If you're a kid and a terrible thing happens, what do you do to feel safe? If you're an adult, how do you offer guidance to the kids when you can't even make sense of what's happened—and when it's your job to act as a shield to the children? Those are some of the questions that animate Buffalo Extreme, a new series from NPR's Embedded. Buffalo Extreme follows a group of Black cheerleaders, their coaches and their mothers in the year after a racist mass shooting at a supermarket just three...

In their final episode, Invisibilia searches for the right way to say goodbye.

We need your help to say goodbye.

This week, we're running an episode from our friends at It's Been a Minute that digs into the cultural phenomenon that is Real Housewives...and why so many of us can't look away.

The new year is a time to be reflective and make changes - maybe to yourself or how you relate to others. With resolutions in mind, we bring you this NPR Life Kit episode exploring what attachment styles reveal about your relationships. Reported and guest hosted by our own Kia Miakka Natisse.

Sometimes the holidays are filled with the people you love. Other times, they're marked by an absence. In this special holiday episode, new Code Switch co-host and former Invisibilia producer B.A. Parker tells a story about family, loss and preserving memories before it's too late. Then Parker joins Kia and Yowei to reflect on the making of this story, and what it means to her now.

Bad bosses. Obnoxious coworkers. Unfair compensation. There are so many reasons people feel disempowered in the workplace. But how can our feelings about power enable or disrupt the larger dynamics we hate at work? This week, Yowei Shaw seeks answers from a power researcher and a union organizer.

After months of working from home and retreating from the world, Kia Miakka Natisse is stuck - in her house, and in her head. In an attempt to break out of the funk, she's searching for wisdom at the bottom of the ocean with South Africa's first Black freediving instructor, Zandile Ndhlovu.

In San Jose, California, a community clinic was stumped as to why their clients were seeing ghosts. This week, a story about grappling with ghosts of our past and one clinic's attempt to heal intergenerational trauma.

This week on Invisibilia, could the rebrand of a familiar pill open up a new way to control fertility in a post-Roe America?

Alex is a comic who feels perfectly comfortable commanding a packed, rowdy audience, but consistently submits to what other people want in everyday life. This week, a look at how uncomfortable feelings about power can backfire on ourselves and the people we love. We get the help of a power expert - a dominatrix - to untangle Alex's power dynamics, and find out what it takes to treat a power allergy.

2022 feels like walking a tightrope. We're grappling with control of our bodies, our time, the direction of our country - while trying to not spin out and just doomscroll. So this season, Invisibilia takes on control. The narratives we have about what's in or out of our control. Invisible tools of control. The crutches we use to FEEL in control but that might not be helping.

Invisibilia is seeking stories about discomfort with power. Stories about leaders denying their power, organizations with supposedly flat power structures and invisible hierarchies, or personal relationships with difficult power dynamics. If you have a story about power – at a workplace, in a band, on a high school basketball team, etc... – send a short summary with the subject line – POWER – to [email protected]. The deadline is March 11th.

This week at Invisibilia, we're bringing you an episode from NPR's Throughline about an emotion you might be feeling a lot these days: nostalgia. Longing for 'simpler times' and 'better days', many of us have been turning to 90s dance playlists, TV sitcoms, and sports highlights. We're looking for comfort and safety in the permanence of the past, or at least, what we think the past was. But, when it first appeared, nostalgia itself wasn't considered a feeling; it was a deadly disease. This...

It's the end of the friendship season! We'll be back next year with more Invisibilia. In the meantime, if you're hungry for more friendship content, our friends over at Life Kit have done several episodes about it - from how to be a better listener, to what to do when a friendship changes. In this episode: practical tips on how to make new friends.

Would you ever consider going to therapy with a friend?Two best friends who call themselves brothers were drifting apart, so they asked psychotherapist Esther Perel to help — and we listened in. This episode was recorded in collaboration with Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel and a companion episode can be heard on her podcast.

Sh*t happens. So why is it so hard to talk about? This week, the ways that poop divides and binds us in our friendships.

A lot of us think that it's a bad idea to get physical with friends. We worry it'll get messy, maybe even ruin the friendship. But if physical intimacy between friends weren't so taboo, what could our friendships look like? In this episode, we explore the gray zone of sex and friendship, following a man who deliberately kept his friendships with women hazy and now wants to apologize, and a pair of BFFs who became close through sex.

You know the old saying--keep your friends close and your enemies closer. But what if you can't tell the difference? In this episode, the story of two friends who got caught up in a Top Secret operation that tested their assumptions about trust, betrayal, loyalty, and power.

It's a basic tenet of friendship that you get to choose your friends. We look at two institutions that took away that choice: convents circa the 1960s and a summer program with unusual rules. What do we lose and what do we gain when we give up our preferences and try to make friends with everyone equally?

It's one of the most common and infuriating friend mysteries out there - a friend disappears into thin air. But where do these ghosts go? And why are we so haunted by them? If you or someone you know may be considering suicide, contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741.

Friendship gets the Invisibilia treatment.

A 16-year-old Black kid walks into a gas station in Stockton, Calif. to buy gummy worms for his little sister. When the teen gets in an argument with the clerk over a damaged dollar bill, a white officer in plainclothes decides to intervene — with force. We bring you an episode of On Our Watch, a new podcast from NPR and KQED that traces the ripple effects of this incident over the next 10 years in a department trying to address racism and bias.

Let's get slow. Producer Abby Wendle picks up the gauntlet that was thrown down in the last episode "The Great Narrative Escape." Sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride.