It's funny the things that go through your head during a disaster.

Summoning up stuff that’s usually hidden down deep.

It’s been nine months since Roe v. Wade was overturned. We talk to people who wanted abortions right when the laws were changing in their states. They had to wait for appointments, for money to travel or abortion pills. And during that waiting, a lot of interesting things happened. We see how much life has changed, nine months later.

Three people, and one animal, who know the path their lives will take until, suddenly, they don’t.

People ​so close to each other, ​in ​extremely intimate situations​,​ who are also a million miles apart.

A flute player breaks into a British museum and makes off with a million dollars worth of dead birds. 

The ghosts that visit us, the ghosts that never do, and the ghosts that walk among us.

People staring down that hardest of questions: Is now the time? To leave?

Exactly how much are the animals that live in our homes caught up in our everyday family dynamics?

People who are tied together, but imagine radically different futures. 

When it comes to finding love, there seems to be two schools of thought on the best way to go about it. One says, wait for that lightning-strike magic. The other says, make a calculation and choose the best option available. Who has it right?

Feeling lost and trying to figure out how to move ahead.

Sometimes you raise your hand. Other times you’re just the only one left.

People being dodged, delayed, and evaded—and what they do to put an end to it.

They mean something, whether we want them to or not.

Writer Etgar Keret tries to come up with the stories that capture his late mother, Orna Keret—but it’s hard, he says, because she’s like Maria in West Side Story and she’s also like Thanos from the Avengers. He ends up with a series of very short stories — most just a few paragraphs long — that give glimpses of different sides of her. 

San Francisco’s Spider-Man burglar was remarkable. He dropped into buildings from skylights, leapt 10 feet from one roof to another. But mostly, his talent got him into trouble. This week, his story, and stories of other undesirable talents.

People experiencing Christmas in brand new ways, giving the holiday even more meaning.

People use machines to find people they lost.

Stories about one person single-handedly taking charge of a situation gone wrong.

Something we’ve never done before: true stories told in the form of a game show.

People trying to coax each other across the line, from one side to the other.

People who try to revisit their childhoods—what they find and what they do not find.

Why we tell them, and what happens after we do.

Not long ago, Republicans in Ohio passed a constitutional amendment to end gerrymandering in the state. And then a funny thing happened. The same Ohio Republicans drew electoral maps that violated their own constitutional amendment. They’ll be using them in this week’s midterm elections. We try to understand how that could happen.

We hear from kids who are dealing with some of the country’s most contentious debates. Debates that are supposedly about them.

Stories about birds and the hearts they sway, the havoc they wreak, the lives they change.

Two people go on excavations of their families’ pasts. Including the first episode of the new podcast, “We Were Three,” hosted by our longtime producer, Nancy Updike, and from Serial Productions and The New York Times.

People taking it upon themselves to keep an eye on those in charge.

Getting to the facts can be difficult, but it’s always the right thing to do. Except when it isn’t.

Getting from Point A to Point B—with expert assistance.

An exploration of the very upper limits of what you do for someone you love.

There’s a program that brings together kids from two schools. One school is public and in the country’s poorest congressional district. The other is private and costs $43,000/year. They are three miles apart. The hope is that kids connect, but some of the public school kids just can’t get over the divide. We hear what happens when you get to see the other side and it looks a lot better. 

Our most ambitious live show ever! We pulled together a massive team of theater pros at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Opera House—nearly 50 singers, actors, dancers and musicians. The result? Journalism turned into a Broadway musical, into opera. Mike Birbiglia, Sasheer Zamata, Stephin Merritt, Josh Hamilton, Lindsay Mendez, Lin-Manuel Miranda and others.

When a fundamental part of yourself changes dramatically, are you still who you thought you were?

With so many songs, movies, and books about the joy of the open road, it's hard to take just a normal road trip without huge expectations.

Ten people were killed at a grocery store in Buffalo, NY. Their stories, as you’ve never heard them.

