Reveal

More 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 w...

Chris Mack has been locked up in Mississippi’s Rankin County Jail on and off since he was a teenager. In a lawsuit, he detailed a jailhouse assault that left him with broken ribs, a broken nose, and two black eyes. But it wasn’t just guards who attacked him. Mack said a group of inmates joined in—men in the jail’s Trusty Inmate Program, who had special privileges and wore blue jumpsuits.  “They we...

More To The Story: About 2,100 people are on death row in America. Some have been there for decades, in part because executions have been on the decline in the US. But that’s changing. So far this year, 41 people have been executed, up from 25 last year, and six more executions are scheduled. Early in his second term, President Donald Trump signed an executive order reinstating federal executions...

When Andrea Dettore-Murphy first moved to Rankin County, Mississippi, she didn’t believe the stories she heard about how brutal the sheriff’s department could be when pursuing suspected drug crimes.  But in 2018, she learned the hard way that the rumors were true when a group of sheriff’s deputies raided the home of her friend Rick Loveday and beat him relentlessly while she watched.   A few years...

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 privat...

In November 2005, a group of US Marines killed 24 civilians in Haditha, Iraq. The case against them became one of the most high-profile war crimes prosecutions in US history—but then it fell apart. Only one Marine went to trial for the killings, and all he received was a slap on the wrist. Even his own defense attorney found the outcome shocking.  “It's meaningless," said attorney Haytham Faraj. “...

More To The Story : America in these last 10 years has experienced generational political upheaval, clashes over race and identity, and a battle over the very direction of the country itself. Few writers have charted these wild swings better than staff writer for The New Yorker and Columbia Journalism School Dean Jelani Cobb. And for Cobb, it all started when he was asked to write about an inciden...

Here at the Center for Investigative Reporting, we excel at finding things: government documents, contact information, the misdeeds people have tried to hide. It’s serious work that we use for serious tasks—but that gave us an idea. What would happen if we used these skills for things that are less about accountability and more about joy? If we  turned our energy toward meaningful, personal questi...

More To The Story : On October 18, roughly 2,700 No Kings demonstrations took place around the US. Organizers estimated that 7 million protesters came out to denounce what they described as America’s slide toward authoritarianism under President Donald Trump. That’s right where More To The Story ’s Al Letson found himself this weekend. Al spoke with a handful of the thousands of protesters who att...

In June, a sharp-suited Austrian executive from a global surveillance company told a prospective client that he could “go to prison” for organizing the deal they were discussing. But the conversation did not end there. The executive, Guenther Rudolph, was seated at a booth at ISS World in Prague, a secretive trade fair for police and intelligence agencies and advanced surveillance technology compa...

More To The Story: Bill McKibben isn’t known for his rosy outlook on climate change. Back in 1989, the environmentalist wrote The End of Nature , which is considered the first mainstream book warning of global warming’s potential effects on the planet. His writing on climate change has been described as “dark realism.” But McKibben has recently let a little light shine through thanks to the dramat...

Mackenson Remy didn’t plan to bypass security when he drove into the parking lot of a factory in Greeley, Colorado. He’d never been there before. All he knew was this place had jobs—lots of jobs .  Remy is originally from Haiti, and in 2023, he’d been making TikTok videos about job openings in the area for his few followers, mostly other Haitians. What Remy didn’t know was that he had stumbled ont...

More To The Story : OpenAI became the world’s most valuable private company last week after a stock deal pushed the value of the artificial intelligence developer to $500 billion. 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 rise for years and rec...

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 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 insiders have crit...

More To The Story : The growth of crypto—decentralized digital currency that doesn’t rely on the backing of a bank or government—is one of the most transformative financial developments of the 21st century. And yet cryptocurrencies still baffle so many. How risky of an investment is it? Where do I buy it? And, wait, what is crypto again?  On this week’s More To The Story , host Al Letson sits down...

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 do...

More To The Story: When Brandon Scott took office in late 2020 as one of the youngest mayors in Baltimore’s history, he pledged to reduce the number of homicides and incidents of gun violence. That year, there were 335 reported homicides in the city of roughly 600,000 people, making it one of the most dangerous cities per capita in the US. Scott began implementing a violence prevention strategy de...

When Dr. Mimi Syed returned from her first volunteer trip to Gaza in the summer of 2024, she started flipping through her notes and came to a shocking conclusion: In one month, the ER physician had treated at least 18 children with gunshots to the head or chest. And that’s only the patients she had time to make a note of.  “They were children under the age of 12,” she says. “That’s something I saw...

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-choices

More To The Story: The shocking assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk last week was part of a wider, horrific trend: the rise of political violence in America. But Kirk’s murder also seemed to reveal something even darker. Before a suspect was found—when facts were scarce—the race for political retribution was already well underway. This week, Utah prosecutors charged 22-year-old Tyl...

At 18, Jack Morris was convicted of murdering a man in South Los Angeles and sent to prison for life. It was 1979, and America was entering the era of mass incarceration, with tough sentencing laws ballooning the criminal justice system. As California’s prison population surged, so did prison violence.   “You learn that in order to survive, you yourself then have to become predatorial,” Morris say...

More 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 , s...

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 Tr...

More To The Story : Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Trymaine Lee was in the middle of writing his first book when the unthinkable happened. At 38, a massive heart attack nearly took his life. That near-death experience altered his life and forced him to reckon with the years he’s spent chronicling gun violence involving Black men in America, as well as his own family history marred by slavery, l...

From layoffs to billion-dollar budget cuts and ideological battles over history itself, the National Park Service is facing one of the most turbulent moments in its 109-year history. Reporter Heath Druzin hikes deep into Yellowstone National Park’s backcountry with biologist Doug Smith, who helped reintroduce wolves to the park 30 years ago. The program transformed the ecosystem but could be at ri...