David Sedaris tells true stories of photographers who try to take pictures of him which will make him seem more "wacky" than in fact he is, interlaced with a fictional depiction of what one of these photographers is like.

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.

David Sedaris with a parable of the pressures on modern women, and how one woman — his sister — responded. David's father thought it was very important that his daughters be thin.

David Cale's Lillian.

Writer David Rakoff explains how his life was changed—in a single evening—in a room of 5000 chickens.

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.

Reporter Alix Spiegel and playwright David Kodeski tell stories about Niagara Falls. During the hour we hear from Paul Gromosiak, a man who's obsessed with the Falls, writes about them, thinks about them all the time, but never goes there, because "they've ruined the falls." We hear a man who went over the falls in a barrel, and we hear the recordings he made inside the barrel as he went over. There's a man who picks up the bodies of people who've jumped over the Falls.

David Himmel is a college sophomore and a former camper who became a counselor. He says all the best experiences of his life have been at camp or with camp people.

Alex Melamid and Vitaly Komar hired a polling firm to investigate what people want to see in paintings. Then, using the data, they painted what people want.

Durrell was a professional musician. He toured Asia, Brazil, Canada, gigs in Paris.

Ira and the movie Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. Advertised as wacky, it is anything but.

A high school student named Rebecca tells the story of a friend of hers who changed over the course of four years from a preppy alternative kid to a member of the Latina clique to a ghetto girl to a Clueless girl (a girl who models herself after the girls in the film and TV show Clueless). It's hard to imagine many boys changing style this quickly, this willfully, this many times.

Linda Howard and Richard Bloom, in Boca Raton Florida, had been married years when she started flirting with another man.

The modern history of Niagara Falls can be divided roughly into three phases: Schemers who came in trying to exploit the Falls for tourism and failed; schemers who came in and tried to exploit the Falls for hydroelectric power, who've all gone; and the people who are left in Niagara today. Our show is about this last group: People who live in the aftermath.

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

Sarah Vowell and her twin sister Amy re-trace the Trail of Tears. They visit the town in Georgia that was the capital of the Cherokee Nation before the Cherokee were expelled.

Host Ira Glass with Cornell University Professor Richard Klein, on how seeing isn't just seeing. Seeing implies a kind of power over someone else.

When is a chicken your friend? When is he your dinner? This American Life's former webmeister Elizabeth Meister talks with Kamiko Overs, an 11-year-old girl at the annual poultry exhibition run by the American Poultry Association in Columbus, Ohio. Elizabeth Meister is a producer with Long Haul Productions.

When she began working as a temp secretary in San Francisco, learning the computers, wasting time, Andrea put together a graph with Microsoft Excel. Its title: My Love Life: A Ten Year Span. It made her feel good.

Sylvia's parents are immigrants who want her to be a traditional girl.

D. Travers Scott and his boyfriend spent six months gathering data on their own relationship and put together a report on it in the form of a corporate annual report.

Dishwasher Pete, an itinerant dishwasher and author of the book Dishwasher: One Man's Quest to Wash Dishes in All Fifty States, loves taking the bus as he moves from city to city every few weeks. In this act, he takes a tape recorder with him, hoping to capture the stories he always hears from his fellow passengers.

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.

In this special half-hour story produced by Jay Allison as part of his Life Stories series, Dan Gediman tracks down the original Zoom cast members to find out what his life would've been like if he had achieved his childhood dream of being on Zoom.