On August 28th, 2000, Danny Stewart got on the subway to meet his boyfriend Pete Mercurio for dinner in New York City. As he was exiting the station, he noticed something on the ground. It looked like a baby doll wrapped in a shirt. And then he saw the doll's legs move.

Pete Mercurio's children's book is Our Subway Baby. His forthcoming memoir is called There: We Found Our Family In a New York City Subway Station.

This episode was first released in 2021.

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When Cody Bryant suddenly stopped communicating with Haley Woloshen after weeks of hanging out, she assumed she was being ghosted. It was only later that she found out he’d forgotten about her entirely. 

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The day Edgardo Griffith met Heidi Ross, he asked her if she’d like to come with him to look for frogs. He was looking for a particular kind – bright yellow, with black spots: the Panamanian golden frog. But by the time Edgardo and Heidi were engaged, the frogs had started to disappear.

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Everything you didn’t know about Goodnight Moon, the book that’s put children to bed for generations — and the woman who wrote it. "She could write very well for young children because she remembered exactly what it was like to be one of them."

Leonard Marcus’ book is Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon

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Stories we love about animals really going for it.

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One night in 2018, Ahmed Ali Akbar rented a car and drove two hours to the Detroit airport. He was picking up a package for his cousin – over a dozen boxes of a very special fruit.

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“After more than a hundred years of hard work from some of the greatest cryptological and linguistic minds on the planet, we still don’t quite know what this object is. There’s really nothing like it in the world.”

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Recently, Phoebe told a personal story about her mother, who died this year. In this episode, she talks to journalist Sebastian Junger, who was rushed to the hospital one day after feeling sick – and then, he saw something strange.

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For our 100th episode, a story from Phoebe about her mother, Valentine, who died this spring.

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When Drew Lanham was growing up in South Carolina, he used to lie down in a field and play dead, just so he could get a glimpse of vultures flying over him. He made binoculars out of toilet paper rolls, and wings out of cardboard. He loved birds. But when he went to college, he says, “I was trying to live up to the expectations of others who said, ‘You’re a Black kid who’s good at math and science.’” So he studied engineering, and was miserable. And then, he heard the call of a Prairie Warbler.

Drew Lanham’s book is The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature.

This episode first aired in 2020.

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Writer Andrew Leland talks with Phoebe about slowly losing his eyesight. He was diagnosed with the degenerative eye disease Retinitis pigmentosa when he was in high school. "It was like, 'I'm going out in the woods with my friends at night. And oddly enough, I'm bad at it.'"

Andrew Leland’s memoir, The Country of the Blind, A Memoir at the End of Sight, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

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