Paul Tough turns to UT Austin to see what happens if you admit students with great grades, who didn’t perform well on the SAT, into your college.

Elna Baker notices a change in how people in New York City are dating during the pandemic. (12 minutes)

The pandemic forced restaurant server Shelly Ortiz to put on her “Covid Goggles.” What she saw through them made her reevaluate her ideas of what’s important.

For more than fifty years, Jeanne Darst’s dad neglected to tell his entire family about their entire family. (13 minutes)

Carmen Milito tells Ira the story of a date she went on as a teenager, and the bird her mom brought to the occasion.

Producer Sean Cole has, unfortunately, experienced something known as “cumulative grief” this year. He writes about the multiple upheavals he’s been dealing  with.

The discovery of 30 century-old postcards written in old Yiddish by a distant family member challenges David Kestenbaum’s ideas about the unimportance of blood ties.

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)

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

When Neena Pathak found out she had a fibroid, it didn’t seem so bad. But then it got bigger, more uncomfortable, bloodier… and she had to decide if she was going to have to get surgery to get it removed.

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

For the last year, writer Karen Cheung has been watching her hometown of Hong Kong change in big and small ways under a new law, and wondering when and if leaving will be her last resort.

When you need to retrieve all manner of treasures secured behind steel doors and complex locks, there’s one man you can count on: safecracker Dave McOmie.

A woman’s dog has an unexpected reaction to the pandemic, and a mother has to re-think how to teach her son to drive.

Guest host Chana Joffe-Walt talks to a carpenter whose job output went from fixing doors to something more urgent in the last year. (9 minutes)

Sean Cole guest hosts.

Ira tells three stories about the ghosts captured whenever you record sound. (10 minutes)Michèle Dawson Haber wrote about hearing her father’s voice on tape as a Modern Love column "Hearing His Voice Changed Everything," in The New York Times.

Producer Aviva DeKornfeld was interested in the toll that having a wakeup-moment could have on a family, and she heard about someone who had a moment like that over a decade ago. He tried to pull his family into activism too, and what unfolded was the most extreme example of things going badly in a family that Aviva heard of.

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

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

Rebecca Shrader thought she knew what was right when it came to abortion. Then she got pregnant.

A beloved drawing goes missing from Mr. Ablao’s third grade classroom.