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 piece of evidence,” Horton said, “and it was wrong.”
Hospitals across the country routinely drug test people coming in to give birth. But the tests many hospitals use are notoriously imprecise, with false positive rates of up to 50 percent for some drugs. People taking over-the-counter cold medicine or prescribed medications can test positive for methamphetamine or opiates.
This week on Reveal, our collaboration with The Marshall Project investigates why parents across the country are being reported to child protective services over inaccurate drug test results. Reporter Shoshana Walter digs into the cases of women who were separated from their babies after a pee-in-a-cup drug test triggered a cascade of events they couldn’t control.
A Saudi-owned farm in the middle of the Arizona desert has attracted national attention and criticism since Reveal’s Nate Halverson and Ike Sriskandarajah first broke this story eight years ago. The farm is using massive amounts of water to grow hay and export it to Saudi Arabia in the midst of a water crisis in the American West.
Since then, megafarms have taken hold here. And the trend isn’t fueled just by foreign companies. Many people have no idea that their retirement funds are backing massive land deals that result in draining precious groundwater. Halverson uncovers that pension fund managers in Arizona knew they were investing in a local land deal, which resulted in draining down the aquifer of nearby communities. So even as local and state politicians have fought to stop these deals, their retirement fund has been fueling them.
And it’s not just happening in Arizona. Halverson takes us to Southern California, where retirement money also was invested in a megafarm deal. This time, the farm was tapping into the Colorado River to grow hay and ship it overseas. And it was happening as the federal and state governments have been trying to conserve river water.
Halverson’s investigation into water use in the West is just one slice of his reporting into a global scramble for food and water, which is featured in an upcoming documentary, “The Grab” by director Gabriela Cowperthwaite. “The Grab” will be coming soon to a theater or screen near you.
Support Reveal’s journalism at Revealnews.org/donatenow
Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get the scoop on new episodes at Revealnews.org/newsletter
Quickly delivering donated organs to patients waiting for a transplant is a matter of life and death. Yet transportation errors are leading to delays in surgeries, putting patients in danger and making some organs unusable. This week, we look at weaknesses in the nation’s system for transporting organs and solutions for making it work better.
More than any other organ, donated kidneys are put on commercial flights so they can get to waiting patients. In collaboration with Kaiser Health News, we look at the system for transporting kidneys and how a lack of tracking and accountability can result in waylaid or misplaced kidneys.
We then look at the broader issues affecting organ procurement in the U.S. with Jennifer Erickson, who worked at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under the Obama administration. She says one of the system’s weaknesses is that not enough organs are recovered from deceased people – not nearly as many as there could be.
We end with an audio postcard about honor walks, a new ritual that hospitals are adopting to honor the gift of life that dying people are giving to patients who will receive their organs. We follow the story of one young man who was killed in a car accident.
This episode originally was broadcast Feb. 8, 2020.
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 Twitter, Facebook and Instagram
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choicesIn the early 2000s, rampant steroid use across Major League Baseball became the biggest scandal in the sport’s history. But fans didn’t want to hear the difficult truth about their heroes – and the league didn’t want to intervene and clean up a mess it helped make.
We look back at how the scandal unraveled with our colleagues from the podcast Crushed from Religion of Sports and PRX. Their show revisits the steroid era to untangle its truth from the many myths, examine the legacy of baseball’s so-called steroid era and explore what it tells us about sports culture in America.
We start during the 1998 MLB season, when the home run race was on. Superstar sluggers Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa battled to set a new single-season record, and McGwire, the St. Louis Cardinals first baseman, was portrayed as the hero baseball needed: part humble, wholesome, working man and part action hero, with his brawny build and enormous biceps. So when a reporter spotted a suspicious bottle of pills in his locker in the middle of the season, most fans plugged their ears and refused to acknowledge that baseball might be hooked on steroids.
Joan Niesen, a sportswriter and host of the podcast Crushed, takes us on a deep dive into an era that dethroned a generation of superstars, left fans disillusioned and turned baseball’s record book on its head. The story takes us from ballparks and clubhouses to the halls of Congress to explain how baseball was finally forced to reckon with its drug problem.
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choicesBill and Nancy Rasweiler thought they were making a smart decision when they decided to lease their land to Shepherd’s Run, a large-scale solar project that promised a steady income and offered them a way to contribute to renewable energy efforts. But when they presented their plan to the town of Copake, New York, they were met with widespread backlash.
“We never expected this kind of resistance,” Nancy Rasweiler recalled. “We thought it would be a win-win for everyone.” Instead, the Rasweilers found themselves at the center of a heated debate over the area’s future.
Residents in Copake are deeply divided: While some see it as a necessary step toward renewable energy, others fear it will harm the environment and disrupt their rural community. It’s been seven years, and the project’s future is still uncertain.
This week on Reveal, investigative reporter Jonathan Jones travels to Copake to explore the resistance to Shepherd’s Run, how the divide is affecting the town and what this fight means for renewable energy projects across the country.
This is an update of an episode that originally aired in January 2024.
Reveal revisits a story produced in collaboration with a Guatemalan journalist who is now in prison. José Rubén Zamora was jailed last summer after his newspaper, elPeriódico, published more than 100 stories about corruption within Guatemala’s government.
Corruption is a longstanding problem in Guatemala, and it’s intertwined with U.S. policy in Central America. At times, the U.S. has had a corrupting influence on Guatemalan politics; at others, it has supported transparency. This week’s show looks at the root causes of corruption and impunity in Guatemala and how they have prompted generations of Guatemalans to flee their country and migrate north.
Veteran radio journalist Maria Martin takes us to Huehuetenango, a province near Guatemala’s border with Mexico. For decades, residents have been migrating to the U.S. to help support families struggling with poverty. We then connect the migration outflow to U.S. policy during the Cold War and its support of brutal dictatorships in Guatemala that were plagued by corruption.
Then Reveal’s Anayansi Diaz-Cortes introduces us to a crusading prosecutor named Iván Velásquez. In the early 2000s, Velásquez was tasked with running an international anti-corruption commission in Guatemala, known by its Spanish acronym, CICIG. Its mandate was to root out corruption and improve the lives of Guatemalans so they wouldn’t feel compelled to leave their homes. Velásquez had a reputation for jailing presidents and paramilitaries, but met his match when he went after Jimmy Morales, a television comedian who was elected president in 2015. Morales found an ally in then-U.S. President Donald Trump, whose administration helped Morales dismantle CICIG.
With CICIG gone, journalists were left to expose government corruption – journalists like Zamora, who was arrested last summer on trumped-up charges. Diaz-Cortes speaks with Zamora’s son about his father’s arrest and the state of journalism in Guatemala.
This is an update of an episode that originally aired in September 2020.
