Audiofiles!

One of the best-known stories from the Bible reenacted with an armadillo. Sort of.

Playing around with audio samples taken from pornography films, producer Ed Prosser was struck by how much the moans and groans came to resemble the calls of whales.

The phenomenon known as genetic sexual attraction occurs when family members who have never met until adulthood find themselves attracted to one another. And for those who experience it, GSA is often shrouded in secrecy, shame, and fear.

A dark tale about a woman obsessed with The Sound of Music and the Von Trapp Family as well as other things Austrian. That is, until she realizes Austria’s recent history is not just about apple strudel, singing nuns, and happy blond children.

Blaise Allysen Kearsley ponders the question: How do you learn about sexuality when no one tells you anything useful and everyone else seems to know what they’re doing?

A woman reveals to her boyfriend that she’s not always what she seems.

A story about being a crybaby, from David Sedaris’ book of animal fables.

At the countdown to the New Year, Joe Frank is feeling the weight of time.

Jad Abumrad goes looking for the devil, in search of the truth behind the legend of one of the most haunting, shadowy figures in music — American blues singer Robert Johnson.

A young man is bewildered when his phone conversation with a date sounds entirely different on her end of the line than it does on his.

“Night in London is a brief period of infinite possibility,” wrote the journalist HV Morton in the 1920s. Nowhere is this truer than in Hackney, which becomes an asphalt jungle for revellers, criminals, artists, lovers, all night eateries, and taxi drivers.

John Hodgman rambles through a story about aliens, physics, time, space, and the way all of these somehow contribute to a sweet, perfect memory of falling in love.

At 17, Eleanor Longden started to hear voices and was diagnosed as a schizophrenic — a label she rejects. Now she is a high achieving academic, living happily with the voices.

A first-hand account of the power of animal magnetism.

John Hodgman tells a story about returning to the beach after a very bad year.

A sit down with a man accused of some of the most horrific acts imaginable, as a warlord with The Lord’s Resistance Army in Northern Uganda.

The photographer Michele Iversen documents strangers in their own homes, without permission. At night she sits in her car, looking in and waiting for the perfect shot.

The story of a man who has spent more than a decade trying to convince doctors that he’s not mentally ill. But the more he argues his case, the less they believe him.

In 1906, the Bronx Zoo in New York unveiled a new exhibit that would attract thousands of visitors. Inside a cage, in the monkey house, was a man.

A twist on the timeless question: Is it art?

A Houston woman tries to document every day of her four-year-old daughter’s life.

As a brain scientist, Jill Bolte Taylor got an unusual research opportunity. She had a massive stroke, and watched in fascination as her functions shut down one by one.

For twenty years, Robert Shields has kept a written record of absolutely everything that has happened to him. For no less than four hours each day, Shields holes himself up in a small office in his home and types – 35 million words and counting.

The story of sisters who, at the ripe old ages of 11 and 14, concocted a prank that put them at the center of the spiritualism movement in 19th century America.

A soundscape of weather, walks, and slugs in North Wales.

A world in which meteorologists have vanished suddenly and without explanation, and people begin to study details of the weather themselves. The first story in a trilogy.

The story of Maggie Iaquinto, an American-born Australian and ham radio operator who forged a unique relationship with Russian cosmonauts aboard the space station.

The pop star Robbie Williams is taking time out from his career and has been researching UFO sightings, abductees, and the possibility of extra-terrestrial life. Jon Ronson accompanies him to a UFO conference in Laughlin, Nevada.

A complicated answer to a seemingly simple question changes a family’s geometry.

Off the coast of Baja, California, scientists have found gray whales are uncharacteristically social with humans, even allowing their faces, mouths and tongues to be massaged as they bump up beside boats.

Ali Davis literally hands people their fantasies, at a video store with a huge porn section.

Amy, a one-time fetish model, on her venture into an unusual corner of the porn world. Note: This story deals with mature themes.

The true story of Princess Alexandra Amelie of Bavaria, 1826-1875, who was observed awkwardly walking sideways down the palace corridors. When questioned by her worried royal parents, she announced that she had swallowed a grand glass piano.

Meditations on insanity and unsanity.

A story of the kind of preferential treatment we all dream of, where waiters routinely bring us extra appetizers on the house, delivery men throw a little something special into our take-out orders, and deli owners regularly comp us free pickles and chips.