In 1967, the first two Black students were enrolled at an all-white private boarding school in Virginia. The main reason they were there? To benefit the white kids.

Stories of people racing against time to solve a problem. Will they make it? 

People who love summer camp say that non-camp people simply don't understand what's so amazing about it. We attempt to bridge this gap of misunderstanding between camp people and non-camp people.

We try something harder than anything we've ever tried before, by taking the random ideas that members of our own families have told us would be "perfect for the show," and turning them into actual stories.

An investigation into a very basic question about people: Are most of us bad or good?

The Supreme Court case that overturned Roe v. Wade began with a lawsuit filed by a Mississippi abortion clinic. On the day Roe was overturned, we were there. Stories from the center of this moment of history, the day it happened.

Kids do not like being told it’ll make sense when they’re older. They’re pretty sure the grown-ups are wrong.

Getting from A to B via Z.

Stories of very small injustices and also one very big one.

Kids navigating hairy situations all on their own, with no help from grown-ups.

Government isn’t doing much to prevent school shootings. So parents are jumping in: parents whose kids have died in mass shootings, in the wake of each shooting. They take practical, effective action — and they get results.

The one thing you know for sure when you're watching a romantic comedy is that it's going to turn out okay in the end. When you're living one? Not so much. This week, stories that unfold like rom-coms.

Kids using perfectly logical arguments, and arriving at perfectly wrong conclusions.

People staring squarely at the truth, and still finding it hard to believe what they’re seeing.

A man finds himself thrust into a new world he didn’t necessarily ask to visit. He takes a look around.

Four personal stories from the war in Ukraine.

On a summer day in 1951, two baby girls were born in a hospital in small-town Wisconsin. The infants were accidentally switched, and went home with the wrong families.

In this moment when autocrats and almost-autocrats are getting bolder and more powerful, we bring you two stories of resistance, from Hungary and Russia.

People trying to jump in and solve other people's problems, putting themselves directly in the gap between the problem and the solution. 

It is a peculiar feeling to know with certainty that something big is about to happen to you. This week, we watch people go right up to the edge of inevitable change.

The pandemic broke school. Can we ever go back?

What goes on while mom and dad are away, that mom and dad never find out about. Including the story of two teenagers who decide to invent children to babysit, as an excuse to get out of their own house.

Stories about Vladimir Putin. Did he come to power in 1999 by killing hundreds of innocent Russians? How’s he really seen in his home country? This show is a mix of old and new stories we’ve done about him. 

The casino game everyone thinks they can beat. 

A woman wakes up and discovers her backyard has disappeared, and other stories from places slowly coming apart.

A while back, one of our producers Brian Reed was in England giving a speech about the podcast he'd hosted, S-Town. A journalism student approached him, asking for advice about a story he wanted to look into – something that’d been big news in Britain, something he’d thought about for years. Brian and the student, Hamza Syed, decided to team up to try and solve the mystery at the heart of that story. The original idea was to put this on our show, but it got too big. Too many twists and turns! This week, it rolls out as a spectacularly great podcast called The Trojan Horse Affair. We’re excited to bring you their first episode today.

Last week's story continues, about a Michigan couple who walked into a police officer's house and made a disturbing discovery. This week: the police officer suffers the consequences and so does the couple.

Rob and Reyna Mathis make an unsettling discovery in the home of a local police officer. Soon, their whole city is asking questions about who the officer really is and what he's been doing.

A doctor named Benjamin Gilmer gets a job at a rural clinic in North Carolina. He’s replaced another doctor named Gilmer – Dr. Vince Gilmer – who went to prison after killing his own father. But the more Benjamin’s patients tell him about the other Dr. Gilmer, the more confused he becomes. Everyone loved Vince Gilmer. So Benjamin starts digging around, trying to understand how a good man can seemingly turn bad. Sarah Koenig reports.