Support Reveal’s journalism at Revealnews.org/donatenow
Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get the scoop on new episodes at Revealnews.org/newsletter
More To The Story: Jason Stanley isn’t afraid to use the F-word when talking about President Donald Trump. The author of How Fascism Works and Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future is clear: He believes the United States is currently under an authoritarian regime led by a fascist leader. At a time when the Trump administration is putting increasing pressure on private and public universities to conform or lose funding, Stanley recently left his position at Yale University and moved his family to Canada, where he’s now the Bissell-Heyd chair in American studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto. The move, he says, has allowed him to talk about the US in a way that wouldn’t have been possible if he remained in the country. On this week’s More To The Story, Stanley traces the recent rise of fascist regimes around the globe, and explains why he describes what’s happening in the US today as a “coup” and why he thinks the speed and scope of the Trump administration’s hardline policies could ultimately lead to significant pushback from those opposed to the president.
Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Copy editor: Nikki Frick | Digital producer: Artis Curiskis | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson
Read: He Studies Fascism: Is He Now Living Through It? (Mother Jones)
Listen:Trump’s New World (Dis)Order (Reveal)
Watch: We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the US (The New York Times)
Read: How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (Random House)
Note: If you buy a book using our Bookshop link, a small share of the proceeds supports our journalism.
Since 9/11, the power of the U.S. military has been felt around the world in the name of rooting out terrorism. But at what cost? From Fallujah in Iraq to tiny villages in Afghanistan and Yemen, Reveal reporter Anjali Kamat talks to three journalists about how America’s so-called war on terror has shaped an entire generation.
Anand Gopal is a foreign journalist who traveled across the Afghan countryside, meeting with Taliban commanders and trying to understand how people understood the war. He says when U.S. President George W. Bush divided the world into those who are “with us” and those who are “with the terrorists,” it was an oversimplification and had tragic consequences for Afghanistan. Within months of the invasion, the Taliban wanted to surrender, but 9/11 was fresh and the U.S. said no. Instead, the military allied with anti-Taliban warlords and incentivized them to hunt down “terrorists.” Gopal says thousands of innocent people were arrested, tortured and killed – which only galvanized the Taliban and drew more recruits to their ranks.
To many Americans, Fallujah is remembered as the site of two brutal battles where many Americans died during the invasion of Iraq. But to journalist Feurat Alani, it’s also his parents’ hometown. While American TVs filled with images of the city as a jihadist stronghold, Alani knew it was a bustling city full of regular people whose lives would be forever changed by the invasion. Alani recounts precious memories of Fallujah, like swimming in the Euphrates River with his cousins and seeing football matches with his uncles. But after the invasion, his family fell apart and the city was reduced to rubble. The football stadium turned into a cemetery, and joyful moments there became somber walks through gravestones.
Finally, journalist and filmmaker Safa Al Ahmad talks about what America’s post-9/11 wars have done to Yemen, where drone strikes became part of everyday life for civilians. Al Ahmad recounts what it felt like to ride in a pickup truck, wondering if she would be targeted as the sound of a drone buzzed overhead. She saw on the ground how the tactics of the war on terror in Yemen led to resentment and hostility among people whose lives were upended. While the 9/11 attacks happened 20 years ago, Al Ahmad says that for people in other places, bombings, airstrikes and drone attacks have never stopped. “They're still living the nightmare that people in New York lived for the day,” she says.
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choicesThe summer of 2020 was a hinge point in American history. The murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police inspired racial justice demonstrations nationwide. At the time, the FBI was convinced that extreme Black political activists could cross the line into domestic terrorism – a theory federal agents had first termed “Black identity extremism.”
That summer, Mickey Windecker approached the FBI. He drove a silver hearse, claimed to have been a volunteer fighter for the French Foreign Legion and the Peshmerga in Iraq, and had arrest records in four states that included convictions for misdemeanor sexual assault and menacing with a weapon, a felony. He claimed to the FBI that he had heard racial justice activists speak vaguely of training and violent revolution in Denver.
The FBI enlisted Windecker as a paid informant, gave him a recording device and instructed him to infiltrate Denver's growing Black Lives Matter movement. For months, Windecker spied on activists and attempted to recruit two Black men into an FBI-engineered plot to assassinate the state's attorney general.
Windecker's undercover work is the first documented case of FBI efforts to infiltrate the 2020 racial justice movement. Journalist Trevor Aaronson obtained over a dozen hours of Windecker's secret recordings and more than 300 pages of internal FBI reports for season 1 of the podcast series Alphabet Boys.
This episode of Reveal is a partnership with Alphabet Boys and production company Western Sound.
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 Twitter, Facebook and Instagram
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choicesAt 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 started aggressively targeting prison gangs, Morris was accused of associating with one of the groups. The punishment was severe: He was sent to a special supermax unit at the state’s highest-security prison, Pelican Bay.
The facility was designed to isolate men deemed the “worst of the worst.” Like Morris, most lived in near-total isolation. No phone calls, no meaningful physical contact with another human, no educational classes, no glimpses of the outside world. The only regular time out of a cell was for a shower and solo exercise in another concrete room.
Decades later, prisoners at Pelican Bay, including Morris, started a dialogue through coded messages and other covert communication. They decided to protest long-term solitary confinement by organizing a hunger strike. It would become the largest in US history and helped push California to implement reforms.
This week on Reveal, we team up with the PBS film The Strike to tell the inside story of a group of men who overcame bitter divisions and harsh conditions to build an improbable prison resistance movement.
Chelsea Goodrich and her mother, Lorraine, were locked in discussions with the director of the Mormon church’s risk management division, Paul Rytting. One of Rytting’s jobs is to protect the church from legal liability, including sexual abuse lawsuits.
The women had come to the meeting with one clear request: Would the church allow a local Idaho bishop who heard Chelsea’s father’s confession of abuse to testify against him at trial?
In this week’s episode, produced in collaboration with The Associated Press, secret audio recordings expose a legal playbook used by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that keeps evidence of sex abuse out of reach of authorities.
AP reporters Michael Rezendes and Jason Dearen investigate what happened after a former Mormon bishop, John Goodrich, was accused of sexual abuse—and the family pressed Mormon church officials on whether they were going to make decisions that would help Chelsea or her father.
Rezendes and Dearen also sit down with guest host Michael Montgomery to discuss a major development in the Goodrich case since this investigation was released last year—and why states across the country continue to exempt clergy from mandatory reporting laws that are meant to protect children from abuse.
This is an update of an episode that originally aired in December 2023.
Lindsay Aime remembers the moment his Haitian immigrant community came under a national spotlight. It was September 2024 when then-presidential candidate Donald Trump accused Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, of eating people’s pets. To Aime, who is originally from Haiti but has lived in Springfield since 2019, the accusation was not just absurd. It felt like Trump was portraying his entire community as criminal.
