Consider This from NPR

Some young people are hesitant to start a family because they are worried about the impact it will have on the environment. But some experts argue, there are good reasons to still consider having children. One of them is Dean Spears. He's an economist and demographer at the University of Texas - Austin, and co-author of the new book, "After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People....

The job of a media reporter is to examine the role the press plays in our democracy, and the choices the large corporations operating newsrooms are making every day. It's a tough assignment, even more so when it means covering the place you work. For this week's reporter's notebook series, NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik talks about how he navigates his beat, reporting on his employer and...

Thursday night, President Trump announced new tariff rates, and a new deadline. For weeks, the administration said that new, tougher tariffs would go into effect August 1 — instead, most countries won't see the new rates kick in for at least a week. Meanwhile, new numbers from the Labor Department show job growth slowed sharply this spring, as President Trump's earlier, worldwide tariffs started t...

"In an era where false claims are the norm, it's much easier to ignore the fact-checkers." Those are the final words of the final column of Glenn Kessler, who has been The Fact Checker at the Washington Post these last 14 years. Kessler is one of many journalists making high-profile exits from the Post, some of whom cite the new direction the paper's leadership is taking as the reason they're leav...

This year, hundreds of employees at the Justice Department have been fired, sometimes over clashes with the Trump administration, and other times for unknown reasons. Those departures are spreading fear across the workforce and transforming the Justice Department. NPR Justice correspondent Carrie Johnson spoke with a few of the career civil servants who have lost their job for reasons they say are...

President Donald Trump is aiming to fundamentally shift how the country manages homelessness with a new executive order he signed last week. It calls for changes that would make it easier for states and cities to move people living on the street into treatment for mental illness or addiction, and in some cases, potentially force people into treatment. Consider This: The Trump administration says t...

New light has emerged between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump, with the latter disputing Israel's claim that there is no starvation in Gaza. But Consider This: Even as global outrage and assistance grows, aid agencies say only a total ceasefire will allow all the necessary aid in to get to those who desperately need it in Gaza. For sponsor-free episodes of Cons...

President Trump traveled to Scotland to talk trade with the EU and play golf. But as soon as he landed he was asked about Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender. The pressure on the Trump administration has continued to intensify over its handling of the Epstein files, and who-knew-what-when . Pressure that's also coming from within his party. And as those calls have ramped up, so has messagi...

At least 135 people died earlier this month when floods swept through the Texas Hill Country. As in any other natural disasters, journalists from around the country soon arrived to cover the catastrophe. For this week's reporter's notebook series, NPR's Sergio Martínez-Beltrán and Kat Lonsdorf speak with host Scott Detrow about their experiences covering the floods and the importance of interviewi...

Before he entered politics, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made a career out of stoking doubt about vaccines, promoting theories contradicted by mountains of scientific evidence on common vaccines which have been studied for decades and safely administered to hundreds of millions of people. Now, six months in as head of Health and Human Services, he has instituted a number of policy changes on access to va...

Federal education policy has seen a lot of changes since President Trump's inauguration. For example, the Department of Education itself, which Trump has vowed to close. But that hasn't stopped the Trump administration from also wielding the Department's power. Most recently, by withholding billions of dollars for K-12 schools. The Trump administration has drastically changed the federal governmen...

Since returning to office, President Trump has moved swiftly to upend decades of federal policy—from education to healthcare to vaccines...but nowhere more aggressively than immigration. Congress just passed tens of billions in funding for immigration enforcement...It's the largest domestic enforcement funding in U.S. history, fueling Trump's mass deportation campaign of migrants living in the U.S...

As a candidate in 2024, President Trump promised – often – to end what he and other conservatives describe as "woke" policies. On his first day in office, he signed executive orders rolling back policies around diversity, equity and inclusion — and those policy changes have continued over the last six months of the second Trump administration. One of the oldest civil rights organizations in the co...

President Trump helped reshape the federal courts during his first term in office. And he relied heavily on the Federalist Society in that effort, which helped him zero in on judges with a conservative, originalist interpretation of the constitution. Now the nominations machinery is restarting, and Trump's most controversial judicial nominee is only one step away from the federal bench. His name i...

Plea deals with the 9/11 defendants, including for the alleged ringleader, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, have been canceled. Families of those who died on September 11th are still calling for justice. What happens next in the most delayed criminal trial in US history? NPR's Sacha Pfeiffer speaks with Georgetown University Law professor Stephen Vladeck. For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up...

NPR correspondent Jasmine Garsd has taken several reporting trips to Florida recently, a state seeing some of the most aggressive immigration enforcement since President Trump took office again in January. She's spoken with children separated from their parents and reported on a new massive detention center in the state. For our weekly Reporter's Notebook series Garsd talks about how Florida is ke...

One of the narratives at the heart of President Trump's political movement is this: American society is dominated by a shadowy group of elites, and those elites are deeply corrupt. Nothing represented that theory more than the case of Jeffrey Epstein. He was a man most people had never heard of initially, with a private plane and a private island. Acquainted with the world's most powerful people:...

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Earlier this week, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy testified on Capitol Hill, where he thanked Congress for recently approving $12.5 billion dollars to modernize the nation's aging air traffic control system. But some U.S. air traffic controllers say there's a much deeper problem: a nationwide staffing shortage that leaves controllers overworked and employee morale low. NPR's Joel Rose and Joe...

It's been over three months since President Trump announced very big across-the-board tariffs on imports from nearly every territory on Earth–including uninhabited islands. It's a move he said would revitalize the U.S. economy. Since that splashy White House announcement, the tariff rates have been a wildly moving target. Ratcheted up - then back down - on China, specifically. Overlaid with global...

It's not just Texas. In the past couple of weeks, communities all around the country have been hit with torrential rains and deadly flash flooding. Extreme weather events like this are expected to become more common as the planet heats up. As climate change increases flash flooding risks, our infrastructure is struggling to keep up. But improvements to that infrastructure will cost billions. NPR's...

President Trump has made some big shifts in U.S. policy on Russia's war with Ukraine lately. In the course of two weeks, Trump halted and reinstated weapons to Ukraine and he began openly showing frustration with Russian president Vladimir Putin's continued military escalations. Now, Trump has announced a deal with NATO to try to pressure Russia toward a ceasefire deal in just 50 days by threateni...

It's been a year since the assassination attempt on President Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania and the motivations of the shooter are still unclear. The US Capitol Police threat assessment cases have risen for the second year in a row, with the total number more than doubling since 2017. At times political violence is starting to feel as pervasive as school shootings. But what do we know about what's...

On July 2nd, Sean Combs was acquitted of the most serious charges he faced: racketeering and sex trafficking. He was found guilty on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution — and he remains in prison awaiting sentencing in early October. Over the course of eight weeks, the trial became a spectacle, even by the high standards of celebrity courtroom dramas. One reason? All of the infl...

All across the U.S., there are aging oil and natural gas wells no longer in use. A lot of them don't have anyone on the hook to seal them up. Some estimate over a million such "orphan wells" still exist. Because they haven't been plugged, they're still leaking greenhouse gases and other chemicals into the atmosphere and into the land around them. What would it take to plug them — or even just one...