When the Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Department in California wanted to purchase new firearms, it sold its used ones to help cover the cost. The old guns went to a distributor, which then turned around and sold them to the public. One of those guns—a Glock pistol—found its way to Indianapolis. That Glock was involved in the killing of Maria Leslie’s grandson, and the fact that it once belonged to law enforcement makes her loss sting even more. “My grandson was in his own apartment complex. He li...
Apr 19, 2025•51 min
Justin Wolfers teaches economics 101 at the University of Michigan. It’s an introductory course about supply, demand, and trade. The basics. He wishes President Donald Trump attended. Wolfers, an Australian known for his research on how happiness relates to income, is one of the more prominent economists speaking up about Trump’s sweeping tariff policies. He says that they not only betray the most basic laws of economics, but could very well tip the US into a recession unnecessarily. On this epi...
Apr 16, 2025•30 min
On March 15th, federal agents rounded up more than 230 Venezuelan nationals who were then deported to El Salvador and locked up in the country’s notorious mega-prison. The Trump administration said the men belonged to a violent Venezuelan gang, but presented no evidence, and there were no court hearings in which the men could contest the allegations. Nearly a month later, families of the Venezuelan men say they have heard nothing about their fate. It’s as if they disappeared. “We're living in a ...
Apr 12, 2025•51 min
David Folkenflik occupies a unique role at NPR: He’s a journalist who writes about journalism. And that includes the very organization where he works, which is once again being threatened by conservatives in Washington. The second Trump administration has aggressively gone after the media in its first few months. It’s kicked news organizations out of the Pentagon. It’s barred other newsrooms from access to the White House. And Trump supporters in Congress are targeting federal funding for public...
Apr 09, 2025•29 min
Adam Aurand spent nearly a decade of his life stuck in a loop: emergency rooms, psychiatric hospitals, jails, prison, and the streets in and around Seattle. During that time, he picked up diagnoses of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and schizoaffective disorder. He also used opioids and methamphetamine. Aurand’s life is an example of what happens to many people who experience psychosis in the US: a perpetual shuffle from one place to the next for visits lasting hours or days or weeks, none of t...
Apr 05, 2025•50 min
The Daily Show co-creator Lizz Winstead’s path to advocacy was a curvy one. She started out as a comedian, first as a stand-up and then working on The Daily Show . In the early 2000s, she co-founded Air America Radio, which was designed to be a counterweight to the popularity of radio personalities on the right. Today, as producer of the Feminist Buzzkills podcast and founder of Abortion Access Front, she’s weaving together politics and comedy to educate people about abortion laws and give them ...
Apr 02, 2025•28 min
At 18, Jack Morris was convicted of murdering a man in South Los Angeles and sent to prison for life. It was 1979, and America was entering the era of mass incarceration, with tough sentencing laws ballooning the criminal justice system. As California’s prison population surged, so did prison violence. “You learn that in order to survive, you yourself then have to become predatorial,” Morris says. “And then, you then expose somebody else to that, and it's a vicious cycle.” When California starte...
Mar 29, 2025•51 min
Fraud, waste, and abuse: That’s what inspectors general are tasked with investigating throughout the federal government. But in his first week in office, President Donald Trump did something unprecedented. He fired at least 17 IGs—more than any president in history—without notifying Congress or providing a substantive rationale for doing so, both of which are required by federal statute. On this week’s episode of More To The Story , host Al Letson talks with one of those fired IGs, Larry Turner ...
Mar 26, 2025•27 min
When Andrea Dettore-Murphy first moved to Rankin County, Mississippi, she didn’t believe the stories she heard about how brutal the sheriff’s department could be when pursuing suspected drug crimes. But in 2018, she learned the hard way that the rumors were true when a group of sheriff’s deputies raided the home of her friend Rick Loveday and beat him relentlessly while she watched. A few years later, Dettore-Murphy says deputies put her through another haunting incident with her friend Robert G...
Mar 22, 2025•51 min
This month marks the five-year anniversary of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has killed 1.2 million people in the US alone. While life has returned to normal for most Americans, the threats to our health haven’t disappeared. On this week’s episode of More To The Story , infectious disease epidemiologist Jessica Malaty Rivera talks with host Al Letson about the collision course between the Trump administration’s health priorities and our developing public health emergencies, including the spread of...
