Sarah Vowell takes over the family Thanksgiving dinner by bringing everyone to New York. What results is a series of milestones and family firsts.

The story of Tyler Cassity and how he's trying to remake one of our oldest rituals of commemoration.Tyler is one of the owners of a cemetery called Hollywood Forever, and he's been introducing 20th century technology to American funerals, which haven't changed much since the Civil War. At Hollywood Forever, the cost of a burial includes a video of your life: to be shown at your funeral, to be viewable at kiosks on the cemetery grounds, and to be posted—for eternity—online.

On a commemorative day, it can be hard to feel a real sense of the past and of how time has moved forward. Russell Banks has a story demonstrating what it might take to do just that.

What if you asked people for advice and actually took all the advice that everyone gave you? As an experiment, writer Sarah Vowell tried exactly that, when she recently solicited advice from many different people about insomnia.

Host Ira Glass talks with his mom—a clinical psychologist—about why people seem to rarely take the advice others give. Then advice columnist Dan Savage, author of the syndicated column and book Savage Love, gives the audience some advice that hopefully might save lives.

Forget all the self-help seminars you've ever heard of or attended. Writer Cheryl Trykv leads the audience in Seattle in a guided meditation, to end our program with epiphany, epiphany, epiphany.

There are the people who take two hours to get dressed every day, who dress primarily to be seen, and then there are most of the rest of us. Writer Sarah Vowell decides to make the leap into the two-hours group.

Ira tells the story of Lucia Lopez, a former gang member who would beat you up if she caught you looking at her...and how her life changed when she put herself in a position where hundreds of people were looking at her.

Writer David Rakoff travels to a place where everyone seems to be looking at him, a place where no one follows the customs people follow back home in New York City, a place called...New Hampshire.

A case study of how children are asked to live the unlived lives of their parents. Author David Sedaris had a father who loved jazz but played no instrument himself.

As a teenager, Sarah Vowell was not casual about music lessons — music became her life. She was in marching band, jazz band, Band One, symphony band, pep band and the Bozeman Recorder Ensemble.

Writer Anne Lamott presents an example of what we can learn from music outside of formal classes. She tells the story of an airplane trip, a song, and a small miracle.