The story of the government cracking down on smokestack emissions at a city factory...even though the residents LIKE the emissions. We hear from Jorge Just, who explains the one, magical, special secret about Chicago no one outside Chicago ever believes is true, from Brian Urbaszewski, Director of Environmental Health Programs for the American Lung Association in Chicago; and from Julie Armitage, Manager of Compliance and Enforcement for the Bureau of Air at the Illinois State EPA.

Host Ira Glass talks about something he read that seemed to put an end to all debate over one of the key issues swirling around right now. He checks with William Nichelson, author of the books Emergency Response and Emergency Management Law and Homeland Security Law and Policy, to see if he's correctly understanding the issue.

Hemant Lakhani, an Indian-born British citizen, had been a salesman all his life. Clothing, rice, oil...it didn't matter to him what the product was, as long as he could spin a deal.

How NOT to get a job in U.S. intelligence: Admit to being a pervert during your job interview. Somehow, though, that's exactly what happened to a perfectly normal, nice guy who we're calling "Matt" for the purposes of this story.

The FCC says it just wants a little civility on the nation's airwaves. And by tightening the rules on what swear words are allowed, government officials say they're protecting kids.

The Union of Concerned Scientists has issued a report condemning the Bush Administration for what it called "distorting and censoring scientific findings that contradict" Administration policies. One of the cases cited in the report involves something called the Advisory Committee on Childhood Lead Poisoning.

Producer Sarah Koenig talks to the people behind survey results—whose answers determine so much of political news.

Adam Davidson reports from Baghdad on the charismatic, ambitious young Americans who want to bring freedom and hope to Iraq, if only the Iraqis would listen to them. There is a ominous information gap between the U.S. officials running the country and the Iraqi people being governed.

We try to figure out the paradox of the current economy, where more and more Americans are simultaneously both losing jobs and buying new homes and cars. Host Ira Glass talks to Ernest Istook, Republican Congressman from Oklahoma, who supports both a balanced budget amendment and President Bush's proposed budgets, which will create record deficits.

In January 2002-- not long after the Taliban were driven from power in Afghanistan-- he came to the United States, partly to be on hand for the State of the Union address last year. And while he was here, he spoke with an audience that was mostly Afghan-Americans at Georgetown University.

We hear a brief clip of host Ira Glass talking to John Podesta, who as chief of staff under President Clinton helped institute that administration's policy of declassifying as many documents possible. The Bush administration's philosophy is very different.

Host Ira Glass tells the story of a report by the U.S. intelligence community back in October 2002 that declared that the likelihood of Saddam Hussein using weapons of massive destruction was very low for the "foreseeable future"...unless the U.S. were to launch a military attack on Iraq. In other words, the war to stop him from using weapons of mass destruction would probably cause the thing it was designed to prevent.

Al Jurczynski is the mayor of Schenectady, New York. For the past year, he's embarked on a strange recruitment campaign, to convince Guyanese immigrants living in Queens, New York, to move upstate to Schenectady.

We hear excerpts from two autobiographies which each describe the same moment, but in very different ways. Elia Kazan and Arthur Miller agree that they met with each other in 1952, around the time Kazan named the names of his old friends to the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

We hear clips from the recent press conference with Charlotte Beers, recently appointed Undersecretary of Public Diplomacy. Part of her job is, in her words, to sell the "brand America" abroad.

After the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, U.S. diplomats had to start working the phones to assemble a coalition of nations to combat this new threat. Some of the calls, you get the feeling, were not the easiest to make.