Reveal’s investigations will inspire, infuriate and inform you. Host Al Letson and an award-winning team of reporters deliver gripping stories about caregivers, advocates for the unhoused, immigrant families, warehouse workers and formerly incarcerated people, fighting to hold the powerful accountable. The New Yorker described Reveal as “a knockout … a pleasure to listen to, even as we seethe.” A winner of multiple Peabody, duPont, Emmy and Murrow awards, Reveal is produced by the nation’s first investigative journalism nonprofit, The Center for Investigative Reporting, and PRX. From unearthing exploitative working conditions to exposing the nation’s racial disparities, there’s always more to the story. Learn more at revealnews.org/learn.
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A young woman clings to a tree as masked men try to peel her off. The men wrench one of the woman’s arms behind her back, then stuff her into the back of an unmarked SUV as bystanders film and shout. She was selling food outside a Home Depot in West Los Angeles when federal agents chased her down and arrested her. Videos of aggressive immigration raids like this have become commonplace as the Trump administration pursues its goal of deporting millions of people over the next four years. US Immig...
More To The Story : Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Trymaine Lee was in the middle of writing his first book when the unthinkable happened. At 38, a massive heart attack nearly took his life. That near-death experience altered his life and forced him to reckon with the years he’s spent chronicling gun violence involving Black men in America, as well as his own family history marred by slavery, lynching, and even murder. On this week’s episode of More To The Story , Lee sits down with host Al L...
From layoffs to billion-dollar budget cuts and ideological battles over history itself, the National Park Service is facing one of the most turbulent moments in its 109-year history. Reporter Heath Druzin hikes deep into Yellowstone National Park’s backcountry with biologist Doug Smith, who helped reintroduce wolves to the park 30 years ago. The program transformed the ecosystem but could be at risk in future rounds of budget cuts. Also particularly at risk: biologists and other scientists whose...
More To The Story : The opioid crisis has been a quiet, deadly presence in America for a quarter-century now. Since 1999, it’s killed more than 800,000 people in the US. But in the background, another crisis has been simmering: the often-lawless patchwork of treatment centers and programs that make up America’s drug rehab industry. Many of the roughly 50 million Americans who battle substance abuse rely on this underregulated for-profit industry that too often exploits patients, fails to properl...
In 2017, David Leavitt drove to the Northern Cheyenne reservation in Montana to adopt a baby girl. A few years later, during an interview with a documentary filmmaker, Leavitt, a wealthy Utah politician, told a startling story about how he went about getting physical custody of that child. He describes going to the tribe’s president and offering to use his connections to broker an international sale of the tribe’s buffalo. At the same time, he was asking the president for his blessing to adopt t...
More To The Story : The Voting Rights Act turned 60 years old this month. The landmark piece of legislation is considered one of the most effective laws protecting the right to vote for racial minorities around the country. But the conservative movement has successfully hollowed out much of the law, thanks to Supreme Court decisions over the last decade. On this week’s episode, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie sits down with host Al Letson to talk about how the Voting Rights Act has been d...
Kansas City police Officer Matt Masters first used a Taser in the early 2000s. He said it worked well for taking people down; it was safe and effective. “At the end of the day, if you have to put your hands on somebody, you got to scuffle with somebody, why risk that?” he said. “You can just shoot them with a Taser.” Masters believed in that until his son Bryce was pulled over by an officer and shocked for more than 20 seconds. The 17-year-old went into cardiac arrest, which doctors later attrib...
Earlier this week, President Donald Trump announced that his administration is removing homeless encampments from around Washington, DC. The announcement illustrated how the federal government’s approach to homelessness is dramatically changing. It follows an executive order issued last month that makes it easier for cities and states to involuntarily commit unhoused people and eliminate encampments. It also prioritizes treatment over housing for people struggling with mental health issues or su...
Pregnant with her fifth child, Susan Horton had a lot of confidence in her parenting abilities. Then she ate a salad from Costco: an “everything” chopped salad kit with poppy seeds. When she went to the hospital to give birth the next day, she tested positive for opiates. Horton told doctors that it must have been the poppy seeds, but she couldn’t convince them it was true. She was reported to child welfare authorities, and a judge removed Horton’s newborn from her care. “They had a singular pie...
