Comedian Aziz Ansari has been touring the country collecting people’s text messages from when they first say hi, and ask each other out. Sociologist Eric Klinenberg wanted to study this raw data of the initial approach a man makes to a woman over text.

Jane, Julia and Ella continue describing the complex social map that is constantly changing in their phones.

A woman befriends her neighbor, only to find herself dragged into a world of make-believe we almost never get to see inside. Producer Jonathan Menjivar tells what happened.

NPR Science reporters Alix Spiegel and Lulu Miller explain to Ira Glass how they smuggled a rat into NPR headquarters in Washington, and ran an unscientific version of a famous experiment first done by Psychology Professor Robert Rosenthal. It showed how people’s thoughts about rats could affect their behavior.

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.

Reporter Joe Richman visits a program in Richmond, CA that is trying a controversial method of reducing gun violence in their city: paying criminals to not commit crimes. Sounds crazy, but the even crazier part is…it works.

On September 29th a medical researcher in Philadelphia fired off a simple, well-meaning tweet, and then barely thought twice about it. Little did she know that by doing that, she was perpetrating covert propaganda on behalf of the U.S. government.

Leo Hornak's story about Abdi continues. Abdi encounters one obstacle after another on the streets of Nairobi.

Lots of people don’t remember the storm: like people who are just becoming adolescents today. But they think about it a lot.

Comedian Tig Notaro tells the story about the time she played a string of dates night after night after night in Las Vegas – and bombed every single time. Getting up on stage and pretending like everything was going great was not easy.

It turns out winning the lottery is only the first step in trying to come to America. More than half of the people who win each year never make it.

One of the show's producers, Zoe Chace, tells Ira about a joke she made pretty soon after something terrible had happened.And then Ira talks to Amy Silverman about something else being too soon, and how she finally figured out the right moment for it. Amy's blog about her daughter is at girlinapartyhat.com.

Ira talks to a man in his 70s who’s about to travel across the country to tell a woman he loves how he really feels, despite some very real signs that doing so might be a bad idea.

Radio producer Scott Carrier quit his job at a low moment in his life. His wife left him and took the kids.

When Jon Mooallem went to see his six-year-old daughter in a musical at her after-school program, he didn't know what to expect. But it certainly was not the performance saw.

Brett Martin documents a previously unnoticed human phenomenon, one that involves airplanes, crying, and Reese Witherspoon. (11 minutes)Brett is the author of the book Difficult Men. 

Writer and musician Ahamefule Oluo has been puzzling out one story for a lot of his life. It's the story of a stranger, who also, is his dad.

When someone stole Jessamyn Lovell’s ID, she became obsessed with the thief. Miki Meek tells what happened.

Jeffrey Brodeur worked at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and was put in charge of an Osprey Cam — a live web feed of an osprey nest near his office. Which he thought was just charming — until the mother osprey in the nest began acting strangely.

Producer Miki Meek tells the story of a father and the incredible, decades-long fantasy he created for his 12 children.

For two summers when she was 18 and 19, Blair Braverman worked as a dogsled guide on an Alaskan glacier. 8 times a day, helicopters full of tourists would arrive on the glacier for their experience of Real Alaska. Then one day, the weather turned bad and things got a little too real.

Adriana's story continues, as she ventures deep into a mysterious world of heroin addiction treatment centers where no one seems to be taking responsibility for the people they're treating. Adriana is the editor of the bilingual newspaper The Gate.