Today, the estimated 10,000 Haitian immigrants in Springfield are under a different sort of spotlight. The Trump administration is trying to revoke the legal status that allows hundreds of thousands of Haitians and other immigrants to live in the US. Those moves are being challenged in court, but many are feeling panicked and confused. Aime is the co-founder of the Haitian Community Help and Support Center in Springfield, a resource for immigrants looking for legal advice, especially now. “We don’t have any good news,” he says. “We keep telling all our people who come in our office: Stay safe, stay safe, stay safe. Stay out of trouble.”
On this week’s episode of More To The Story, host Al Letson talks with Aime about what it was like when all eyes were on his community during the election, why returning to his home country is not an option, and the challenges of trying to reunite with a son still living in Haiti.
Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Interim executive producers: Taki Telonidis and Brett Myers | Host: Al Letson
Donate today at Revealnews.org/more
Subscribe to our weekly newsletter at Revealnews.org/weekly
Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky
Listen: Trump’s Deportation Black Hole (Reveal)
Read: Bomb Threat Prompts Evacuation of Springfield, Ohio, City Hall (Mother Jones)
Read: After Jailing of Newark Mayor, DHS Official Warns of “More Arrests Coming” (Mother Jones)
The final chapter of our three-part investigation into the abduction
of 43 Mexican students in 2014 looks at how an unexpected turn in Mexico’s politics leads to a new investigation with Omar Gómez Trejo as special prosecutor.
With the election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador as president, Mexico’s investigation into the missing students is reopened, and Gómez Trejo gathers evidence to indict members of the previous government for manipulating evidence and forcing confessions. We hear an exclusive interview with a man who was the victim of torture and learn that a former top official in the original investigation is under indictment.
Reveal’s Anayansi Diaz-Cortes and our partner Kate Doyle look at what current investigators are learning about the attack on the buses and what happened to the students who were taken away by local police. They visit Cristi Bautista, the mother of one of the missing students. Seven years after her son Benjamin disappeared, she continues to pray that she will one day know the truth about what happened to him.
Donate today to support Reveal’s journalism.
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choicesMore To The Story: When Trymaine Lee began writing his first book, he didn’t realize that the gun violence he was reporting on was such a central part of his own story. But then he began digging into his family history, only to fully learn about a series of racially motivated murders involving his ancestors. Lee’s book, A Thousand Ways to Die: The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America, soon became more personal than he’d planned. On this week’s episode of More To The Story, Lee sits down with host Al Letson for part 2 of a conversation about generational trauma, the challenges of being a Black journalist in America, and how learning about his family’s history has changed how he writes and reports on Black Americans killed by violence.
Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Copy editor: Nikki Frick | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson
Listen: Mississippi Goddam (Reveal)
Listen: Being Black in America Almost Killed Me Part 1 (More To The Story)
Read: Trump Prepares to Wipe Out Years of Progress on Gun Violence (Mother Jones)
Read: A Thousand Ways to Die: The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America (St. Martin’s Press)
Watch: Hope in High Water: A People’s Recovery Twenty Years After Hurricane Katrina (Peacock)
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choicesNote: 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, her son would die, too.
Stuart said he saw the man who did it: a Black man in a tracksuit.
Within hours, the killing had the city in a panic, and Boston police were tearing through Mission Hill looking for a suspect.
For a whole generation of Black men in Mission Hill who were subjected to frisks and strip searches, this investigation shaped their relationship with police. And it changed the way Boston viewed itself when the story took a dramatic turn and the true killer was revealed.
This week on Reveal, in partnership with columnist Adrian Walker of the Boston Globe and the Murder in Boston podcast, we bring you the untold story of the Stuart murder: one that exposed truths about race and crime that few White people in power wanted to confront.
To hear more of the Boston Globe’s investigation, listen to the 10-part podcast Murder in Boston. The HBO documentary series Murder in Boston: Roots, Rampage, and Reckoning is available to stream on Max.
This is an update of a show that originally aired in May 2024.
Some of the most enduring photos of the civil rights movement were taken by Ernest Withers. A native of Memphis, Tennessee, Withers earned the trust of Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders. But as it turns out, he was secretly taking photos for the federal government as well. This week, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Wesley Lowery brings us the story of Withers in an adaptation of the podcast “Unfinished: Ernie’s Secret,” from Scripps News and Stitcher.
Lowery starts by explaining how Withers earned his reputation as a chronicler of the civil rights movement. We tour a museum of Withers’ photographs with his daughter Roz, who deconstructs his famous “I Am a Man” photo of striking sanitation workers. Civil rights leader Andrew Young explains that without Withers’ photographs, they wouldn’t have had a movement.
We then learn that after Withers’ death, a Memphis reporter named Marc Perrusquia followed up on an old lead about the photographer: that he was secretly working for the FBI. Perrusquia gained access to thousands of reports and photos taken for the FBI by Withers. We hear excerpts from several reports and meet the daughter of the agent who recruited Withers. During the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, the bureau recruited thousands of informants as part of a covert program originally created to monitor communists in America but ended up targeting the civil rights movement, as well as other individuals and groups.
We close with reflections on Withers by people who knew him. While some believe Withers betrayed the cause of civil rights, others are more forgiving. They say his actions were part of a larger narrative about the U.S. government’s unchecked power to spy on its own citizens and extinguish ideas and movements it felt were a threat.
Support Reveal’s journalism at Revealnews.org/donatenow
Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get the scoop on new episodes at Revealnews.org/weekly
Connect with us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choicesFrom Russia to Sweden and the United States, there’s a growing network of White nationalist groups that stretches around the world. The reporting team at Verified: The Next Threat investigates how these militant groups are helping each other create propaganda, recruit new members and share paramilitary skills.
We are updating this episode, which first aired in July, to reflect recent activities by the Russian Imperial Movement and other white supremacist groups around the world.
We start with a group called the Russian Imperial Movement, or RIM. Its members are taking up arms in Russia’s war against Ukraine, which they say is a battle in a much larger “holy war” for White power. Scripps News senior investigative reporter Mark Greenblatt interviews a leader of the group who says RIM’s goal is to unite White nationalists around the world. The group even runs training camps where White supremacists can learn paramilitary tactics.
Russia’s White nationalists are making connections with extremists in the United States. Greenblatt talks with a neo-Nazi named Matt Heimbach, who was a major promoter of the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Soon after Charlottesville, Heimbach invited members of RIM to the U.S. and connected them to his network of American White power extremists.
We end with a visit by Greenblatt to the State Department in Washington, where he interviews two top counterterrorism officials. They say they’re aware of the growing international network of White supremacists, but explain that White power groups are now forming political parties, which makes it more difficult for the agency to use its most powerful counterterrorism tools.