Mar 19, 2025•32 min
Decades before Covid-19, the AIDS epidemic tore through communities in the US and around the world. It has killed some 40 million people and continues to take lives today. But early on, research and public policy focused on AIDS as a gay men’s disease, overlooking other vulnerable groups—including communities of color and women. “We literally had to convince the federal government that there were women getting HIV,” says activist Maxine Wolfe. “We actually had to develop treatment and research a...
Mar 15, 2025•51 min
This past weekend marked a major escalation in the Trump administration's mass deportation efforts, with the dramatic detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist who played a prominent role in the protests against Israel on Columbia University’s campus last year. Khalil, a Columbia graduate student, is a permanent legal resident in the US. The Trump administration says it detained Khalil for what it described, without evidence, as his support for Hamas, and President Donald Trump promise...
Mar 12, 2025•31 min
In November 2005, a group of US Marines killed 24 civilians in Haditha, Iraq. The case against them became one of the most high-profile war crimes prosecutions in US history—but then it fell apart. Only one Marine went to trial for the killings, and all he received was a slap on the wrist. Even his own defense attorney found the outcome shocking. “It's meaningless," said attorney Haytham Faraj. “The government decided not to hold anybody accountable. I mean, I don't know, I don't know how else t...
Mar 08, 2025•51 min
One of President Donald Trump’s first actions as president was simple and sweeping: pardoning 1,500 people convicted of offenses related to the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. That single executive action undid years of work and investigation by the FBI, US prosecutors, and one person in particular: Tim Heaphy.Heaphy was the lead investigative counsel for the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, and he’s arguably done more than any...
Mar 05, 2025•36 min
This week on Reveal , we celebrate our 10-year anniversary with a look back at some of our favorite stories, from investigations into water shortages in drought-prone California to labor abuses in the Dominican Republic. And we interview the journalists behind the reporting to explain what happened after the stories aired. Support Reveal’s journalism at Revealnews.org/donatenow Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get the scoop on new episodes at Revealnews.org/newsletter Connect with us on Blu...
Mar 01, 2025•51 min
From the unflinching investigative team behind Reveal comes a new weekly podcast that delivers More To The Story . Every Wednesday, Peabody Award-winning journalist Al Letson sits down with the people at the heart of our changing world for candid—sometimes uncomfortable—conversations that make you rethink your entire newsfeed. Whether he's sounding the alarm about the future of democracy, grappling with the shifting dynamics of political power, or debating big cultural moments, Al always brings ...
Feb 26, 2025•3 min
The loss of land for Black Americans started with the government’s betrayal of its “40 acres” promise to formerly enslaved people—and it has continued over decades. Today, researchers are unearthing the details of Black land loss long after emancipation. “They lost land due to racial intimidation, where they were forced off their land (to) take flight in the middle of the night and resettle someplace else,” said Karcheik Sims-Alvarado, an assistant professor of Africana studies at Morehouse Coll...
Feb 22, 2025•51 min
Skidaway Island, Georgia, is home today to a luxurious community that the mostly White residents consider paradise: waterfront views, live oaks and marsh grass alongside golf courses, swimming pools, and other amenities. In 1865, the island was a thriving Black community, started by freedmen who were given land by the government under the 40 acres program. They farmed, created a system of government, and turned former cotton plantations into a Black American success story. But it wouldn’t last. ...
Feb 15, 2025•51 min
Our historical investigation found 1,250 formerly enslaved Black Americans who were given land—only to see it returned to their enslavers. This is an update of an episode that originally aired in June 2024 . Support Reveal’s journalism at Revealnews.org/donatenow Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get the scoop on new episodes at Revealnews.org/newsletter Connect with us on Bluesky , Facebook and Instagram Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Feb 08, 2025•51 min
Mackenson Remy didn’t plan to bypass security when he drove into the parking lot of a factory in Greeley, Colorado. He’d never been there before. All he knew was this place had jobs… lots of jobs. Remy is originally from Haiti, and in 2023, he’d been making TikTok videos about job openings in the area for his few followers, mostly other Haitians. What Remy didn’t know was that he had stumbled onto a meatpacking plant owned by the largest meat producer in the world, JBS. The video he made outside...