This Is Your Life was a 1950s television show in which unsuspecting, often famous, guests would have their biographies created on the spot for 40 million viewers. But in some cases, the format seemed a bit inappropriate for the story being told.

In which Sean Cole goes undercover as a strip club attendee in Memphis, which he’s heard is the city for that sort of thing. Note: This story deals with mature themes.

The Great Salt Lake’s West Desert is a land of polygymists and bombing ranges. There’s chlorine gas in the air, anthrax underground, and people who call the place home.

The history of the modern shopping mall, told by people living in a real, yet unnamed, city. Scored to Muzak, the universal mall experience comes to life, for better or worse.

A chimp teaches us the ups and downs of growing up human (here’s the epilogue, too).

Impart as much knowledge as you can to a resident of the 14th century — go!

Why is it that karaoke machines only have songs on them? Why aren’t there other options, like the “you talkin to me?” scene from Taxi Driver?

What happens at the moment we slip from life to the other side? When exactly does it happen? What happens afterward? Eleven meditations on how, and even if, we die.

Two sisters, now in their seventies, have preserved the same relationship they had as girls — down to the matching outfits and shared favorites.

Milton Reid works as a muralist in one of the largest housing projects in America. Starting at about 50 dollars, he’ll paint a resident’s wall. When he first started, all clients wanted were black and gold panthers, but their tastes have gotten more varied.

Pornography rates up there with Hollywood as one of Southern California’s biggest industries, yet stories about it are often completely off the mark. Pornographer Sam Stern offers an unsettling answer to the question: just how far have we come in perceptions of feminine sexuality? Note: This story deals with mature themes.

An account of life in one of the Bowery’s last flophouses, from the men who live in its rows of wooden cubicles. “So it’s not the Waldorf,” says Nathan Smith, the manager, “but where else can you find a room in New York for $10 a night?”

When he was 16, Myron Jones was allowed to go out any night of the week, but his mother barely let his sister out of the house. So the siblings invented an imaginary family that required her to babysit late into the night and sometimes for entire weekends.

Master of Horror Mick Garris, a former Mexican Mafia hit man and a self-aware hypochondriac on how we’re held captive by others and ourselves.

A rewind to the 1970s and ’80s, diving into the archives for the strange and hilarious work that was produced when public radio was a medium without a real template.

The phone rings at the Coney Island Chamber of Commerce and 86-year-old Matt Kennedy answers a common question about the Brooklyn amusement park. “Yes, of course Coney Island still exists. Yes, it’s bigger and better than ever. Thank you.”

The people of Lubec, Maine, are met with an unpleasant surprise when an enormous whale washes onto the beachfront of their tiny coastal town. As the 60-ton creature begins to decompose, the town is forced to come up with a plan to get rid of it.

Witness the tearful end of a perfect online world.

A mystery involving a box of old letters and a chase through clues and suspects — a Manhattan middle school teacher, homesick WWII soldiers, Rte 101, an estranged wife and mother — that all revolve around, yes, a goat standing on a cow.

Steve McGreevy goes to Canada for the Northern Lights. Not to see them, but to hear them. You can do that, with the right equipment. And Steve’s got a van full. He records Natural Radio, the sound of earth’s magnetic field.

Near the end of the 19th century, a mysterious young woman with a beguiling smile turned up in Paris. She became a huge sensation. She also happened to be dead. You’d probably recognize her face yourself. You might have even put your mouth on it.

A well-known activist — an anarchic, revolutionary activist — is accused of spying on other activists for the FBI. The strangest thing about the rumor is, it’s true. The story of how Brandon Darby transformed from cop-hater to federal witness.

In 1988, Deborah Luster’s mother was murdered by a contract killer. To cope, Luster turned to photography — in prisons. “The perspective was that everyone is a whole person, that they’re not just the sum of their worst acts or even their best acts.”

The CIA enlists a cat as a listening device in its fight against the Soviets. The plan fails.

An hour under the influence of the radio maestro and radical raconteur.

Comedian Mike Birbiglia on the time he ruined a cancer charity event with the worst performance of his life. He improvised. About cancer.

For decades, believers living in the Appalachian hills of the southeastern US have incorporated handling serpents and drinking strychnine into their religious practice. In accordance with their faith, handlers refuse medical treatment when bitten.

A series of convergences, but none of them are harmonic. The story of Pythagoras and the fifth hammer, using Nazi cameras in art, what happens when the mind goes pop!, and more. In other words, another hour with Benjamen Walker.