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 Twitter, Facebook and Instagram
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices“Get a job!” That sums up our current cash welfare system in a nutshell. Ever since so-called welfare reform in the 1990s, the system has been based on the idea that welfare recipients must be doing some kind of work or job-readiness activity to receive government assistance. It’s a system that plays on what Americans have long wanted to believe – that all it takes to move out of poverty is a can-do attitude and hard work.
Now, there is a growing chorus of politicians who argue that even more programs that help people in need should have more and tougher work requirements attached. Recently, Republicans successfully fought to create new work requirements for food assistance under the debt ceiling deal.
In this episode, Reveal partners with The Uncertain Hour podcast from Marketplace to explore the lucrative industry built on welfare-to-work policies. Critics say these for-profit welfare companies have cultivated their own cycle of dependency on the federal government. Krissy Clark from The Uncertain Hour takes listeners into America’s welfare-to-work system.
We meet a struggling mother of two in Milwaukee who hits hard times and turns to a local welfare office for help – a welfare office outsourced to a private for-profit company. Inside, staff preach the power of work, place people into unpaid “work experience” and enforce work requirements for welfare recipients, all in the name of teaching self-sufficiency. But who’s set to benefit most, that struggling mother or the for-profit company she turned to?
Then, Clark has a frank conversation with the founder of America Works, one of the first for-profit welfare-to-work companies in the country.
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choicesThe murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis Police officer last year sparked a wave of social justice protests, including ones targeting monuments that celebrate segregationists, slave-owners, conquistadors and Confederate leaders. Since then, about 160 monuments have come down, but roughly 2,000 remain standing.
We teamed up with Type Investigations to visit dozens of Confederate monuments and found that for devoted followers, they inspire a disturbing – and distorted – view of history: Confederate generals as heroes. Slaves who were happy to work for them. That twisted history is also shared with schoolchildren on class trips. And you won’t believe who’s funding these sites to keep them running.
Then, reporter Stan Alcorn follows the story of New Mexico’s great monument controversy. In 1998, the state was set to celebrate its cuarto centenario: the 400th anniversary of the state’s colonization by the Spanish. But a dramatic act of vandalism would turn the making of a monument in Albuquerque into a fight over history the city didn’t expect.
This show is an update from a 2020 episode that was based on reporting originally broadcast Dec. 8, 2018.
Donate now to support Reveal’s journalism.
•••
On the morning of Billey Joe Johnson’s death, crime scene tape separates the Johnsons from their son’s body. Their shaky faith in the criminal justice system begins to buckle.
As Billey Joe Johnson’s family tries to get answers about his death, they get increasingly frustrated with the investigation. They feel that law enforcement, from the lead investigator to the district attorney, are keeping them out of the loop. While a majority White grand jury rules that Johnson’s’s death was accidental, members of the family believe the possibility of foul play was never properly investigated.
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choicesIn August 2022, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall made a guest appearance on a local conservative talk radio show. It was two months after the US Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade, and abortion was now illegal in Alabama. And Marshall addressed rumors that he planned to prosecute anyone helping people get abortions out of state.
“If someone was promoting themselves out as a funder of abortion out of state,” Marshall explained to the host, “then that is potentially criminally actionable for us.”
This particular threat launched an epic legal battle with implications for some of the most basic American rights: the right to travel, the right to free speech, the right to give and receive help.
This week on Reveal, reporter Nina Martin spends time with abortion rights groups in Alabama, following how they’ve adapted to one of the nation’s strictest anti-abortion policies—and evolved their definition of help.
This is an update of an episode that originally aired in May 2025.
Donate now to support Reveal’s journalism.
•••
Amazon gathers a lot of information about its customers, from what they read and watch to what they search for and buy. And the company says customers trust it to keep their data safe. But internal memos and people who have worked inside Amazon paint a different picture.
Reveal found Amazon’s intense focus on growth left the company vulnerable to serious security risks. Amazon couldn’t track where all of its data was, according to a former executive. Customer service employees had the ability to look up the shopping history of celebrities, and some shady companies went through a back door to take the personal information of millions of Amazon shoppers. When Amazon found out, it kept it a secret from its customers.
Customer data wasn’t the only thing at risk. As a result of the company’s security struggles, corruption spread and independent sellers on Amazon’s marketplace have suffered attacks. Reveal explores the cutthroat world of Amazon sellers.
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choicesAfter the Civil War, a new form of slavery took hold in the US and lasted more than 60 years. Associated Press reporters Margie Mason and Robin McDowell investigate the chilling history of how Southern states imprisoned mainly Black men, often for minor crimes, and then leased them out to private companies – for years, even decades, at a time. The team talks with the descendant of a man imprisoned in the Lone Rock stockade in Tennessee nearly 140 years ago, where people as young as 12 worked under inhumane conditions in coal mines and inferno-like ovens used to produce iron. This system of forced prison labor enriched the Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad company – at the cost of prisoners’ lives.
At the state park that sits on the former site of the Lone Rock stockade, relics from the hellish prison are buried beneath the soil. Archeologist Camille Westmont has found thousands of artifacts, such as utensils and the plates prisoners ate off. She has also created a database listing the names of those sent to Lone Rock. A team of volunteers are helping her, including a woman reckoning with her own ancestor’s involvement in this corrupt system and the wealth her family benefited from.
The United States Steel Corporation helped build bridges, railroads and towering skyscrapers across America. But the company also relied on forced prison labor. After US Steel took over Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad in 1907, the industrial giant used prison labor for at least five more years. During that time, more than 100 men died while working in their massive coal mining operation in Alabama. U.S. Steel has misrepresented this dark chapter of its history. And it has never apologized for its use of forced labor or the lives lost. The reporters push the company to answer questions about its past and engage with communities near the former mines.
This is an update of an episode that originally aired September 2022.
Support Reveal’s journalism at Revealnews.org/donatenow
Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get the scoop on new episodes at Revealnews.org/weekly
Connect with us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choicesThe future of warfare is being shaped by computer algorithms that are assuming ever greater control over battlefield technology. Will this give machines the power to decide who to kill?
The United States is in a race to harness gargantuan leaps in artificial intelligence to develop new weapons systems for a new kind of warfare. Pentagon leaders call it “algorithmic warfare.” But the push to integrate AI into battlefield technology raises a big question: How far should we go in handing control of lethal weapons to machines?
We team up with The Center for Public Integrity and national security reporter Zachary Fryer-Biggs to examine how AI is transforming warfare and our own moral code.
In our first story, Fryer-Biggs and Reveal’s Michael Montgomery head to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Sophomore cadets are exploring the ethics of autonomous weapons through a lab simulation that uses miniature tanks programmed to destroy their targets.
