A Holiday Inn comes up with a brilliant scheme to increase their roomservice orders. Former room service waiter Cliff Doerksen says there was only one problem with the plan...and it came down to a big, ridiculous, floppy hat.

Host Ira Glass talks about the infamous line in the band Van Halen's contract insisting that the groups' dressing room include a bowl of M&Ms with all the brown M&Ms removed. Ira used to think this request was just petulant rock-star behavior.

Hemant Lakhani, an Indian-born British citizen, had been a salesman all his life. Clothing, rice, oil...it didn't matter to him what, as long as he could spin a deal.

In big families, there's often one kid who always gets blamed when something goes wrong. But Shalom Auslander came from a small family, so the role of fall guy was up for grabs.

A few years back, Bill Cotter was a rare book binder who decided to get into the rare book selling business. To do this, he financed his business on a bunch of low-interest credit cards.

Host Ira Glass describes the scene at a courthouse resource center in lower Manhattan where people learn how to represent themselves in civil court. Attorney Ruth Sharfman, who assists at the center, tells Ira that some of the pro se litigants are more prepared for the job than others.

David Rakoff tells the story of a contract between a son and his visiting mother. David Rakoff is the author of several books including Don't Get Too Comfortable.

Host Ira Glass talks with Michael Perrino, a law professor at St Johns University School of Law in New York, who wrote a book about Ferdinand Pecora called The Hellhound of Wall Street. Pecora was the lead attorney in the Senate Banking Committee hearings in the 1930s looking into wrongdoing in the banking industry.

A live performance detailing a humiliating love affair. When comedian Mike Birbiglia was in high school, he fell for a cool girl named Amanda.

David Rakoff demonstrates—in rhyme—how to make a wedding toast for people you never wanted to see married in the first place. Rakoff is the author of several books, most recently Half Empty.

Most of the This American Life production staff spent the weekend at Penn State, and found that drinking is the great unifier at the school. Ira Glass, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak and Jane Feltes report on tailgating parties, frat parties, an article of clothing known as a "fracket," and a surprising and common drunken crime.

Earlier this year, admitted drug user Jorge Cruz decided to act as his own lawyer in an Albany, New York criminal court. Impossibly, he won.

Ira reviews some infidelity stats from his mother's book on the subject, Not Just Friends. And author James Braly tells a story of temptation at The Moth.

Host Ira Glass talks with NPR correspondent Adam Davidson about a black tie event he attended in the spring of 2008. The event was an awards dinner for finance professionals who created the mortgage-based financial instruments that nearly brought down the global economic system.

Well over two years ago, long before the country chose Barack Obama...a company called Tigereye Design in Greenville, Ohio chose him. The owners liked Obama as a candidate and they approached him and asked if they could make buttons and posters and yard signs for the campaign and its online store.

Act two showed us a moment before infidelity occurs. In this act, Dani Shapiro has a story about the confusing mess things can be during an affair.

NPR reporter and Planet Money contributor Chana Jaffe-Walt reports this story of what it really looks like when a bank fails and is taken over by the FDIC. She talks to the former employees and a handful of FDIC staff about the Friday night when the Bank of Clark County was interrupted and closed by 80 FDIC employees, who had every step of their secret operation down to a science.

Family members can easily be frenemies. You're stuck with them.

Our story about Hemant Lakhani's case continues, through the sting and the trial.

Reporter Chris Arnold visits a foreclosure prevention event to find out the painful truth about the mortgage crisis: 90% of foreclosures are being enforced by servicing companies not because it helps the banks to foreclose, and not because home owners aren't interested in renegotiating their loan terms, but because there's just no system in place to handle the sheer volume of loans that need help.

A couple in Texas find a seemingly abandoned car and think they've stumbled across a crime scene. And they're right...but not in the way they imagined.

In Tehran in 2004, Omid Memarian confessed to doing things he'd never done, meeting people he'd never met, following plots he'd never heard of. Why he did that, and why a lot of other people have confessed to the same things, is all in the fine print. This American Life producer Nancy Updike tells the story.

Planet Money reporter Chana Joffe-Walt asks a simple question: Who was the federal regulator who was supposed to be regulating AIG? The answer turns out to be far from simple.

Dan Savage points a finger at the Catholic Church for being the kind of criminal organization that drives him to atheism—despite the fact that he still wants to believe he'll see his mom in heaven someday. Dan writes the sex advice column Savage Love and is the author of several books including The Commitment.