Think back to two summers ago, the summer of 2020, when a series of violent, highly-publicized killings of Black Americans sparked outrage and a national movement to eradicate racism and its evils. That movement gave way to a newer, reactionary one, a backlash that is playing out in schools and school board meetings across America. Host Emanuele Berry shares stories about Black people who got tangled up in this current backlash in both extreme and very personal ways. 

Stories about the intersection of Christmas and retail, originally broadcast in 1996 when our show was only a year old. Including David Sedaris's story "Santaland Diaries," which first aired on NPR's Morning Edition in a much shorter version.

We take the stately laws of physics—laws which mathematicians and scientists have spent centuries discovering and verifying—and apply them to the realm of human relationships, to see if they shed useful light on our daily lives.

People earnestly doing what they're told, and absolutely not getting what they were promised.

In 2006, a new convert showed up at a mosque in Orange County, California. Known as Farouk al-Aziz, the convert was actually an FBI informant named Craig Monteilh. That informant’s infiltration of the mosque is at the heart of FBI v Fazaga, a case heard at the Supreme Court last month. We return to our episode from 2012, which tells the story behind it.

People who tell a lie and then believe the lie more than anyone else. 

Getting the point across — or trying to, anyway.

Stories that take place on the edge of civilization, just out of sight.

A man who was imprisoned for 14 years in Guantanamo Bay, without charges, gets out and issues an invitation to all the people who kept him there. Amazingly, three of them agree to talk.

In a world where a virus spreads across the country and most people are not going to movie theaters, we bring the movies to you.

Personal recordings one person made for just one other person, including what some have called the greatest phone message ever.

An hour devoted to embarrassing stories. They’re not always just little moments – funny, daily stuff that we laugh about later. Some can change you for the rest of your life.

People caught in limbo, using ingenuity and guile to try to get themselves out.

What happens when one family goes all in on fighting climate change.

Who thought that would be good for a kid?

We made you a mixtape. Don't make a big deal out of it or anything.

People trying to escape all kinds of seemingly impossible situations.

A group of inmates at a high-security prison rehearse and stage a production of the last act—Act V—of Hamlet.

The pandemic forced jobs to change, but then the workers changed, too.

We human beings think we run the world, that we’ve got things under control. Then an animal shows up, and things don’t go as planned. This week, seals, wolves, and a moose drop in and show us who isn't boss.

Bad neighbors. What can you do about them?

What’s recovery mean, anyway?

We heard about a test that could determine if someone was a psychopath. So, naturally, our staff decided to take it. 

Words mean things, but some words are especially meaningful.

Solving problems using very extreme measures.

Most of us go from day to day just coasting on the status quo. If it ain’t broke, why fix it—right? But when routines just get too mundane or systems stop making sense, sometimes you just have to hold your breath and jump. People who leap from their lives, their comfort zones, even through time.

A bank robber on an undercover mission. A teenage girl with the powers of a tiger. A vigilante seeking vengeance in Ciudad Juarez. All have secret identities. But not all of them chose those identities for themselves.

Sisters build worlds together, worlds that are just for them. Stories about the bonds between sisters and how they get broken and fixed—or not.

Remember conventions, before the pandemic? When people with one common interest gather in monstrous, fluorescent-lit halls for the weekend. Sometimes they drive each other crazy, sometimes they fall in love.

So many of us, we don’t want to think about death. We avoid grieving when we lose someone, distract ourselves, look away. In this episode, at a moment when so many families are mourning, we have stories of people figuring out how they’ll grieve, and doing a pretty good job of it.

Lissa Yellow Bird searches for missing people. Cold cases, mostly. People no one else is looking for. It’s not her job, but a lot of Native Americans go missing and their cases remain unsolved, so families often ask Lissa for help. But then, Lissa’s own niece goes missing. 

An ode to life's daily practices, and what you learn from doing a thing every single day.

People starting over—sometimes because they want to, other times because they have to.

People who try simple mind games on others and find themselves in way over their heads.