Next, Fryer-Biggs and Montgomery talk to a top general leading the Pentagon’s AI initiative. They also explore the legendary hackers conference known as DEF CON and hear from technologists campaigning for a global ban on autonomous weapons.
Machines are getting smarter, faster and better at figuring out who to kill in battle. But should we let them?
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choicesMore To The Story: Detroit pastor Lorenzo Sewell is one of the most prominent Black conservatives in President Donald Trump’s orbit. It all started last summer when the president visited Sewell’s 180 Church while campaigning in Detroit. A month later, Sewell spoke at the Republican National Convention. And in January, he prayed for the new president during his inauguration inside the US Capitol. As Sewell’s voice echoed around the domed rotunda, the prayer sounded familiar to many. That’s because Sewell adapted Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech. As Trump dismantles DEI policies around the country and pushes efforts to erase Black history from schools and museums, Sewell remains one of the president’s most prominent Black defenders and argues that the Trump presidency is actually improving Black Americans’ lives. On this week’s More To The Story, Sewell sits down with host Al Letson to talk about his upbringing as a drug dealer in Detroit, his conversion to Christianity, and his inauguration prayer. Letson challenges Sewell’s ideas about racism, his support of Charlie Kirk, and his defense of the Trump administration’s rollback of DEI policies.
Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Copy editor: Nikki Frick | Digital producer: Artis Curiskis | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson
Watch: I Spent a Week With Black Republicans (Mother Jones)
Listen: Red, Black, and Blue (Reveal)
Read: Trump Shuts Down Diversity Programs Across Government (Mother Jones)
Listen: The Bible Says So…or Does It? (More To The Story)
Watch: Rev. Lorenzo Sewell Delivers Benediction (PBS NewsHour via YouTube)
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choicesMore To The Story: US and Israeli military strikes against Iran that killed several of the country’s top officials, including longtime supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have ushered in a new and unpredictable era in the Middle East. Within hours, Iran retaliated, striking US allies across the Persian Gulf, including US embassies and a military operations center in Kuwait. At least six US service members had been killed. In Iran, days of military strikes have reportedly killed hundreds of people, including dozens of girls at an elementary school.
Davar Ardalan knows Iran inside and out. She lived in the country before the Islamic Revolution, when it was ruled by the shah, and afterward, when it was run by the country’s ayatollahs. For more than two decades, she was a journalist at NPR, where she produced major stories about the country. She’s also the author of My Name Is Iran: A Memoir, which highlights three generations of women living in both Iran and the US during times of revolution. On this week’s episode, Ardalan examines how Iranians inside the country are reacting to the ever-widening conflict, the long history of outside intervention in the region, and who might lead the country moving forward.
Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Copy editor: Nikki Frick | Digital producer: Artis Curiskis | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson
Read: What a War Powers Resolution Vote on Iran Actually Means (Mother Jones)
Listen: Jeffrey Goldberg on Signalgate, Pete Hegseth, and the Risk of WWIII (More To The Story)
Read: My Name Is Iran: A Memoir (Holt)
When they were invented in the ’90s, renewable energy certificates were meant to stimulate the green energy market. Back then, building wind and solar farms was way more expensive than it is today. The idea was that renewable energy producers could sell certificates that represented the “greenness” of the energy they made. Anyone buying those certificates, or RECs, could claim that green power and also claim they were helping the environment.
For years, corporations have bought RECs as a low-commitment way to claim they’re “going green” – all while using the same old fossil fuel-powered electricity.
So how exactly do RECs help the climate crisis? This week, Reveal investigates RECs and finds that the federal government uses them to pad its environmental stats.
Reveal’s Will Evans starts with Auden Schendler, the man in charge of sustainability at Aspen Skiing Co. Schendler initially convinced his company to buy RECs to go green, then realized he made a mistake. But even after he spoke out and evidence piled up showing that RECs were ineffective, other companies kept buying them – and the federal government did, too. Evans and Reveal’s Melissa Lewis determined that since 2010, more than half of what the government has claimed as renewable energy was just cheap RECs.
Next, Reveal’s Najib Aminy takes us to Palm Beach County, Florida, to find out where some RECs are made: in a trash incinerator. Amid all the sounds and smells of burning garbage, Aminy looks into whether buying RECs actually helps the environment and where the money goes. He meets Andrew Byrd, who lives nearby and worries about the fumes. It turns out that federal agencies bought RECs from this incinerator in order to meet renewable energy mandates.
Finally, we explore another place where the government buys RECs: two biomass plants in Georgia, where residents complained of toxic pollution. Evans looks into where the government’s modest environmental goals come from and why federal agencies buy RECs in the first place. He also talks to a REC industry veteran and examines how a plan from the Biden administration could change things.
Support Reveal’s journalism at Revealnews.org/donatenow
Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get the scoop on new episodes at Revealnews.org/newsletter
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 Immigration and Customs Enforcement is arresting people in front of their kids during school dropoffs, on the way to church, and at routine check-ins at immigration offices. Communities are pushing back, leading to clashes with police and protests. These raids are remaking the country.
“Being forced apart like this is tearing through the heart of our home and community,” says Cecelia Lizotte, the sister of a Nigerian man in ICE detention.
This week on Reveal, producers Katie Mingle and Steven Rascón and reporter Julia Lurie tell stories about the people swept up in President Donald Trump’s mass deportations and the families that are left behind.
The first time Trina Edwards was locked in a psychiatric hospital for children, she was 12 years old. She was sure a foster parent would pick her up the next day. But instead, Trina would end up spending years cycling in and out of North Star Behavioral Health in Anchorage, Alaska.
At times, she was ready to be discharged, but Alaska’s Office of Children’s Services couldn’t find anywhere else to put her – so Trina would stay locked in at North Star, where she would experience violent restraints and periods of seclusion. Then, shortly before her 15th birthday, Trina was sent to another facility 3,000 miles away: Copper Hills Youth Center in Utah.
Both North Star and Copper Hills are owned by Universal Health Services, a publicly traded Fortune 500 company that is the nation’s largest psychiatric hospital chain. Trina’s experience is emblematic of a larger problem: a symbiotic relationship between failing child welfare agencies, which don’t have enough foster homes for all the kids in custody, and large for-profit companies like Universal Health Services, which have beds to fill.
This hour, Mother Jones reporter Julia Lurie exposes how Universal Health Services is profiting off foster kids who get admitted to its facilities, despite government and media investigations raising alarming allegations about patient care that the company denies.
This is an update of an episode that originally aired in October 2023.
