Alexis Figueroa is willing to do the unthinkable to get a celebrity’s autograph. In this episode, we follow him as he attempts to get the one autograph that got away, that of an aging rocker he’s been after for more than a decade. Will Alexis get the memento he’s looking for, or will his best-laid plans fail him once more?

This story was originally published in 2018.

In the early 2000s, Daniella Tobar, a 20-year-old actress, joined a cutting-edge artistic and architectural project: living in a glass house right in the heart of Santiago, Chile. Anyone passing by could see her doing what we all do: sleeping, cooking, showering. It wouldn’t be long before a scandal broke out.

When Erica met Henry, it was love at first sight. But back then, in the late ’90s, she was only 15, and they soon lost touch. More than a decade later, Henry reappeared: he got her phone number and called her. They started talking every day, and Erica gradually fell in love. But it wouldn’t be long before she discovered that Henry had kept something crucial about his life a secret from her.

For the children of Argentine mountaineer Guillermo Vieiro, his death was always shrouded in a certain mystery. They grew up with many questions about him and believed there would never be answers—until, in early 2024, almost forty years after his death, someone called them with unexpected news.

Lorena Borjas was the queen of queens. No one had more prestige and authority among the community of Latina trans women in the Queens neighborhood of New York. Borjas seemed to be everywhere: on the streets, handing out condoms to sex workers; in the courts, accompanying trans women at risk of deportation; or in hospitals, helping people living with HIV. For the queens of Queens, a world without Lorena was unthinkable. And when they lost her, they asked themselves: what will we do without her?

Our series podcast, Central, has a new production: Las Reinas de Queens, the story of a group of trans women from Queens, New York, all Latin American immigrants. Across ten episodes, we follow their fight for the right to exist and thrive in the face of raids, violence, and exclusion. But we also join them at drag shows and beauty contests where they compete against each other to become the new queens of Queens.

Father and son Julio and Andrés share a passion for Andean biodiversity. Each in his own way and in his own time, has dedicated his life to protecting Peruvian seeds from various threats, guided by a common conviction: the information they contain is an ancestral treasure.