Allow users to sort stories by date or content type What is the easiest way to allow users to sort a story view by content type or date? Is there a module that would allow you to do so? The idea would be to have a drop down list containing the different content types and a calendar widget (or perhaps also drop down lists) which would allow users to determine a date range. 

If this can only be achieved programmatically, no need to provide much detail -- I suspect it would be a rather long explanation and don't want to take that much of anyone's time.
i think you might be confusedly mixing a few different concepts? 

"story" is one of the default/example content types distributed with Drupal and is nothing special, ie. not quite sure what you mean by "story view".

I assume from the way that you're phrasing your question that you're new to Drupal, have you discovered Views and CCK?

exposing filters is relatively easy in Views 2 and 3, but exposing sort options in general is more difficult in Views 2 (you'll probably need some basic PHP knowledge to achieve this) but can be done through the UI in Views 3.

popup calendar widgets for date fields exist in the Date module once you install the jQuery UI module.

if you want a calendar widget that is "inline" (doesn't popup from a dropdown menu) then you'll likely have to do a little coding, but it isn't very hard as jquery UI provides a good API for inserting calendars into your page.