Support Reveal’s journalism at Revealnews.org/donatenow
Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get the scoop on new episodes at Revealnews.org/newsletter
More To The Story: This weekend, American football fans will be glued to their TVs to watch the New England Patriots play the Seattle Seahawks in the Super Bowl. From the NCAA to the NFL, sports are a dominant aspect of American culture. But the sports industry is also rife with controversy. From financial scandals to transgender rights, DEI, and Bad Bunny, there’s no shortage of sports stories to tell. However, investigative sports journalism is a shell of its former self. That’s where Pablo Torre comes in.
A longtime sports journalist and now host of the podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out, Torre prides himself on digging into the important stories that are often unnoticed or underreported. On this week’s More To The Story, Torre sits down with host Al Letson to discuss what it’s like investigating the complicated world of sports.
Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Copy editor: Nikki Frick | Digital producer: Artis Curiskis | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson
Listen: How Sports Became a Battleground Over Trans Rights (Reveal)
Read: How Right-Wing Superstar Riley Gaines Built an Anti-Trans Empire (Mother Jones and Pablo Torre Finds Out)
Watch: What Is Riley Gaines Hiding? We Investigated (Pablo Torre Finds Out)
Our two-part series starts September 27th, exposing the inside story of the failed crypto currency exchange & the contentious bankruptcy that followed.
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choicesIn July, a popular uprising in Sri Lanka forced the country’s president, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, to step down and flee the country. Rajapaksa is accused of carrying out massive atrocities more than a decade ago.
Reveal reporter and host Ike Sriskandarajah looks into why powerful people suspected of committing war crimes often walk free. Sriskandarajah spent six months investigating the U.S. government's failure to charge accused perpetrators of the worst crimes in the world. The federal government says it is pursuing leads and cases against nearly 1700 alleged human rights violators and war criminals. Victims of international atrocities sometimes even describe running into them at their local coffee shop or in line at Walgreens.
After the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war, families seeking accountability for state-sanctioned violence filed a suit against a man they say is a war criminal. A private eye was tasked with hunting down Gota, Sri Lanka’s former defense minister. The P.I. found the alleged war criminal in Southern California, shopping at Trader Joe’s.
At the close of World War II, dozens of former Nazi leaders came to the United States. After decades of inaction, in 1979, President Jimmy Carter created a special unit within the Department of Justice dedicated to hunting down Nazi war criminals. Decades after passing the first substantive human rights statutes that make it possible to prosecute war criminals for crimes like torture and genocide, the U.S. has successfully prosecuted only one person under the laws. Sriskandrajah talks to experts about why prosecutors often take an “Al Capone” strategy to going after war criminals, pursuing them on lesser charges like immigration violations rather than human rights abuses.
With little action from the government to prosecute war criminals, victims of violence are instead using civil lawsuits to try to seek accountability. Lawyers at the Center for Justice & Accountability have brought two dozen cases against alleged war criminals and human rights violators – and never lost at trial. But when the lawyers share their evidence with the federal government, it often feels like the information disappears into a black box.
This is a rebroadcast of an episode originally released on April 22, 2022.
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choicesDuring an NCAA women’s swimming championship in March 2022, two seniors tied for fifth place. The race was unremarkable except for one fact: One of the swimmers, Lia Thomas, was a transgender woman. The swimmer she tied with, Riley Gaines, believed the NCAA never should have allowed her to participate.
The matchup, and Gaines’ subsequent transformation into a leading anti-trans activist, has fueled a growing movement to “save women’s sports” from trans women—and a conservative crusade against trans rights more broadly.
This week on Reveal, we examine Gaines’ rise and radicalization, as her rhetoric shifts from calling out NCAA policy to calling trans women sexual predators.
Over the last year, the anti-trans movement has reached a tipping point. Trans girls are banned from girls’ school sports in the majority of states. The NCAA and US Olympic and Paralympic committees have banned trans women from women’s competitions. The Supreme Court is currently considering the issue, too.
Then we dive into the science to understand how gender-affirming hormone therapy affects trans women’s performance—and what questions science still has not answered around fairness in women’s sports.
Finally, we return to the swimming pool, as reporter Imogen Sayers speaks with Meghan Cortez-Fields, one of the last transgender swimmers to compete as a woman in the NCAA.
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 the church. “In my heart, in my soul, I feel like the best thing that they can do is to exit the reservation, return all property, and pay us,” Nelson said.
In the second half of Reveal’s two-part collaboration with ICT (formerly Indian Country Today), members of the Pine Ridge community put pressure on the Catholic church to share information about the boarding school it ran on the reservation.
ICT reporter Mary Annette Pember, a citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Ojibwe, travels to the archives of the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions. She discovers that many records are redacted or off-limits, but then comes across a diary written by nuns. Buried in the diary entries is information about the school’s finances, the massacre at Wounded Knee, and children who died at the school more than a century ago.
This is a rebroadcast of an episode that originally aired in October 2022.
Donate now to support Reveal’s nonprofit journalism.
In Portland, Oregon, unhoused people make up at most 2% of the population, but they account for nearly half of all arrests. Cities have long turned to police as the mechanism for making homelessness disappear. But arrests don’t solve a housing crisis.
Reveal looked at six major cities up and down the West Coast and found that people living on the streets are consistently more likely to be arrested than their neighbors who live in houses. At the same time, places such as Portland, San Francisco and Los Angeles are now grappling with a major court decision. In 2019, the Supreme Court let a ruling stand that says it's cruel and unusual punishment to arrest people who are sleeping or camping in public places if there is no shelter for them to stay. In Portland, the city is trying to build more shelters, but there is pushback from residents who don’t want a shelter in their neighborhood. People are growing frustrated, and they want the problem to go away. Reporter Melissa Lewis tells the story of these intersecting parts after spending months talking to unhoused people who go to weekly dinners at a neighborhood park.
Lewis follows one man’s journey through the criminal justice system as he tries to disentangle himself from arrest warrants that keep accumulating after he misses court dates and fails to check in with his probation officer. We also hear from locals who are trying to build trust and connection with their houseless neighbors and others who are tired of seeing tents and call the police for help. We also hear what it takes to move someone off the street, one person at a time.
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choicesMore To The Story: John J. Lennon thinks true crime is exploitative—and he has a unique perspective. In 2001, he killed a man on a street in New York City. He was convicted of murder several years later and given the maximum sentence—25 years to life in prison—on top of three additional years for two other convictions. From behind bars, he began reckoning with his crime through in-prison writing workshops and soon fell in love with journalism. He’s since made a name for himself as an incarcerated journalist and has been published in The Atlantic, Esquire, and the New York Times Magazine, often writing about the criminal justice system and conditions in correctional facilities, all from the inside. In the decades Lennon’s been behind bars, America has become increasingly fixated on stories like his—true crime—through endless podcasts, documentary series, and streaming shows. But Lennon argues that tragedy is too often being turned into entertainment. True crime “creates this thirst for punishment,” he says. On this week’s More To The Story, Lennon joins with host Al Letson to discuss how his first book, The Tragedy of True Crime: Four Guilty Men and the Stories That Define Us, inverts the basic structure of the true crime genre. They also discuss how his portrayal on a cable news show hosted by Chris Cuomo inspired him to write the book and how Lennon now views the murder he committed almost a quarter-century ago.
Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Copy editor: Nikki Frick | Digital producer: Artis Curiskis | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson
Listen: In a Mississippi Jail, Inmates Became Weapons (Reveal)
Read: There Are Many Programs Trying to Reduce Recidivism. This One Works. (Mother Jones)
Read: The Tragedy of True Crime: Four Guilty Men and the Stories That Define Us (Celadon Books)
Read: A Convicted Murderer’s Case for Gun Control (The Atlantic)
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choicesReveal’s Jennifer Gollan leads an investigation that exposes the consequences of passing gun laws with no teeth. For the first time, Reveal tallies the number of intimate partners, children and bystanders whose lives are shattered by abusers who fail to give up their firearms. Our analysis of 21 states finds that from 2017 through 2020, at least 110 intimate partners, children and bystanders were killed by suspects using guns they weren’t allowed to have under federal law and, in some cases, state law as well. This is likely a massive undercount because the federal government does not track the number of people killed by intimate partners who are prohibited from possessing guns.
We meet Chad Absher, who even as a young man could not control his rage. He was convicted of shooting at an ex-girlfriend's house, which meant he could never have a gun again. Absher’s story with guns should have ended there, but it didn’t.
Gollan picks up his story years later when Absher starts dating another young woman, Ashlee Rucker. It isn’t long before he becomes controlling and abusive, and Rucker wants out of the relationship. But Absher won’t let go and, once again, threatens violence. Despite the law, he has a firearm.
In the final segment, Gollan tracks the law enforcement failures that make it possible for felons such as Absher to possess guns. From the local sheriff to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and a member of Congress, Gollan discovers that laws that have been on the books for decades have very few enforcement mechanisms. She also speaks with a prosecutor in King County, Washington, which is trying to make the laws work as they were originally intended.
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choicesIt 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 actually in it, it’s very chaotic,” Hartzell said.
The following day, New Year’s Day 1945, Hartzell batted Nazi soldiers for control of the Belgian town of Chenogne. In the aftermath, American soldiers gunned down dozens of unarmed German prisoners of war in a field, a clear violation of the Geneva Convention.
“I remember we had been given orders, take no prisoners,” Hartzell said. “When I walked past the field on the left, there were these dead bodies. I knew what they were. I knew they were dead Germans.” News of the massacre reached General George S. Patton, but no investigation followed.
This week on Reveal, reporter Chris Harland-Dunaway investigates why the soldiers who committed the massacre at Chenogne were never held accountable.
This is an update of an episode that originally aired in July 2018.
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: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Interim executive producers: Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson
Listen: The Many Contradictions of a Trump Victory (Reveal)
Listen: What Trump’s Tariff Shock Will Cost You (More To The Story)
Read: Trump’s Assault on Small Farmers (Mother Jones)
Bitcoin is a novel form of currency that bypasses banks, credit card companies and governments. But as Elizabeth Shogren reports, the process of creating bitcoin is extremely energy intensive, and it’s setting back efforts to address climate change. Already, bitcoin has used enough power to erase all the energy savings from electric cars, according to one study. Still, towns across the United States are scrambling to attract bitcoin-mining operations by selling them power at a deep discount.
Bitcoin’s demand for electricity is so great that it’s giving new life to the dirtiest type of power plants: ones that burn coal. In Hardin, Montana, the coal-fired power plant was on the verge of shutting down until bitcoin came to town. The coal that fuels the bitcoin operation is owned by the Crow Nation, so some of the tribe’s leaders support it. But in just one year, the amount of carbon dioxide the plant puts into the air jumped nearly tenfold. After our story first aired, the company that owns the computers that mine bitcoin in Hardin announced that it would move them to a cleaner source of power. The generating station is negotiating with other companies to take its place.
Bitcoin’s huge carbon footprint has people asking whether cryptocurrency can go green. Bitcoin advocates say it can switch to renewable energy. Others are instead developing entirely new types of cryptocurrency that are less energy hungry. Guest host Shereen Marisol Meraji talks with Ludwig Siegele, technology editor at The Economist, who gives his assessment of the challenges of making cryptocurrency environmentally friendly.
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 Twitter, Facebook and Instagram
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choicesOn 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 world where you can just be rounded up with no hearing, not even an administrative hearing, nothing,” says immigration attorney Joseph Giardina. “Why couldn't you have let their cases be adjudicated? There's no logical answer other than a publicity stunt.”
This week on Reveal, Mother Jones reporters Isabela Dias and Noah Lanard speak to the families and lawyers of 10 men now imprisoned at the Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT. They vehemently deny allegations that the men are members of the Tren de Aragua criminal organization, and several provided evidence to support that.
To learn more about the Trump administration’s arrangement with the government of El Salvador, host Al Letson speaks with Carlos Dada, co-founder and director of El Faro, the Salvadaron investigative news outlet. Dada says that in addition to foreign nationals, the agreement also allows for American citizens convicted of crimes to be imprisoned in El Salvador.
As the Trump administration also targets international students who have spoken out about Israel’s war in Gaza, Reveal’s Najib Aminy reports on pro-Israel groups that are claiming to have shared lists of student protestors with the White House, and then taking credit when some of those young people are targeted for deportation.
In a Minnesota town outside the Twin Cities, Emily is a nurse who treats many immigrant patients. She can’t locate a patient who just had a test result that shows they might have cancer. The patient was recently detained by ICE; situations like these have forced the clinic to adapt, making house calls and triaging care.
“I'd love to know how well somebody's kidneys are functioning today,” Emily said, but “I'm gonna wait till three months because I don't want them to come in for a lab appointment that's not critical.”
Emily is one of many Minnesotans mounting a quiet, secretive resistance to the Trump administration's hard-nosed and often violent immigration agenda. Across the state, neighbors are helping neighbors and communities are building grassroot systems to support immigrant families.
This week on Reveal, our Minnesotan reporters Nate Halverson and Artis Curiskis report on how Minnesota is teaching the country to resist federal agents who have arrested children, killed citizens in the street, and pepper-sprayed high schoolers.
