Tina Dupuy was a teenage alcoholic. She joined Alcoholics Anonymous at the age of 12, got sober by 13.

Mike Birbiglia has this story about a time his good guy-ness was called into question.

Producer Nancy Updike takes some personal questions about death and dying to a place where they're happening all the time.

Reporter Mary Wiltenburg tells the story of a little boy stymied by the question "Where do you come from?" (8 minutes)You can read more of the family’s stories on Mary’s website.

ProPublica's Jake Bernstein tells the story of Carmen's first months at the New York Fed, and how she came to start recording.

Ira brings up a story that got a lot of attention last year, in the New York Times and also on a lot of morning news shows. A couple was sailing across the Pacific Ocean with their two small children, and after three weeks of sailing they signaled for help — which came in the form of four National Guardsmen and a navy vessel.

Ira explains that in May 2013, the FBI shot a guy named Ibragim Todashev in his living room in Florida. Supposedly, right before he died, Todashev implicated himself in a crime, a pretty gruesome one, a triple murder of three drug dealers in Waltham Massachusetts, a Boston suburb.

Joshuah Bearman tells a story that’s a sequel to his memorable episode about his mother and half-brother David. It’s done onstage as a play that’s structured like a radio documentary, with Josh Hamilton playing Joshuah, and James Ransone playing his brother.

If you haven't spent much time in the southwest, you may not know about this, but there are these border patrol checkpoints that are just in the middle of interstate highways and other roads... not at the border. They're as far as a hundred miles away.

Carin Gilfry explains how she once accidentally locked herself in a hotel closet, and because today’s show is being broadcast from an opera house stage, Ira is able to take the story to a place he never usually can.

Mark Oppenheimer reports on agunah in the Orthodox Jewish community. An agunah is a woman whose husband refuses to give her a divorce – in Hebrew it means "chained wife." If you're an Orthodox Jew, strictly following Jewish law, the only real way to get divorced is if your husband agrees to hand you a piece of paper called a get.

James Spring tells the story of the "Caminata Nocturna" — a simulated illegal border crossing run by a small town in Mexico. The event was recently criticized by conservative media as a training camp for illegal immigration.

Producer Stephanie Foo speaks to Nasubi, a Japanese comedian who, in the 90s, just wanted a little bit of fame. So he was thrilled when he won an opportunity to have his own segment on a Japanese reality TV show.

We plays excerpts from Mike Pesca's podcast, The Gist, from Slate. Mike Pesca used to be the sports reporter for NPR, but The Gist isn't about sports.

Ayelet Waldman says her dad is a bookish man ... a very smart man ... but no man is everything his kids want him to be.

Jacob Goldstein and David Kestenbaum of NPR's Planet Money tell the story of two guys who decided that the CEO of a small tool company was paid too much and wanted to wake people up to that fact - They wanted to cut the CEO's pay. The two people happened to be investors in the tool company.

Producers Jonathan Goldstein and Sean Cole were fascinated by a recent Pew Research statistic stating that 9% of Americans want to travel through time.

Producer Alex Blumberg interviews the writer Jon Mooallem, who just wrote a story for the Atavist about a period in the early 1900’s when meat was scarce in the United States. A group of forward-thinking men had a plan to fix that problem.

We hear what the New York Fed and Goldman Sachs say about all this. We hear a New York Fed supervisor tell Carmen Segarra how an examiner should talk and act to be successful at the Fed.

Producer Ben Calhoun talks about the moment when the cool teacher at school told the girls they should pay attention to Ben, and they did. Then Ira Glass interviews actress Molly Ringwald about what happened when she watched one of her own movies, The Breakfast Club, with her daughter.

Producer Brian Reed recounts one of the more riveting arguments he's ever heard about whether marijuana is dangerous or relatively benign. It takes place in Congress.