In the last few months, widespread starvation has gripped the Gaza Strip. United Nations-backed food security experts say the “worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out” in Gaza, home to an estimated 2 million Palestinians. One of the few organizations still on the ground trying to feed Palestinians at risk of famine is the Gaza Soup Kitchen. This week’s guest on More To The Story with Al Letson is Abe Ajrami, a Palestinian who now lives in the US and helps coordinate the organizati...
Jade Dass was taking medication to treat her addiction to opioids before she became pregnant. Scientific studies and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say this leads to the best outcomes for both mothers and babies. But after Dass delivered a healthy daughter, the hospital reported her to the Arizona Department of Child Safety, which conducted an investigation and separated her from her newborn. “I just couldn’t believe it, that people would act like this,” Dass says. “Like how they...
Dan McClellan has spent much of his life learning—and relearning—what the Bible and its authors were trying to tell us. But his years in graduate school also taught him that the way scholars talk about the Bible is much different from how churchgoers discuss it. Several years ago, McClellan began pushing back against what he saw as misguided biblical interpretations online and soon gained a following. Today, he has almost 1 million followers on TikTok who look for his thoughts on topics like the...
During his campaign for the presidency, Donald Trump talked a lot about pulling America out of international treaties and disentangling from military operations abroad. Once in office, he started talking about the idea of Manifest Destiny…that the expansion of the US was both justified and inevitable. In some cases that’s meant turning the tables on America’s friends and allies. For this week’s show, Reveal reporter Nate Halverson and Panamanian journalist Andrea Salcedo investigate how the Trum...
Just a few years ago, historian and activist Dr. Ibram X. Kendi seemed to be everywhere. At the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, Kendi became one of the leading voices on racism in America—and particularly what he described as antiracism. But over the last few years, as a backlash grew against the BLM movement, Kendi also came under attack. His ideas urging people to be actively antiracist were often the target of conservative critics fighting against DEI policies and the teaching of c...
In April 2024, medical staff testified before Louisiana’s House Health and Welfare Committee about just how bad things had gotten at the Glenwood Regional Medical Center. The West Monroe hospital had been under fire from the state Health Department over lapses in patient care that seemed to be escalating. The hospital had stopped paying bills for oxygen supplies, the blood bank, and repairs to the elevators that take patients up to surgery. Former Glenwood nurse Debra Russell testified that ther...
David Sirota is a journalist, former speechwriter to Bernie Sanders, and co-writer of the Oscar-nominated movie Don’t Look Up, about the threat of climate change. On this week’s More To The Story , Sirota joins host Al Letson to discuss how climate change is fueling more intense weather events like the recent floods in Texas, how the country’s leaders are failing to address climate disasters while avoiding accountability, why Trump’s domestic policy bill is “class war in legislative form,” and w...
Bruce Praet is a well-known name in law enforcement, especially in California. He co-founded a company called Lexipol that contracts with more than 95 percent of police departments in the state and offers its clients trainings and ready-made policies. In one of Praet’s online training webinars, he offers a piece of advice that policing experts have called inhumane. It’s aimed at protecting officers and their departments from lawsuits. After police kill someone, they are supposed to notify the fa...
In this episode, Al Letson interviews Daniel Holz of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists regarding the Doomsday Clock's closest-ever setting to midnight. They delve into the clock's history, its purpose as a symbol of existential risk, and the specific man-made threats driving its time, including nuclear weapons, climate change, disinformation, and the growing concern around artificial intelligence in military systems. Holz emphasizes that while the situation is dire, the clock also represents hope and highlights concrete actions humanity can take to reduce these risks and secure the future.
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. This is an update of an episode that originally aired in March 2025 . Support Reveal’s journalism at Revealnews.org/donatenow Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get the sco...