More To The Story: In January, the federal government released updated dietary guidelines for Americans that reimagine the nation’s longtime food pyramid by literally turning it upside down. The guidelines, which once prioritized foods like grains while minimizing fats, now recommend red meat, whole milk, proteins, and healthy fats. It’s one of the most unmistakable ways that US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has brought the Make America Healthy Again movement into the federal government. Over the last year, RFK Jr. has reshaped the country’s vaccine advisory committee with vaccine skeptics, fired thousands of employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, and revised the CDC’s stance on the unfounded link between vaccines and autism. The moves, often influenced and cheered by folks in the MAHA movement, are ones that infectious disease epidemiologist Jessica Malaty Rivera says are not merely misguided, but dangerous. On this week’s More To The Story, Rivera examines how Big Ag has influenced the nation’s latest dietary guidelines, whether the US is on the cusp of a national measles outbreak, and why the CDC dropping vaccine recommendations could have potentially long-term and deadly consequences.
Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Copy editor: Nikki Frick | Digital producer: Artis Curiskis | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson
Read: Measles Cases This Year Near 1,000. That We Know Of. (Mother Jones)
Listen: Why Trump Deemed Basic Sanitation Illegal DEI (More To The Story)
Read: RFK Jr. Wants to End the “War” on Unproven Treatments Like Stem Cell Therapy (Mother Jones)
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 a rebroadcast of an episode that originally aired in March 2025.
Sugar is a big part of Americans’ daily diet. But who harvests some of that sweet cane?
Reporters Sandy Tolan and Euclides Cordero Nuel visit Haitian migrants in the Dominican Republic who do the backbreaking work of cutting sugarcane for little pay. They live in work camps, or “bateyes,” that are part of a vast sugar plantation owned by the Central Romana Corp. The company is the Dominican Republic’s largest private employer and has strong links to two powerful Florida businessmen, Alfonso and Pepe Fanjul. The reporters speak to workers who have no access to government pensions, so they’re forced to work in the fields into their 80s for as little as $3 a day. Through its sugar exports to the U.S. and other businesses, Central Romana generates an estimated $1.5 billion a year – but some workers are so poor they can’t afford doctors’ visits.
In the 1990s, Tolan reported on human trafficking and child labor in the Dominican sugar industry. Conditions improved following pressure on the government from local activists, human rights groups, and the U.S. Labor Department. But major problems persist. And cane cutters say they must go into deep debt just to survive, leaving them trapped.
After Reveal’s story aired in fall 2021, Congress took action. Fifteen members of the House Ways and Means Committee called on federal agencies to formulate a plan to address what they called the “slave-like conditions” in the Dominican cane fields. Central Romana also took action: It bulldozed one of the bateyes our reporters visited. The company contends it was part of an improvement program, but residents say that with very little warning, they were told to pack up their lives. They were loaded onto trucks and moved to other bateyes, as their settlement was wiped off the map.
This is an update of an episode that originally aired in September 2021.
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 Twitter, Facebook and Instagram
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choicesThe schools in Steubenville, Ohio, are doing something unusual—in fact, it’s almost unheard of. In a country where nearly 40 percent of fourth graders struggle to read at even a basic level, Steubenville has succeeded in teaching virtually all of its students to read well.
According to data from the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University, Steubenville has routinely scored in the top 10 percent or better of schools nationwide for third grade reading, sometimes scoring as high as the top 1 percent.
In study after study for decades, researchers have found that districts serving low-income families almost always have lower test scores than districts in more affluent places. Yet Steubenville bucks that trend.
“It was astonishing to me how amazing that elementary school was,” said Karin Chenoweth, who wrote about Steubenville in her book How It’s Being Done: Urgent Lessons From Unexpected Schools.
This week on Reveal, reporter Emily Hanford shares the latest from the hit APM Reports podcast Sold a Story. We’ll learn how Steubenville became a model of reading success—and how a new law in Ohio put it all at risk.
Many Lakota people agree it's imperative to revitalize their language, which has declined to fewer than 1,500 fluent speakers, according to some estimates. But how to do that is a matter of broader debate and a contentious legal battle. Should Lakota be codified and standardized to make learning it easier? Or should the language stay as it always has been, defined by many different ways of writing and speaking? The NPR podcast Code Switch explores this complex, multigenerational fight that's been unfolding in the Lakota Nation, from Standing Rock to Pine Ridge.
Connect with us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choicesThree stories from local reporters who uncovered injustice and inequality in their hometowns, from an eviction crisis in Ohio to a Hitler-quoting state police training in Kentucky.
Louisville high schooler Satchel Walton knew something was off about the PowerPoint presentation used by the Kentucky State Police to train new recruits. The slides urged officers to be “ruthless killers” and quoted both Robert E. Lee and Adolf Hitler. Walton reached out to Reveal to ask about our past reporting on police officers in White supremacist Facebook groups, then co-wrote a story with his brother about the training presentation for his high school newspaper, the Manual RedEye. After Walton broke the story, the state police commissioner resigned. Guest host Ike Sriskandarajah talks with Walton about how he reported the story and the change it’s brought to the state.
Then, Reveal reporting fellow Noor Hindi documents an overlooked part of the housing crisis. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government issued a ban on evictions. But as Hindi reports, in Akron, Ohio, evictions kept happening despite the ban. She watched 132 housing hearings this past fall – and found that many renters at those hearings were evicted. Hindi follows the story of mother and nursing-home worker Amber Moreland, who lost her rental home during the pandemic, despite being an essential worker who tried to apply for federal aid.
Next, CapRadio reporter Sarah Mizes-Tan looks into the racial disparities around the Paycheck Protection Program, or PPP. Earlier this year, Reveal found that in major cities across the country, the rate of PPP lending was higher in majority-White neighborhoods than in neighborhoods of color. We shared our data with local reporters around the country, and Mizes-Tan found something else: In Sacramento, California, the disparity was even more pronounced for places of worship. There, three times as much money went to places of worship in White neighborhoods compared with those in neighborhoods where people of color are the majority.
Reporters featured on this episode worked with Reveal’s local reporting networks. If you’re a journalist, learn more about Reveal’s Reporting Networks.
Thirty years ago, activists and scientists turned a fight over the spotted owl and ancient trees into one of the biggest environmental conflicts of the century. The process transformed the way we see – and fight over – the natural world.
Don’t miss out on the next big story. Get the Weekly Reveal newsletter today.
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 bird flu and the ongoing measles outbreaks. We’ve not only failed to learn our lessons from the pandemic, she argues, but we also might be stumbling into the next one.
Donate today at Revealnews.org/moreSubscribe to our weekly newsletter at Revealnews.org/weeklyFollow us on Instagram @revealnews
Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Digital producers: Nikki Frick and Artis Curiskis | Interim executive producers: Taki Telonidis and Brett Myers | Host: Al Letson
Listen: The Covid Tracking Project (Reveal)
Read: Avian Flu Could Define Trump’s Second Presidency (Mother Jones)