Bailey Leavitt comes from a family of carnies. For her, one of the most thrilling things she looks for at the fair is someone who is really good at luring people into spending money at their stand.

Reporter Aaron Reiss found a woman that an entire community calls, in order to find out the names of the very streets they're walking on. She's the gatekeeper for a series of secret underground maps of New York City.

Host Ira Glass talks with Adam Mansbach about what happened when he went looking for an apartment and was mistaken for someone else. Adam is the author of the book Go The F*** To Sleep.

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.

When Janice Powell's husband went to prison, he wrote her a letter every day for eight years. When he was at home, he'd drink and get violent, but Janice said that the years in prison were the best of their relationship.

Two stories of communication where the words really don't matter: Elizabeth Gilbert tells the story of the worst wedding toast she's ever heard of. This story first appeared on the former website Other People's Stories.

Host Ira Glass plays a strange voicemail left by a 96-year-old surgeon about a letter that was written five decades ago. (6 minutes)

Yowei’s story continues. Meron learns whether or not the kidnappers can be trusted to keep their word when she pays the ransom, and what will become of the hostages.

Host Ira Glass interviews Lori Gottlieb about the time she sent a letter to a writer in a magazine, a letter packed with white lies.

Host Ira Glass plays a voicemail containing something very common but veryrare to hear: an elected official directly asking a lobbyist for money.

Host Ira Glass talks to Tim Jaccard, who used to be a police medic. The calls he hated most were all the same: "Baby not breathing." So in 1998, he helped write the first "safe haven" law, which allows mothers to safely abandon their babies without getting into trouble.

Kevin Murphy is a college student in Idaho who stutters. Using the power of radio editing, he and the production staff of This American Life removed his pauses, stutters and repeats so that he could record a message the way it seems the rest of the world would like to hear him sound.

Ira reads an excerpt from James Ellroy's memoir My Dark Places.

Sara Corbett's father-in-law Dick is 81. And he's become obsessed with a limbo most of us hate – the music he hears whenever he's on hold.

Our producer Zoe Chace goes to Fairview Heights, Illinois, where Planned Parenthood has opened a massive new abortion clinic just across the river from Missouri. Abortion is banned in Missouri and lots of the surrounding states now that Roe has been overturned.

Sara Corbett's father-in-law Dick is 81. And he's become obsessed with a limbo most of us hate – the music he hears whenever he's on hold. (14 minutes)Sara is co-author of the book A House in the Sky.The hold music, Opus No. 1, was composed by Tim Carleton and Darrick Deel.

Anna Boiko Weyrauch talks with a woman in the West African country of Ghana about the internet dating scams she has pulled on white Americans. The woman says she felt guilty about the scams and eventually came clean to her marks.

Chris Benderev speaks with writer Georgie Codd, who went searching for someone to be the father she never had.

A man tries something he’s never done before and discovers a new passion. A work of short fiction written by Neil Drumming and read by actor Dorian Missick.

Host Ira Glass explains how you can get away with anything if you claim you did it for love.

Cariad Harmon tells Elna Baker about what it was like to live through a literal embarrassment nightmare. (15 minutes)

How Etgar's parents met.

Ira finds out more about what Eric and Charlotte Kaufman’s sailing trip was meant to be, how prepared they were for such an extensive trip, and exactly what went wrong on their sailboat that led to the dramatic rescue for which they were so roundly criticized.