A rerun organized around ordinary people confronting extraordinary responsibility moves from a wrongful-conviction case haunted by a daughter’s silence to a family besieged by a neighbor and, finally, to Shalom Auslander’s darkly comic theology of two starving hamsters. Across the hour, power appears less as authority than as the burden of what one person can do to another.

A family’s daily long-distance intimacy is severed when Iran’s government plunges the country into an internet blackout during war, leaving one daughter in the U.S. desperate for any word from her parents. The hour gathers smuggled voice memos from inside Iran, where ordinary life, political terror, grief, love and rage all continue beneath bombardment and enforced silence.

Ira Glass makes a funny, unexpectedly candid case against commencement speeches as a doomed genre, then explains why family history, old loyalties and one memorable Goucher dorm room changed his mind. The conversation sets up a 2012 graduation address shaped by skepticism, sentiment and a story about his grandmother meeting Adolf Hitler.

A trip to the blackjack table opens into a broader story about the seductive logic of beating the house, from card counters chasing a mathematical edge to gamblers and casino workers describing how skill, compulsion and self-deception blur together. The hour follows the thrill of advantage play and the far darker machinery that keeps people betting long after reason gives out.