Reveal

More To The Story: Boston University professor Quinn Slobodian discusses his book “Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed,” which he co-authored with Ben Tarnoff. They outline how Elon Musk’s background and political views have reshaped capitalism and coin new terms to describe the unique ways Musk has been able to forge a close and symbiotic relationship with the government. On this week’s More To Th...

Access to medication abortion in the years since Covid and the fall of Roe v. Wade has completely reshaped the abortion access landscape in America. “There's this irony that's actually happened,” says Dr. Angel Foster, an abortion provider and researcher. “Tragically, 33 to 40 percent of women of reproductive age now have less of a right to an abortion. But access for many people has increased.”  ...

More To The Story : A photo went viral on Independence Day this year. It showed a Black woman on a Metro train in Washington, DC, surrounded by members of Patriot Front, a far-right white nationalist group. The picture, taken on America’s 250th anniversary, seemed to encapsulate not only the continuing story of race in America, but also this current moment when right-wing groups seem louder, proud...

Last fall, life for the Perez children was turned upside down. Their father, Romeo Sr., was picked up on his way to work and sent to immigration detention. A few months later, their mother, Olga, was detained, too. Her daughter was driving when they were pulled over. Romeo Sr. and Olga were both undocumented and had lived in the United States for decades; their children are US citizens. “I just re...

This week, we’re bringing you a special episode from Revisionist History , Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. Gladwell’s show recently investigated the story of what was once the biggest secession movement in the US since the Civil War: the movement by disillusioned residents in Staten Island to secede from New York City. The Staten Island Problem, Revisionist Hi...

When the cryptocurrency exchange FTX imploded, customers around the world lost access to their money. Founder Sam Bankman-Fried was convicted of fraud and sent to prison. But the story didn’t stop there. For the past three and a half years, FTX has been in bankruptcy, a legal process that determines who will be paid back and how much they’ll receive.  From the start, some customers and FTX insider...

More To The Story : OpenAI and its revolutionary chatbot ChatGPT have single-handedly accelerated AI’s boom and threatened to upend much of how we work, create, learn, and communicate in the process. But when OpenAI was founded a decade ago, the company’s approach to artificial intelligence wasn’t taken seriously in Silicon Valley. Tech journalist Karen Hao has been covering OpenAI’s astounding ri...

Sam Bankman-Fried was once called the “crypto king.” But in November 2022, his company, FTX, imploded within a matter of days. All around the world, customers of the cryptocurrency exchange were suddenly cut off from their money.  “I tried to withdraw an amount, you know, and it would spin and say, your, your withdrawal is pending,” says Tareq Morad, an investor from Canada. “I remember myself doi...

More To The Story : Last month, the Supreme Court issued a number of landmark opinions involving transgender rights, campaign finance, executive power, and immigration. Those decisions were issued in the traditional way many of us recognize: pages and pages of arguments and citations, with each justice on the record voting yea or nay. But over the last decade, the court—led by Chief Justice John R...

When Bryan Stevenson moved to Montgomery, Alabama, in the 1980s, the city—one of America’s most prominent slave trading spaces before the Civil War—had dozens of Confederate monuments and memorials, but nothing commemorating slavery.  Today, thanks to Stevenson’s efforts, the city looks much different. Over the last decade, the executive director of the non-profit Equal Justice Initiative has tran...

More To The Story : Growing up in Los Angeles in the 1980s and ’90s, a daughter and granddaughter of social justice activists, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein fell in love with math and the physical sciences and developed a profound curiosity about the cosmos (though the smoggy night sky of her childhood blocked her view of the stars). She soon developed a detailed plan for her life that led to a career...

Elizabeth Freeman was an enslaved person living in Massachusetts when the Declaration of Independence was signed 250 years ago. The document’s famous words “all men are created equal” did not apply to her, but she thought they should.  “She is somebody who heard the words of the declaration, knew that they were real in her life, and argued for that to be true,” says Errin Haines, editor-at-large a...

