Reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, who has investigated integration in schools for years, joins ChanaJoffe-Walt to interview the Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. The Obama Administration saysit’s in favor of integrating the schools, but doesn’t seem to do so much to promote it.

Rachel has two kids. Elias, age seven, is a vegetarian.

Ira introduces “the backfire effect,” a phenomenon stating that when confronted with evidence disproving what we believe, most of us ignore that evidence, dig in and become more entrenched in our beliefs. Which just makes the recordings he plays more surprising—recordings of canvassers going door to door and effectively convincing people to completely flip their positions.

Actress Sue Scott reads a short story by Etgar Keret. Etgar's newest book is a memoir called The Seven Good Years.

Workshops on sexual assault and consent are hugely popular on college campuses around the country. Chana visits one of these workshops to find out what’s being taught, and more importantly, what college boys in particular have already learned about sex, back when they were kids.

Ira finds a ridiculous comment thread on the Internet about an optical illusion.

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.

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

We bring you this very matter-of-fact article from 1853, about something profoundly troubling: a slave auction in Virginia.

Writer Ariel Sabar tells the story of Roger Barker, a psychologist who believed humans should be studied outside the lab. So Barker dispatched an army of graduate students to follow the children of Oskaloosa, Kansas, and write down every single thing they did.

Most big grand transformations we go through really come down to a hundred little things that we change about ourselves. This recently happened for a refugee from Afghanistan, now living in Detroit.

Why did it take so many years for GM to begin implementing the lessons of NUMMI across the company? NPR Automotive Correspondent Frank Langfitt continues his story.

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

Ira continues to explain how these canvassers learned how to change people’s minds, and talks about the mistakes they made along the way.

Ephron takes the shirt Rabin was wearing on the night of the assassination from Israel to the U.S. to have it examined by a gunshot expert. A right-wing activist describes what the assassination meant to her and her settler movement -- a political victory.

Jesse had been waiting his whole life to fall in love—and then he started getting these letters from the perfect woman, Pamala. She seemed vulnerable.

As we were putting together this week's show, we thought back to the guy in Act One who was in charge of marketing when Jack in the Box went through an E. Coli crisis.

Kim Jong-Il loved movies – but hated all the movies made in North Korea. So he kidnapped a famous South Korean director and his ex-wife, a South Korean film star, locked them up in a villa in North Korea, and forced them to make movies for him.

Ira talks to New York Times reporter Damien Cave, about a strange phenomenon he noticed in the pages of in-flight magazines.

Ira and music contributor John Conners on Sinatra's worst songs. And a brief history of what makes that 1950s Sinatra sound so great, with Will Friedwald, author of the definitive book on Sinatra's music, Sinatra! The Song Is You: A Singer's Art.

This American Life producer Chana Joffe-Walt sits in for Ira Glass, because Chana has kids, two young sons. And her oldest, Jacob, has some complicated ideas about people, that Chana wants to straighten out, but doesn’t know exactly how.

Gay Talese reads from his classic 1966 Esquire article, in which he followed around Sinatra at the height of Sinatra's power.

Ira speaks with New York Times Magazine Reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones about her years reporting on education and the various kinds of school reforms administrators have tried to close the achievementgap that never seem to work. Nikole says there's one reform that people have pretty much given upon, despite a lot of evidence that it works – school integration.

Ira talks about the fact that he never much liked William Burroughs or his writing, just never got why Burroughs was this revered figure for some people. Then Ira heard a recent BBC documentary about Burroughs and finally understood.