Hour-long Stories
This list is handy if you want to immerse yourself in a long story.
A flute player breaks into a British museum and makes off with a million dollars worth of dead birds.
This story is sort of a real-life Hardy Boys mystery, about a young boy, an abandoned house, and the mysterious family who once lived there but seemed to disappear without a trace.
A very unusual story about one family and the fights they got into when Russia invaded Ukraine.
Over the course of six months, Jack Hitt followed a group of inmates at a high-security prison as they rehearsed and staged a production of the last act of Hamlet.
We document one day in a Chicago diner called The Golden Apple, starting at 5 a.m. and going until 5 a.m. We hear from the waitress who has worked the graveyard shift for over two decades, the regular customers who come every day, the couples working out their problems, various assorted drunks, and, of course, cops.
A security guard at the airport notices something going wrong on the tarmac, and takes it upon herself to fix it. It’s way harder than she expects.
In Schenectady, New York, a school maintenance man named Steve Raucci worked his way up the ranks for 30 years, until finally he was in charge of the maintenance department. That's when he started messing with his employees.
What do you get when you take a private investigation firm, toss in a bunch of sexy soccer moms, and then add official sponsorship from Glock firearms, a lying boss, and delusions of grandeur? This show. That’s what you get.
In 1984, General Motors and Toyota opened NUMMI as a joint venture in California. Toyota showed GM the secrets of its production system: How it made cars of much higher quality and much lower cost than GM achieved. Frank Langfitt explains why GM didn't learn the lessons — until it was too late.
Abdi is a Somali refugee living in Kenya and gets the luckiest break of his life: He wins a lottery that puts him on a short list for a U.S. visa. This is his ticket out. But before he can cash in his golden ticket, the police start raiding his neighborhood, targeting refugees.
We devote the entire hour to one phone call that happened on a very unusual hotline. It takes you inside this world that either you're already in, or it's totally invisible to you.
Sarah Vowell and her twin sister retrace the "Trail of Tears" — the route their Cherokee ancestors took when expelled from their land by President Andrew Jackson.
In January 2002, the President of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, spoke at Georgetown University. There he urged Afghan-Americans, especially young ones, to move back to Afghanistan. It’s possible that the very first teenager to heed his invitation was Hyder Akbar, 17, from Concord, California.
Nine radio producers. Two days. One rest stop on the New York State Thruway. In this show, we bring you stories of people who are just passing through, and people who are at the rest stop every day — working.
Life aboard the USS John C. Stennis, an aircraft carrier that was sending bombing missions over Afghanistan in the months immediately after 9/11. Only a few dozen people on board actually fly jets. It takes the rest of the crew — over 5,000 people — to keep them in the air.
In 1912, a 4-year-old boy named Bobby Dunbar went missing in a swamp in Louisiana. Eight months later, he was found in the hands of a wandering handyman in Mississippi.
The story of how the American Psychiatric Association decided in 1973 that homosexuality was no longer a mental illness.
Surprising stories from survivors of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. We give people who were in the storm more time than daily news coverage can to tell their stories and talk about what they're thinking. This leads to a number of ideas that haven't made it into the regular news coverage.
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