Sarah Vowell with Jim Nayder, host of Magnificent Obsession and The Annoying Music Show, who personifies our culture's split between seriousness and wackiness as well as anyone.

NPR's Adam Davidson tells a true story from his own childhood. He was sent to a camp run by the Israeli army at its own training facility.

Frankie Cruz Junior takes on all contenders at a nightclub in Chicago, and nearly always wins. It's a terrible job that pays badly and has no insurance or other benefits.

Ira with "The Hens," a group of nine middle-aged women who've known each other since girlhood. They play recordings of their recent three-day road trip from Chicago to a casino in a cotton field in Mississippi.

We ask 18-year-old Chana Wiliford and her father in Texas if they'd be willing to have a conversation on tape in which each of them gets to ask the other the questions they've never asked before. In the conversation, Chana is half his child, half his peer.

Ira with Michael Lewis, author of Losers: The Road to Everyplace but the White House and many other books, who says that in the '96 Presidential Election all the candidates with new ideas, all the candidates capable of talking the way real people act in their real lives, were shunned by the media as "wacky." (10 minutes)

Dishwasher Pete tells the story of his first day washing dishes on an oil rig off the coast of Louisiana. He'd heard he'd get a hazing when he stepped foot on the rig.

More tape of Chana and her father Bob Wiliford discussing all the things they've never talked about before. Though Chana grew up in Waco, Texas, she left to go to college in Philadelphia.

Ralph Gentles and five other people spent each summer creating a map of every crack, every depression, every protrusion, every pothole in the sidewalks of New York City. We hear why, and we hear all the things their map does not include.

Writer and nationally syndicated sex columnist Dan Savage explains what actually happens in non-monogamous couples, how they make it work, and whether they're happy.

Host Ira Glass describes what thousands of people do all over America on our holiday weekends: we go to historic sites with our kids and stare at bricks and statues, trying to feel some connection with the past. It's not easy.

We think of our phone calls and phone messages as so transient. We have another example of phones recording personal history: this story from Barrett Golding in Bozeman, Montana, comprised of telephone messages about his father.

In Vietnam, Jeffrey Harris, with one year of grad school, judged which soldiers stayed and which went home.

In this special half-hour story produced by Jay Allison as part of his Life Stories series, Dan Gediman tracks down the original Zoom cast members to find out what his life would've been like if he had achieved his childhood dream of being on Zoom.

After years of covering stories about medicine, NPR Reporter Rebecca Perl enters the hospital as a patient. She moves from the world of healthy people into the world of sick ones.

Sure you can try to get your pop songs onto records, or on the radio, or onto MTV. But what happens if your medium of choice is ... the telephone? Before they had record contracts, the band They Might Be Giants distributed their songs through the medium of Answering Machine.

Cedric Jennings grew up in Southeast Washington, in one of the poorest communities in the country. Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind followed him for over two-and-a-half years, as Cedric tried to make it through high school and work his way into an Ivy League university. Once he gets there, he discovers that all the qualities that got him out of the ghetto make him an outcast in the Ivy League.

Ira and the movie Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. Advertised as wacky, it is anything but.

Last year, a woman named Karen Davis started a national letter writing campaign to try to get This American Life to stop the very program we are broadcasting today—the annual Poultry Slam.

Ira Glass talks about a man named Paul Cowan, who wrote a story about becoming ill for The Village Voice.

Germs were first understood at the turn of the 20th century and it turns out that the aesthetics of everyday life during this century—the way we dress, the way we groom ourselves, the way we make our homes—are all partly a response to this newfangled idea of germs.

Writer Jack Hitt talks about his daughter Tarpeley's first day in her new school. It was her first "first day" of any kind.

Ira tells the story of Lucia Lopez, a former gang member who would beat you up if she caught you looking at her...and how her life changed when she put herself in a position where hundreds of people were looking at her.