The odd power of the cover band. One day in Afghanistan, the reporter started playing “Those Were the Days My Friend” on his accordion. His translator, shocked, asks, “How do you know Afghan music?” And so we learn the tale of Afghan Elvis.

In the early 1990s, many psychologists told patients that their problems could be traced to traumatic events they could not even remember, to memories that had to be recovered through special techniques. Turns out, many of those memories weren’t real.

The true nature of the dark side, its power over 32-year-old men living with mom — and why being known as “The Master-Vader” may not command the respect you seek.

The idea is simple: if we all shared a second, neutral language, people of all different cultures could communicate freely and easily, and it would foster international understanding and peace. This is the idea behind the invention of Esperanto.

Why does a country music star and all-American guy — half of what was Nashville’s biggest act — have a house full of paintings from the Soviet Union? It’s a long story.

Early in his career, musician Dan Deacon embarked on an eight-week tour. Totally broke, when the car died, he had no choice but to finish the trip by Greyhound bus.

Ever wonder how earthworms do it? Isabella Rossellini has always been famous for her independence of mind. In “Green Porno,” her series of film shorts for Sundance, she applied that iconoclasm to the sex lives of the animal kingdom.

While first man on the moon Neil Armstrong receives honorary degrees from MIT, second man on the moon Buzz Aldrin is stuck doing space-themed fast food restaurant openings. Their embittered email exchange features David Sedaris as Armstrong.

For a time, the Nadeau family had secret: the husband had a tendency to wear women’s clothes. Then Doug Nadeau got sick and, after surgery, he became less inhibited and more public in his crossdressing. His wife tells his story.

The comedian sends his brother, Seth, to a Best Show interview in his place. Seth is visiting from North Carolina and shares his new insights on calamari and the differences between the TGI Friday’s in New York and back home.

Video game designer Ian Bogost hates games like Farmville. So he created a parody, Cow Clicker. But rather than be taken as a joke, the game took on a life of its own.

A famous boy prodigy, William James Sidis taught himself Latin at 3, graduated Harvard at 16, but collected streetcar transfer tickets at 28.

In the 1960s, a young professor of psychology at Yale set out to test our capacity for obedience and cruelty. Millions of words have been written about the results of Stanley Milgram’s experiment. Less is known about the effect it had on those involved.

The Frankenstein Family Crypt in 1952, paranormal observations of an 8 year old, the haunting of a kitty, thoughts on the ghost story structure, and a scary pantry door.

The extraordinary story of Mary Turner Thompson. Mary met and married Will, a man who said he was a CIA agent. He dashed off to Israel, leaving Mary holding the baby, never knowing when he would come back. But the most bizarre twist was still to come.

A 12-year quest to chase down and catch an antelope.

A group of anxiety-ridden professionals hold a weekly phone conference aimed at providing support and advice. The producer joined and recorded the proceedings over six years. In this first episode, we meet the members.

Rob Corddry is a detective confronted with the biggest case of his career: a stolen soul. He’s heard of stolen hearts. Heck, he’s stolen plenty himself. But a stolen soul?

In 1906, a rich family vacationing in Oyster Bay, New York, started to get sick. Very sick. It turns out they’d come down with typhoid, a disease forever associated with one woman: Typhoid Mary. You may think you know this story — you don’t.

Matthew wears a face mask. He reveals through drawings and sound the story behind the mask. Let’s leave it at that, because the strength is in the unraveling.

An hour of stories on the topic — from a man who spent years trying to decipher scratchy transmissions from North Korea, to mysterious signals hidden in between the AM and FM band, to an ode to a mythical pirate station.

Working at FAO Schwartz, the reporter’s job is to sell lifelike “newborns” displayed in a “nursery” inside the store. When the white babies sell out, white parents are faced with a choice: Will they go for an Asian, Latino, or African-American baby instead?

In his memoir “God, If You’re Not Up There, I’m F——-,” the Saturday Night Live impressionist details the systematic brutality he suffered at the hands of his mother, who beat him, stabbed him and tortured him with a hammer and electrical outlet.

A perfect “sonic ID” for the station that serves the Cape & Islands. From WCAI’s collection of pioneering, regional station identifications.

We consume paper by the ton, but most of us never think about where it comes from or how it’s made. The reporter tries to make his own, using a recipe he found in poetry.

The story of a man obsessed with reruns. A director makes an entire movie that’s a rerun, based on a personal rerun that he found himself caught in. But why?

