When a small town loses 100 people in just a few hours, kids come home to find their parents missing. Producer Lilly Sullivan talks to people trying to make sense of where they went and if they’ll come back.

Host Ira Glass gets his grandmother Frieda’s college files, which reveal a whole other side of this person he thought he knew so well.

Daniel Alarcón’s dad was obsessed with soccer when he was growing up, but he was only average at soccer. But those who can’t do...find something else to do.

Where do parents go when they’re deported? For some, the answer is: as close as possible to their kids. That often means Nogales, Mexico.

Veronica Chater explains the conflict in her house between her love for her pet macaw—a kind of parrot—and her love for her husband and three kids. The macaw wreaks a sort of low-level chaos in the house, because it wants Veronica all to itself.

Ira discusses James Comey’s Senate testimony this week, testimony that called the president a liar. And producer Sean Cole talks with Theo Greenly about a lie that bothered him for a while, a lie involving his cousin, an artist named Kenny Scharf.

Journalist Reya El-Salahi tells the story of learning something very surprising about her mother’s past, involving a fake marriage, guns and guerrillas.

We searched for a parent who had a question for their kid...that they could only ask them after their kid was an adult. Then we found Ken Gethard, comedian Chris Gethard's dad, who had some really meaningful questions he wanted to ask his son.

Producer Miki Meek tells the story of a phone booth in Japan that attracts thousands of people who lost loved ones in the 2011 tsunami and earthquake. A Japanese TV crew from NHK Sendai filmed people inside the phone booth, whose phone is not connected to anything at all.

Producer Neil Drumming tells the story of his dad and his family’s timeshare in Orlando, Florida.

Nema and Neda Semnani have extraordinarily similar first names – and completely opposite ways of dealing with what happened to their dad when they were little.

Ira relays advice from a staffer’s family on what to do if you’re thinking about something you don’t want to think about.

Comedian Sasheer Zamata does this joke about her mom in her standup act. About how her mom hates white people.

Anthony DeVito recently observed his grandmother go through a metamorphosis no one in the family ever imagined they'd see.

Writer and musician Ahamefule Oluo has been puzzling out one story for a lot of his life. It's the story of a stranger, who also, is his dad.

Larry speaks English. His dad speaks Chinese.

When Elna Baker was a kid, she hit her younger sister on the head with a broom, then lied and said it was an accident. So Elna’s dad held a family trial to find the truth.

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

Radio Diaries’ Joe Richman continues William Cimillo’s story and talks to his two sons about what it was like to have lived through the drama that ensued after their father’s big journey.