls in a barrel, and we hear the recordings he made inside the barrel as he went over. There's a man who picks up the bodies of people who've jumped over the Falls.

A how-to by Junot Diaz, from his book Drown.

In this part of the show, stories about fathers who haven't gotten quite so close with their children. Two-thirds of all African American children are raised in single parent homes, usually by mothers and/or grandmothers.

Writer David Rakoff travels to a place where everyone seems to be looking at him, a place where no one follows the customs people follow back home in New York City, a place called...New Hampshire.

Forty-five people read Luc Sante's story The Unknown Soldier, in which we hear about people's final moments, final thoughts.

The burden of keeping germs from hurting us in our everyday lives has fallen mostly on women, from the time science fully understood about the existence of germs. After all, women had to keep the home clean, had to prepare food safely.

A story of guys who wear real masks, like superheroes, in their jobs as costumed wrestlers in a kind of Mexican wrestling called Lucha Libre. Writer RJ Smith has them talk about how much smaller they feel, how humiliated, when they have to take the masks off.

When Francois Mitterand knew he was about to die, he decided that the last food to cross his lips would be poultry...a tiny bird that is actually illegal to eat in France. It's a bird that, by tradition, is eaten with a napkin covering your head.

Now in exile, Jose Ramos Horta spent two decades as the leading international spokesman against the invasion of his country by Indonesia. He won a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.

In which we tackle the biggest possible how-to we could think of: how to make your life worth more. And we get answers — real, practical answers — from the people whose job it is to think about this issue: insurance adjusters.

There are the people who take two hours to get dressed every day, who dress primarily to be seen, and then there are most of the rest of us. Writer Sarah Vowell decides to make the leap into the two-hours group.

Sarah Vowell and her twin sister Amy re-trace the Trail of Tears. They visit the town in Georgia that was the capital of the Cherokee Nation before the Cherokee were expelled.