The second Trump administration has made tearing down parts of the federal government a priority. And some of those efforts have been literal. In October, President Donald Trump ordered the demolition of the White House’s East Wing to make way for the construction of a massive 90,000-square-foot ballroom. He’s also overseen a now-problematic overhaul of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, given...

The World Cup is here.  For the first time, the tournament is happening in three countries at once: the United States, Mexico, and Canada. It’s bigger than ever, with more teams, more games, more viewers, and more money on the line. This special World Cup episode of Reveal looks beyond the spectacle of the beautiful game to the organization behind it: FIFA. The global soccer body stands to take in...

More To The Story: When Bryan Stevenson moved to Montgomery, Alabama, in the 1980s, the city—one of America’s most prominent slave trading spaces before the Civil War—had dozens of Confederate monuments and memorials, but nothing commemorating slavery. Today, thanks to Stevenson’s efforts, the city looks much different. Over the last decade, the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative h...

Decades before Covid-19, the AIDS epidemic tore through communities in the US and around the world. It has killed some 40 million people and continues to take lives today. But early on, research and public policy focused on AIDS as a gay men’s disease, overlooking other vulnerable groups—including communities of color and women.  This month marks 45 years since the Centers for Disease Control and...

More To The Story: Heather Cox Richardson is one of today’s unlikeliest social media stars. The Boston College historian has been teaching and writing about 19th-century America, Reconstruction, and the Civil War for decades. But it was only in 2019 that her work took off when she began writing her daily newsletter, Letters from an American , a no-nonsense analysis of the news through the lens of...

Every week, a group of men in their late 60s meets at the Corner Cafe in Elizabethtown, North Carolina. One important reason for these meetups is to discuss what’s going on in their community.  Local news has virtually dried up in their rural county, as well as neighboring counties, and some residents say they’re being left in the dark and don’t feel equipped to make informed decisions. “I’m not g...

More To The Story: It’s impossible to overstate rapper Tupac Shakur’s influence on music and culture in the 1990s. One of the era’s bestselling musical artists, Tupac helped define West Coast hip-hop through vulnerable, introspective lyrics and Black power politics. By his own admission, sports writer Jeff Pearlman is not the rapper’s likeliest biographer. But as he waited for what he called “the...

In 2015, hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war and repression were trying to reach safe havens in Europe. From his home in Norway, Tommy Olsen decided to travel to Greece, a major gateway for migrants and refugees. He joined hundreds of volunteers  helping the new arrivals and later created an NGO, the Aegean Boat Report, which monitors the plight of asylum seekers in Europe. Today, Olsen is...

More To The Story : The Voting Rights Act is widely considered one of the most effective laws in prohibiting racial discrimination in voting. One of its key provisions has long allowed states to take race into account when drawing voting maps to ensure that nonwhite voters have electoral power. But earlier this year, the Supreme Court narrowed that provision. In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan de...

The 911 system functions as a sort of promise: Call for help and someone will be there to respond quickly. But in many American cities, it’s a broken promise. Thanks in part to a widespread understaffing crisis across 911 dispatch centers, hundreds of thousands of callers are left waiting on hold during their most harrowing moments every year. Reporter Byard Duncan has spent more than a year repor...

More To The Story: When Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, went looking for government agencies to axe last year, one of its first targets was the US Agency for International Development. Established during the Cold War to counter Soviet influence, USAID spent billions of dollars on food aid, public health, and emergency relief for some of the world’s most vulnerable populat...

Virginia might be for lovers, but more recently, it’s for data centers. The state has more data centers than anywhere in the world, and companies are pushing to build more of them, including around some of the most hallowed ground in the country: the Manassas National Battlefield Park.  “The amount of surface land that is being displaced by data centers and everything that goes with that, I don’t...

More To The Story: Voters are heading to the polls for this year’s midterms, but the electoral maps are shifting under their feet in real time. Last month, the Supreme Court narrowed a provision in the Voting Rights Act that allowed states to consider race when redrawing maps. That decision set off a mad scramble by GOP state legislatures to alter their maps ahead of November’s elections, a move t...