Jonathan Katz listens to old tapes of his family; then travels back to the neighborhood in Brooklyn they lived in during the 1950s, looking for evidence of what his childhood was like. His sister is along for the trip, and they do not agree on the meaning of what they're seeing.

The Jarvis family, a group of eight, goes on the run from the law—for seven years. They live on a boat, in a treehouse in a swamp.

A small-town mayor tries to keep a developer from building in his town...and it results in the kind of snowballing fiasco by the end of which the town literally doesn't exist anymore. Alix Spiegel tells that story, which she produced with funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Ben Schrank describes what it's like to work as a professional mover. He says that people often go sort of nuts when they see all their worldly possessions—all the stuff that defines them as people—packed into a van.

A few years back Alex Kotlowitz wrote a book called There Are No Children Here, about two boys growing up in Chicago's Henry Horner public housing projects. Those projects were across the street from the site of the 1996 Democratic Convention in Chicago, and when the convention came to town, money poured in for a makeover.

Writer Scott Carrier in Salt Lake City tells the story of someone's life that improved with a huge insurance settlement—even though the money never arrived.

When Eustace Conway was 17, he abandoned his normal life and decided to move to the woods.

Jerry Capeci, dean of the New York reporters who cover organized crime, on the decline of the mob in recent years. And Alec Wilkinson of the New Yorker magazine, who discusses a photo his wife took of his old neighbors, the Gambino crime family.

In 1940, Jack Geiger, at the age of fourteen, left his middle-class Jewish home and knocked on the door of a black actor named Canada Lee. He asked Lee if he could move in with him.

Host Ira Glass talks to Amanda, who's 16 and lives with her mom in a Christian commune in Chicago.

Paul Johnson, Carlos Appleby, and Sanantonio Brooks talk about how their housing project is like a small town.

Paul Tough visits Catherine Chalmers. She raises small animals and insects in her apartment, feeds them to each other, and photographs them eating each other.

Carmen Delzell on a deal she made with the devil when she turned 30.

A visit to a replica of the White House outside San Francisco, the home of Norman and Rosemary Eckersly.

An excerpt from Your Radio is Haunted. (6 minutes)

This American Life contributor Paul Tough visits Catherine Chalmers. She raises small animals and insects in her apartment, feeds them to each other, and photographs them eating each other.

Ira explores the question of when it's time to quit a relationship through rare recordings of bickering between roommates—recorded by the next-door neighbors.