Producer Sean Cole scrubs in to observe heart surgeon Dr. John Elefteriades, or Dr.

Dr.

You can’t get herd immunity until you deal with the herd, and get enough of them moving together in the same direction. That’s been difficult this past year, in a way it’s never been during any other epidemic in our history.

Ira tromps around the woods some more with Noah Strycker, who explains, among other things, his problem with the movie Spencer.

Host Ira Glass revisits the one movie he’s seen more than any other, about an ocean liner that gets hit by a tsunami and flips over. (9 minutes)

One of the 590,000 casualties of U.S. Covid-19 this year was Leiah Danielle Jones.

What does “thank you” actually look like? And who gets one? For Flato Alexander and other essential workers, all sorts of symbols that hadn’t bothered them much before suddenly became unbearable.

Cindy and Dayana Carcamo are close. But recently, they’ve been struggling with this thing that happened when they were very young.

Shamyla always loved books. Like lots of other eleven-year-olds back in 1989, she loved The Babysitters Club.

When the United States Congress saw a problem — sex trafficking — it acted to eliminate it.

A teenage girl finds a wallet and has to decide whether to return it. That, and other stories of people trying to do the right thing, and it not working out the way they thought.

People given the difficult task of deciding who lives and who dies.

Ira Glass talks to Sam Ashner, whose debilitating fear of spiders was ruining his life. So he opted for an extraordinary treatment — the nuclear option — to deal with it.

Chase Friedman was in an accident that left him paralyzed from the shoulders down. Ira Glass talks to him about the unusual goal he set for his recovery.

There’s a museum in Baltimore that was created to memorialize the Black experience in America. It’s called The National Great Blacks in Wax Museum.

Host Ira Glass goes to a block in New York City where, over a year into the pandemic, neighbors are still clapping for health care workers every night at 7 p.m. (7 minutes)

There are the birds who exist, and then there are the birds who may as well exist. Producer Sean Cole explains.

The story of one woman’s mission to bring people together everywhere by eliminating small talk forever. Starlee Kine has been going around lecturing audiences on the subject.

Reporter Anna Maria Barry-Jester tells the story of two public health officials in Santa Cruz County, California, whose lives have been completely upended by threats and harassment over the past year. (20 minutes)This story is a collaboration with Kaiser Health News. You can read their version here.

Susan Burton is a couple years into recovery from the eating disorder she’s had for decades.

David Kestenbaum follows one person as they try to find something—a set of words, some facts, a story—to convince Trump Republicans to get themselves vaccinated.

What does God get out of us praising him? Or is it actually for us? (7 minutes)

As a kid, Nichole Perkins always liked a very specific type of song.

Host Ira Glass talks to writer Mitchell S.