There’s a machine lots of us encounter as a big impersonal, mechanical apparatus, that has a ghost in it. But it’s a ghost that appears to just a small handful of people. Jean Hannah Edelstein tells the story to Ira.

Chase Friedman was in an accident that left him paralyzed from the shoulders down. Ira Glass talks to him about the unusual goal he set for his recovery.

When Adele wrote into our show last summer, she described herself as “the worst phlebotomist in the whole hospital.” Producer Diane Wu couldn’t resist calling her up to find out exactly what she meant by that.

Pavan Bivigou writes about having sickle-cell anemia.

People given the difficult task of deciding who lives and who dies.