True Urban Legends

#406 - 23 April 2010

Can a rat crawl through your plumbing and end up in your toilet? Can your cell phone give you a brain tumor? Download a transcript or read much more information about our Steve Poizner story. Christopher Ketcham's GQ cell article is here.

Inside Job

#405 - 9 April 2010

For seven months a team of investigative journalists from ProPublica looked into a story for us, the inside story of one company that made hundreds of millions of dollars for itself while worsening the financial crisis for the rest of us.

Enemy Camp 2010

#404 - 2 April 2010

Living behind enemy lines, among the enemy, it's sometimes hard to remember why you're fighting in the first place.

NUMMI

#403 - 26 March 2010

A car plant in Fremont California that might have saved the U.S. car industry. In 1984, General Motors and Toyota opened NUMMI as a joint venture. 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.

Save the Day

#402 - 12 March 2010

Stories about one person single-handedly taking charge of a situation gone wrong—including one man's mission to rescue two kids who were kidnapped by alleged murderers and taken to Mexico, and another about a professor's mission to keep the educators of a liberal arts college from extinction.

Parent Trap

#401 - 19 February 2010

Stories about parents setting accidental traps for their children, and sometimes for themselves, including a story from WNYC's Radiolab about a chimp raised twice—once as a human child, and again as a chimp.

Stories Pitched by Our Parents

#400 - 12 February 2010

For our 400th show, we try something harder than anything we've ever tried in the previous 399. We take the random ideas that members of our own families have told us at weddings and family gatherings would be "perfect for the show"...and we actually try to make those ideas into stories.

Contents Unknown

#399 - 22 January 2010

A man named David Maclean finds himself in a train station in India, with no idea how he got there or who he is. His memory gone, he has no choice but to let other people—police, doctors, friends, family—create an identity for him. David's book about this incident is called The Answer to the Riddle Is Me. Plus other stories of filling in the blank.

Long Shot

#398 - 8 January 2010

Stories of people betting on something with very bad odds, mostly because they have no other choice.

2010

#397 - 1 January 2010

At the start of a new year, journalistic outfits put out lots of mealy "perhaps oil prices will rise or perhaps they won't" predictions for the coming year. Instead of that, we asked our contributors to predict real events that will happen to them and the people they know in 2010.