The Atlantic's editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, shares his experience being inadvertently included in a high-level Trump administration Signal chat detailing planned military strikes. He reflects on the apparent lack of professionalism among some officials, expressing concerns about President Trump's impulsive foreign policy approach and the potential for accidental escalation, particularly regarding nuclear threats and conflicts like Taiwan. Goldberg also offers a broader perspective on the challenges facing American democracy today, citing social media and a decline in empathy.
What do Silicon Valley billionaires, religious parents of six, and eugenics-curious biotech founders have in common? Welcome to the world of pronatalism—a growing movement that aims to solve the so-called population crisis by making more babies. We follow the unlikely alliance between tech futurists and traditional conservatives who think it’s their duty to repopulate the Earth—with intelligence, ambition, and carefully screened DNA. Many believe our economic future is at stake without more huma...
Palestinian student activist Mohsen Mahdawi recounts being detained by ICE during his US citizenship interview and accused by the Trump administration of jeopardizing foreign policy due to his campus activism. He shares the premonition he had, his experiences with Columbia University, and how he prepared for potential arrest. Mohsen addresses accusations of anti-Semitism against pro-Palestinian protests and reflects on his traumatic childhood in a West Bank refugee camp and his family's history of unjust imprisonment, connecting it to his own detention experience.
Across the country, women seeking addiction treatment are being harassed and assaulted by men in positions of power. The problem is so pervasive that it has a name among those in the industry: the 13th Step. “I fell right into it, right into it. You know, it’s like, it’s just, you're so vulnerable,” says a victim named Andrea. “The 13-stepper is like, um, when you take advantage of a newcomer. Like, they, they joke like, ‘Don’t be a 13th-stepper.’” This week on Reveal , we join Lauren Chooljian ...
Greg Smith spent 35 years in the Army National Guard. But he’s never witnessed the military used the way it’s being deployed in Los Angeles in response to protests opposing the Trump administration’s immigration raids. On this week’s More To The Story , Smith discusses how the military appears increasingly tasked with enforcing a political agenda rather than defending the Constitution. Producer: Josh Sanburn, with help from Artis Curiskis | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Ar...
For the first time in two decades, the Democratic Party has found itself without a clear party leader or even an obvious frontrunner. Angry and adrift, politicians and voters are clashing over how to fight back. They’re also grappling with an uncomfortable new reality: The places that shifted hardest away from Democrats last fall were the kinds of communities that formed the backbone of the Democratic coalition for years—working-class, nonwhite, and heavily immigrant areas of blue cities and sta...
Bryant Kagay is a farmer in Missouri feeling the uncertainty of President Donald Trump’s tariffs up close. He voted for Trump last year but now questions whether the trade war with China is part of a long-term strategy that could help US businesses or merely a short-term negotiating tactic. In this episode of More To The Story, he says the on-again, off-again nature of the trade war could restrict his ability to sell agricultural goods like soybeans when the harvest comes this fall. Producer: Jo...
This month, some of the nation’s best and brightest teenage girls will 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 20 years later. Oliaee accepted, all while recording it for a six-part audio series called The Competition . I...
David Hogg is disrupting the Democratic National Committee. He’s well known for his gun control advocacy work after surviving the horrific mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, seven years ago. Today, he’s taken on a new role as a DNC vice chair, the first member of Gen Z to hold the position. But his political action committee is spending $20 million to replace Democratic incumbents with younger candidates, which he says could get him kicked out of the DNC. Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara M...
Dylan Bringuel remembers the exact moment they got hired by the Holiday Inn Express in Jamestown, New York. It was late August 2022, and Bringuel—who uses they/them pronouns—had recently moved across the country and was struggling to find work. Bringuel is transgender and was upfront about their gender identity during the job interview. “ I was like, ‘Just so you're aware, I am transitioning from female to male,’” they remember saying. “And they said, ‘Okay, we respect that. We’ll do our best to...
A record 45 million Americans were expected to travel this Memorial Day weekend, long considered the unofficial kickoff to summer. And most of them were hitting the road. Sarah Kendzior is no stranger to the family road trip. Her family, in fact, has visited 38 states—and counting. These trips were born out of a love and curiosity for America and a desire to explore small towns, vast National Parks, and the unexpected oddities along the way. And when money was tight, the best way for her family ...
