Reveal

More To The Story: Lettuce contaminated with cyclospora. Cruise ship passengers contracting a deadly form of hantavirus. Legionnaires’ disease (yet again) in big cities. RFK Jr. refusing any responsibility for measles outbreaks. That’s just a brief list of public health stories in America this summer. And we haven’t even mentioned Dr. Anthony Fauci being held in contempt of Congress during a hostile Congressional ...

Patricia Bailey’s four-bedroom home sits high among the trees in lush Edisto Island, South Carolina. It’s a peaceful place where her body healed from multiple sclerosis. It’s also the source of her generational wealth.

Bailey built this house on land that was passed down by her great-great-grandfather, Jim Hutchinson, who was enslaved on Edisto before he was freed and became a landowner. 

“I know this is ...

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 The Story, ho...

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.”
 

Fost...

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, prouder, and more public than they&...

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 remember after he had started ba...

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 History’s newes...

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 insiders have criticized t...

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 rise for years...

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 doin...

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 Roberts—has increasingly ...

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 transformed...

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 writing and teaching about phy...

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 at...

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 White House a gilde...

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 billions from the tournam...

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 has transfor...

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 Prevention publishe...

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 US history. The newsletter bec...