We meet Russell, 19, the best mobile phone salesman in the mall — and possibly anywhere. His talent for sales is matched only by those of his girlfriend, Chandler, 18, a waitress.

Three guys who go by the names Professor So and So, Jojobean and YeaWhatever spend part of each day running elaborate cons on Internet scammers. They consider themselves enforcers of justice, even after they send a man 1400 miles from home, to the least safe place they can bait him: The border of Darfur.

There's this haven on the U.S. railroad—the Amtrak Quiet Car. You can't yammer on your cell phone in the Quiet Car, or yuck it up with your friends, or even talk above a murmur.

Lawrence Wright is a reporter for the New Yorker Magazine, and an author of the bestselling book on Al Qaeda, The Looming Tower. He's also one of the few people in America who can say definitively that he was targeted by the U.S.

Malcolm Gladwell is a best-selling author and famous journalist at the New Yorker magazine. But not always.

No one much likes to talk about it out loud, but everyone knows it's true: There are a lot of people out there who say they won't vote for Obama because he's black. To fight this problem, Richard Trumka, secretary treasurer of the AFL-CIO, has been traveling around the country giving a speech to fellow union members.

Alex Blumberg sets out to find a woman named Susan Jordan, who babysat him and his sister for a year when he was nine. He discovers that each of them remembered something about the other that the other would just as soon forget.

Kathie Russo's husband was Spalding Gray, who was best known for delivering monologues onstage—like "Monster in a Box," and "Swimming to Cambodia." On January 10, 2004, he went missing. Witnesses said they saw him on the Staten Island Ferry that night.

Reporter Jake Halpern tells the story of Marti Miller and Sue McDonald, the daughters who were switched at birth, and the many complications that came with learning the truth.

Host Ira Glass talks with a high school senior about the lies she tells her mom, and if she'll ever reveal the truth.

Mike Birbiglia talks about the sleepwalking that nearly killed him. (13 minutes)This story is an excerpt of Mike's one-man show, "Sleepwalk with Me," which also became feature film, produced and co-written by Ira Glass.

While McCain gathers stray Democrats, Obama is trying to find new ones—in the reddest part of the state. To do that, his campaign has launched enormous registration drives, especially among college students.

In the late 1960s, a California TV repairman named Bob Nelson joined a group of enthusiasts who believed they could cheat death with a new technology called cryonics. But freezing dead people so scientists can reanimate them in the future is a lot harder than it sounds.

A woman's elderly father has several hired caretakers who help him throughout the day. When one of the caretakers accuses another one of stealing from father, it's up to his daughter to figure out the truth.

In a part of the mall no shoppers ever see, there's a snug, dark little room with 43 TV screens, one for each of the cameras in the hallways and parking lots, the roof and the loading dock. We hang out with the security people who work in there, seeing what they see.

Ira talks to Rev. Donald Sharp, of Faith Tabernacle Church in Chicago.

Host Ira Glass talks with Andy Woolworth, an executive vice president in charge of new product development at the world's largest manufacturer of mousetraps, Woodstream Corporation, in Lititz, Pennsylvania. About once a month, Andy is contacted by someone who thinks he's invented a better mousetrap.

When David Ellis Dickerson was 12, he got a new bike, and his father decided to use the occasion to teach David a lesson. But the lesson David learned wasn't the one his father intended.

Host Ira Glass talks with Yale law professor Jack Balkin about what he calls the Bush Administration's "lawyering style," a tendency to fight as hard as it can, on all fronts, to get what it wants. Ira also plays tape from a news conference with New York Senator Charles Schumer, in which he takes the Justice Department to task for refusing to pay death benefits to the families of two auxiliary policemen who were killed in the line of duty, even though federal law grants those benefits.

TAL producer Alex Blumberg reports on a peculiar Wall Street practice with a dirty-sounding name—naked short selling—and how one of Wall Street's main regulators, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, doesn't seem all that interested in regulating anything. (20 minutes) Alex's story is also going to be on NPR's new Planet Money podcast...which came about after our Giant Pool of Money show, the show Alex did on the mortgage;crisis with NPR's Adam Davidson.

This American Life contributor Jack Hitt uncovers a strange practice within the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service.

We hear from New York City school teachers about a secret room in the New York City Board of Education building. Teachers are told to report there, and when they arrive, they find out they're under investigation for something.

In Scranton, there's a "Citizens for McCain" office. But really, it's a "Democrats for McCain" office; flipping Democrats is vital if McCain is going to win.

Margaret meets the living relatives of her grandfather's kidnapper and finally arrives at an incontrovertible truth.