In December of 1967, miner Melvin Earl Dummar was driving down a desert road in Nevada when he saw a man lying in the road. Melvin rescued the man who turned out, he says, to be billionaire tycoon Howard Hughes. His life changed forever.

Charles Gaulperin is a Santeria priest and the owner of Botanica El Congo Manuel, a religious shop in a strip mall in Hollywood. The reporter goes to witness a sacred ceremony that involves the sacrifice of a hen and a sick man in New York.

On the 25th anniversary of the mass suicide and murder of more than 900 followers of Reverend Jim Jones in Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978, survivor Laura Johnston Kohl looks back on what went wrong, and the pain and regret she lives with.

NASA is figuring out how to take the next great leap into space. The difficulty is, if we send astronauts to Mars, they might not make it back.

Lisa Bufano is a dancer. She is also a double amputee. Her legs and fingers were amputated when she was 21, after a staph bacteria infection raged through her body.

Thunderbolt’s business card is a little mysterious. It reads, “Thunderbolt – Party Naked” and gives a phone number. Call the number and he’ll invite you to a private strip club at his bungalow in a working-class neighborhood in east Detroit.

In 1946, a psychiatrist named Walter Freeman launched a radical new era in the treatment of mental illness. One of his patients, at age 56, embarked on a quest to discover the story behind the procedure he received as a 12-year-old boy.

If you’ve read any 19th century literature, England seems to be an island made up entirely of people with submerged, often misplaced passions for other people. This particular affair, even years after it ended, wasn’t much discussed.

A brush with death turns into a full blown nightmare when the police report is so poorly filled out that somehow Mike winds up owing a drunk driver 12,000 dollars — not because it’s fair, but because he can’t get anyone to listen to him.

For reasons that remain mostly mysterious, the note we call “B flat” does the oddest things. It aggravates alligators, it lurks in the stairwell of an office building, and it emanates from a supermassive black hole 250 million light years from Earth.

Laura Buxton, an English girl just shy of ten years old, didn’t realize the strange course her life would take after her red balloon was swept away into the sky. What happened next is something you just couldn’t make up.

The story of how the insatiable millionaire John D. Rockefeller turned an eye to the untapped market of the American South and ended up eradicating the hookworm. And, we’re introduced to Jasper Lawrence, a modern-day entrepreneur whose passion for hookworms stems from lifelong battles with allergies and asthma.

A restaurant in Switzerland offers up a different dining experience: Guests eat in complete darkness and are served by blind or visually handicapped waitstaff.

Dr. Oliver Sacks called her “Mrs. O’C.” She was Irish. She was old. And she had a problem: One night, while sleeping in her room at a Catholic old people’s home in the Bronx, she was awakened by a voice, a female voice singing Irish ballads.

Will a lost TV remote ever be found? Can you successfully fake the sound of call waiting? Will our hero ever get to see Yentl? Maybe the show’s funniest ever episode.

The producer asks his friend Sam how he would eulogize him. The answer is a startling reminder that you can’t necessarily count on your friends.

Stu Rasmussen, of Silverton, Oregon, is an avid metalworker, woodworker, and electrician — and in 2008 became our country’s first transgendered mayor. News of his election swept the country, but what was it like at home?

Trouble in the Town of Bedrock. Barney accidentally runs over and kills a dinosaur that belongs to his neighbor and best friend, Fred. In the ensuing series of phone messages, the two friends air some long-simmering grievances in their friendship.

One percent of the general population tests as psychopath. Four percent of corporate leaders do. With that in mind, the reporter pays an unforgettable visit to a former Sunbeam CEO. Plus, Jon Ronson talks more about psychopaths with Jesse Thorn.

In the late 1960s, a California TV repairman named Bob Nelson joined a group of enthusiasts who believed they could cheat death with a new technology called cryonics. But freezing dead people so scientists can reanimate them in the future is a lot harder than it sounds. Harder still is admitting you’ve screwed up.

You’d be forgiven for confusing Tracy Morgan with his 30 Rock character Tracy Jordan. Jordan runs down the street in his underwear, wielding a plastic light saber; Morgan appeared on TV reclining on top of a desk with his shirt up over his belly.

A man who’s lost everything, Clive Wearing has what Oliver Sacks calls “the most severe case of amnesia ever documented.” With Clive’s wife, Sacks tries to understand why, amidst so much forgetting, Clive remembers music and love.