Invisibilia NPR

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 invisibiliamail@npr.org. The deadline is March 11th.

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?