Sayre Quevedo’s invented a way to do a podcast that feels completely new. He’s been recording nearly all his conversations for years, and the result is something that captures a person’s life in a raw and complicated way that’s rarely heard. His new show Reaching Out also documents his mutually judge-y relationship with his twin brother as they set out to find their long-lost birth father.

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(00:00:00) Prologue: Ira Glass introduces Reaching Out, a podcast that feels like it invented something completely new — an ambitious way of capturing a life in a way we'd never heard before. (1 minute)

(00:02:39) Part One: Sayre Quevedo and his brother start the search for their birth father, and they discover that this whole time he’s been a few minutes away from where Sayre lives. (20 minutes)

(00:21:57) Part Two: The twins try reaching out in a variety of ways before taking more direct action. Sayre tries to continue life as normal. (12 minutes)

(00:34:00) Part Three: Sayre and Connor go in person to face their dad. (24 minutes)

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Moments when it seems obvious what to do for someone else, so of course you jump in and try to help — and what happens after that.

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(00:00:00) Prologue: Devon Taylor tells host Ira Glass about a time she confronted people who stole $100 from her. (12 minutes)

(00:12:01) Act One: We get to an age when we find ourselves taking care of our parents, whether they want us to or not. Writer Kristen Roupenian wrote this piece of fiction based on something real that happened to a family she knows. (20 minutes)

(00:33:37) Act Two: Two chatbots, stuck in a loop, each trying to help the other. Will they ever break free? (20 minutes)

(00:55:48) Act Three: In Utah, some communities have been fighting measles outbreaks for 14 months. These are some of the longest-running outbreaks in the country. But one of our producers, Miki Meek, heard about how school nurses in a town called Vernal helped end its outbreak in just six weeks. Miki finds out how they did it. (9 minutes)

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Cryptic messages on a cell phone and a teeter-totter at a construction site: these are clues people found, trying to make sense of a death.

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(00:00:00) Prologue: Host Ira Glass talks to a guy about a crazy experiment he devised when he was a kid. It almost killed him. (5 minutes)

(00:06:45) Act One: We begin with a woman whose sister has died. She has questions. Her name is Nadia Bowers, and she wrote this to someone she thinks might be of help. (17 minutes)

(00:29:53) Act Two: There’s a problem with having a Facebook account after you’re dead that you’ve never, ever, ever thought about. Producer Stephanie Foo tells this story, about Dave Maher. (14 minutes)

(00:45:49) Act Three: A guy goes to a funeral for someone he doesn’t know at all, and has to piece together everything about him. Producer Dana Chivvis reports. (16 minutes)

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People braving the true final frontier — the gap between people born at slightly different times.

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(00:00:00) Prologue: Last fall, some NPR podcasts started getting mysterious comments on Spotify. They made no sense to the staff reading them – until someone from a younger generation cracked the code. (11 minutes)

(00:12:00) Act One: When Courtney Maum was eighteen, her mother married a guy she despised. At their wedding, Courtney read a poem she wrote – a pretty dark poem! – which made her mother furious. More than 30 years later, they finally talk about it. (27 minutes)

(00:41:53) Act Two: When Ike Sriskandarajah was a teenager in Madison, Wisconsin, he thought he had the greatest job. He worked at the movie theater, wore a cummerbund, and snuck friends in through the back door! It was magical. That was more than 20 years ago. Is it still as great as he remembers? Ike goes back to find out. (8 minutes)

(00:50:27) Act Three: Every morning, Myra Flynn finds herself in a standoff with her daughter over her hair. Recently, to understand why these hair sessions are so fraught, Myra started recording them. What she heard sent her on a quest to get answers from her own mother. (11 minutes)

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Nikole Hannah-Jones made an argument 10 years ago in The New York Times Magazine that became famous. She wrote about choosing a public school for her daughter, Najya, in one of the most racially and economically segregated school systems in the country: New York City. Nikole chose a regular public school, one that most wealthy and middle-class parents wouldn’t consider, and she challenged other parents to do the same. She revisits that argument, and that choice, in a series of conversations with producer Chana Joffe-Walt and with her daughter, Najya, who’s now 16 and has her own very different views.

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(00:00:00) Prologue: Chana talks with Nikole about what they both remember from being young parents just starting to think about schools for their children. (9 minutes)

(00:10:41) Act One: Nikole talks with Chana about Najya’s elementary school and the problems her family navigated there. (15 minutes)

(00:25:57) Act Two: Chana talks with Najya about her memories of elementary and middle school and how she felt about her mom’s choices. (9 minutes)

(00:31:40) Act Three: Nikole and Najya talk about what changed when Najya pushed back against her mom’s choices for elementary and middle school and got to choose her own high school. (10 minutes)

(00:42:08) Act Four: Nikole and Najya talk with each other about the different choices they made and the questions they still have for each other. (9 minutes)

(00:51:06) Act Five: Nikole fact-checks her memory against her old emails with Najya’s elementary school and has a painful revelation. (7 minutes)

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Labels are powerful. They can distill you down to a single word. They can get stuck on you without your permission. And sometimes, when they get taken away, they can upend your entire life. On this episode: labels and the havoc they wreak.

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(00:00:00) Prologue: Sara and Ethan have been dating for 10 months. They see each other at least once a week, text pretty much every day, and have been there for each other through hard times. But they refuse to have the “what are we?” conversation. So what gives? Guest host Tobin Low looks into it. (5 minutes)

(00:05:14) Act One: Last week, when Temporary Protected Status, also known as TPS, was cut off for Haitian immigrants, some 300,000 people had their lives upended. Marie, a Certified Nursing Assistant in Boston, was one of them. Producer Chana Joffe-Walt spent time last week with Marie as she tried to figure out exactly when her very last day on the job would be. (21 minutes)

(00:27:57) Act Two: Comedian Janet McNamara was walking off stage 15 years ago when the club owner asked, “Hey, have you ever been tested for autism?” No one had ever asked her this before, so Janet decided to look into it. (17 minutes)

(00:44:01) Act Three: When you get down to it, labels are just our way of pointing out what we think is remarkable about other people. That’s Alfred Jung Lee’s argument. He’s been thinking a lot about how we describe each other, especially as he tries to describe his wife, who passed away from cancer. (10 minutes)

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People dealing with new, glaring, massive changes happening right where they live.

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(00:00:00) Prologue: Rick Cole, a city councilmember in Pasadena, CA, talks to Ira about how he responded to a surprise nighttime military exercise in his neighborhood this June – complete with helicopters, gunfire, and flash bangs. (5 minutes)

(00:05:30) Act One: A doctor trained as a midwife tells the eye-popping story of how she and others came together to save a baby during a birth that suddenly went wrong, in a part of rural Maine where the local labor and delivery unit had closed less than a month before. (26 minutes)

(00:34:56) Act Two: Producer Valerie Kipnis never felt inside the jokes and stories her family would tell about growing up in the Soviet Union, until she saw this year's Oscar-winning documentary, Mr. Nobody Against Putin. The film follows the changes unfolding in one school as Russia rolled out a nationwide propaganda push after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Valerie interviewed the young teacher at the center of the documentary and learned things that never made it into the film. (21 minutes)

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