Bailey Leavitt comes from a family of carnies. For her, one of the most thrilling things she looks for at the fair is someone who is really good at luring people into spending money at their stand.

Ira goes out with a letter carrier, ‘Grace,’ as she delivers mail on her route.

A teenage whiz kid invents a new toy for Milton Bradley. Then the trouble starts.

Brothers Wes and Jeff spent a winter tagging black bears in Bryce Canyon National Park. One of the bears they needed to tag decided to hibernate at the end of an usually long tunnel.

Even people who vehemently disagreed with Heider Garcia wanted him to stay in his job. But then something happened that made staying impossible.

We get a tip that an entire town is consumed by a huge, elementary-school-style crush on a local veterinarian.

When to leave Twitter is a question lots of executives faced when Elon Musk took over the company — those who weren't immediately fired, anyway. We hear an insider’s account from the man who ran Trust & Safety at the company, until he couldn’t stand it anymore.

The musicians in the orchestra for Phantom of the Opera tell reporter Jay Caspian Kang about what it’s like to play the exact same music every single night—for decades.

Dr. Amelia Huntsberger loves everything about her rural town in northern Idaho.

What happens when an emergency room nurse has an emergency? Kelsay Irby did something that landed her in the headlines. (9 minutes)

Ira introduces us to Santa Allen. A man who is NOT the real Santa Claus but who will – for the first time ever – be sitting in a chair, dressed as Santa, asking little children what they want for Christmas this year.  He’s nervous.

A teenage girl finds a wallet and has to decide whether to return it. That, and other stories of people trying to do the right thing, and it not working out the way they thought.

When you need to retrieve all manner of treasures secured behind steel doors and complex locks, there’s one man you can count on: safecracker Dave McOmie.

Guest host Chana Joffe-Walt talks to a carpenter whose job output went from fixing doors to something more urgent in the last year. (9 minutes)

When Adele wrote into our show last summer, she described herself as “the worst phlebotomist in the whole hospital.” Producer Diane Wu couldn’t resist calling her up to find out exactly what she meant by that.

To fight those massive fires out west, there are these camps hidden from view. If you were driving by, you might not even know they’re there.