Feb 01, 2025•51 min
A police officer chased a Native teen to his death. Days later, the police force shut down without explanation. In 2020, Blossom Old Bull was raising three teenagers on the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana. Her youngest son, Braven Glenn, was 17, a good student, dedicated to his basketball team. That November, Old Bull got a call saying Glenn was killed in a police car chase that resulted in a head-on collision with a train. Desperate for details about the accident, she went to the police stat...
Jan 25, 2025•51 min
It’s been 20 years since the Battle of Fallujah, a bloody campaign in a destructive Iraq War that we now know was based on a lie. But back then, in the wake of 9/11, the battlefield was filled with troops who believed in serving and defending the country against terrorism. “Going to Fallujah was the most horrific experience of our lives,” said Mike Ergo, a team leader for the US Marines Alpha Company, 1st Battalion. “And it was also, for myself, the most alive I've ever felt.” This week on Revea...
Jan 18, 2025•51 min
President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son and President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge to set free people who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, bring back memories of what’s considered the most controversial pardon ever: Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon. Ford’s pardon of the former president in 1974 sparked outrage among politicians and the American people. “I had a visceral feeling that the public animosity to Mr. Nixon was so great that there would be a lack of understanding, and the tru...
Jan 11, 2025•50 min
In 2015, hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war and repression were trying to reach safe havens in Europe. From his home in Norway, Tommy Olsen decided to travel to Greece, a major gateway for migrants and refugees. He joined hundreds of volunteers helping the new arrivals and later created an NGO, the Aegean Boat Report, which monitors the plight of asylum seekers in Europe. Today, Olsen is a wanted man in Greece, caught up in a crackdown on refugees and people trying to defend their right...
Jan 04, 2025•51 min
It was their first day in battle and the two best friends had just switched places. Bob Fordyce rested while Frank Hartzell crawled down into the shallow foxhole, taking his turn chipping away at the frozen ground. Just then, German artillery fire began falling all around them. With his body plastered to the ground, Hartzell could feel shrapnel dent his helmet. When the explosions finished, he picked himself up to find that his best friend had just been killed in the blur of combat. “When you’re...
Dec 28, 2024•51 min
When Valentino Rodriguez started his job at a high-security prison in Sacramento, California, informally known as New Folsom, he thought he was entering a brotherhood of correctional officers who hold each other to a high standard of conduct. Five years later, Rodriguez would be found dead in his home. His unexpected passing would raise questions from his family and the FBI. Before he died, Rodriguez was promoted to an elite unit investigating crimes in the prison. His parents and his widow say ...
Dec 21, 2024•51 min
Every summer, 50 of the nation’s best and brightest teenage girls gather in Mobile, Alabama, to embark on two of the most intense weeks of their lives. Everybody wants the same thing: to walk away with a $40,000 college scholarship and the title of Distinguished Young Woman of America. Reporter Shima Oliaee competed for Nevada when she was a teenager, and was invited back as a judge more than 20 years later. Oliaee accepted, all while recording it for a six-part audio series called The Competiti...
Dec 14, 2024•51 min
Note: This episode contains descriptions of violence and suicide and may not be appropriate for all listeners. In 1989, Chuck Stuart called 911 on his car phone to report a shooting. He said he and his wife were leaving a birthing class at a Boston hospital when a man forced him to drive into the mixed-race Mission Hill neighborhood and shot them both. Stuart’s wife, Carol, was seven months pregnant. She would die that night, hours after her son was delivered by cesarean section, and days later,...
Dec 07, 2024•51 min
Chief Red Cloud was a Lakota leader in the late 1800s, when the conflict between the US government and Native Americans was intense, and he was the tribal chief when the Catholic church built a boarding school on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Generations of children were traumatized by their experience at the school, whose mission was to strip them of their language and culture. Red Cloud’s descendant Dusty Lee Nelson and other members of the community are seeking reparations from ...
Nov 30, 2024•51 min
In the early 1990s, Justin Pourier was a maintenance man at Red Cloud Indian School, a Catholic school on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. One day, he says he stumbled upon small graves in the school’s basement. For nearly 30 years, Pourier would be haunted by what he saw and told no one except his wife. “Those are Native children down there…hopefully their spirit was able to travel on to whatever is beyond this world,” Pourier says. In 2022, he urged school officials to search the ba...
Nov 23, 2024•50 min
