Reveal

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What Police Weren’t Told About Tasers Aug 16, 2025

Show notes

Kansas City police Officer Matt Masters first used a Taser in the early 2000s. He said it worked well for taking people down; it was safe and effective.

“At the end of the day, if you have to put your hands on somebody, you got to scuffle with somebody, why risk that?” he said. “You can just shoot them with a Taser.”

Masters believed in that until his son Bryce was pulled over by an officer and shocked for more than 20 seconds. The 17-year-old went into cardiac arrest, which doctors later attributed to the Taser. Masters’ training had led him to believe something like that could never happen.

This week on Reveal, we partner with Lava for Good’s podcast Absolute: Taser Incorporated and its host, Nick Berardini, to learn what the company that makes the Taser knew about the dangers of its weapon and didn’t say.

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Trump’s Homelessness Crackdown Has Been Tried Before. It Didn’t Work. Aug 13, 2025

Show notes

Earlier this week, President Donald Trump announced that his administration is removing homeless encampments from around Washington, DC. The announcement illustrated how the federal government’s approach to homelessness is dramatically changing. It follows an executive order issued last month that makes it easier for cities and states to involuntarily commit unhoused people and eliminate encampments. It also prioritizes treatment over housing for people struggling with mental health issues or substance abuse. The policies represent a 180-degree turn away from an approach the federal government has used for years called Housing First, an evidence-based program that prioritizes the opposite: housing before treatment. It was first developed by clinical psychologist Sam Tsemberis almost 30 years ago. On this week’s More To The Story, Tsemberis sits down with host Al Letson to examine the potential effects of Trump’s executive order.
Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson

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Listen: The Churn (Reveal)

Read: Trump’s Plan to Eliminate Homelessness Is Just Cruel. Here’s Another Option. (Mother Jones)

Learn more: Pathways Housing First Institute

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She Ate a Poppy Seed Salad. Child Services Took Her Baby. Aug 09, 2025

Show notes

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.

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in September 2024.

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Gazans Are Starving. It’s a Manmade Catastrophe. Aug 06, 2025

Show notes

In the last few months, widespread starvation has gripped the Gaza Strip. United Nations-backed food security experts say the “worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out” in Gaza, home to an estimated 2 million Palestinians. One of the few organizations still on the ground trying to feed Palestinians at risk of famine is the Gaza Soup Kitchen. This week’s guest on More To The Story with Al Letson is Abe Ajrami, a Palestinian who now lives in the US and helps coordinate the organization’s food aid. Ajrami talks about the kitchen’s extraordinary efforts to help prevent famine in Gaza, the debate over whether the Israeli government is committing genocide against Palestinians, and whether a two-state solution is still achievable.

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Read: “It’s Abhorrent”: A Whistleblower Contractor Speaks Out as Gaza’s Famine Spreads (Mother Jones)

Listen: Kids Under Fire in Gaza (Reveal)

Learn more: Gaza Soup Kitchen

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They Followed Doctors’ Orders. The State Took Their Babies. Aug 02, 2025

Show notes

Jade Dass was taking medication to treat her addiction to opioids before she became pregnant. Scientific studies and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say this leads to the best outcomes for both mothers and babies. But after Dass delivered a healthy daughter, the hospital reported her to the Arizona Department of Child Safety, which conducted an investigation and separated her from her newborn.

“I just couldn’t believe it, that people would act like this,” Dass says. “Like how they couldn’t see—it's, like, you have no humanity if you’re gonna take someone’s baby.”

To understand the scale of this issue, reporter Shoshana Walter, data reporter Melissa Lewis, and a team of Reveal researchers and lawyers filed 100 public records requests, putting together the first-ever tally of how often women are reported to child welfare agencies for taking prescription drugs during pregnancy.

This week on Reveal, we follow Dass as she grapples with losing custody of her baby—and makes one last desperate attempt to keep her family together.

Walter has turned some of her reporting for Reveal into a book about the addiction treatment industry, Rehab: An American Scandal, which comes out this month.

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in July 2023.

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The Bible Says So…or Does It? Jul 30, 2025

Show notes

Dan McClellan has spent much of his life learning—and relearning—what the Bible and its authors were trying to tell us. But his years in graduate school also taught him that the way scholars talk about the Bible is much different from how churchgoers discuss it. Several years ago, McClellan began pushing back against what he saw as misguided biblical interpretations online and soon gained a following. Today, he has almost 1 million followers on TikTok who look for his thoughts on topics like the “sin of empathy,” what the Bible says about slavery, or maybe just to see what graphic T-shirt he has decided to wear that day.

On this week’s More To The Story, McClellan sits down with host Al Letson to talk about the ways people throughout history have used the Bible to serve their own interests, pushing back against conservative commentator Charlie Kirk’s biblical interpretations, and a time when his own perspective of the Bible was challenged.

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Listen: In God We Vote (Reveal)

Read: Christian “TheoBros” Are Building a Tech Utopia in Appalachia (Mother Jones)

Listen: A Christian Nationalist Has Second Thoughts (More To The Story)

Read: The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues (St. Martin’s Essentials)

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Trump’s New World (Dis)order Jul 26, 2025

Show notes

During his campaign for the presidency, Donald Trump talked a lot about pulling America out of international treaties and disentangling from military operations abroad.

Once in office, he started talking about the idea of Manifest Destiny…that the expansion of the US was both justified and inevitable. In some cases that’s meant turning the tables on America’s friends and allies.

For this week’s show, Reveal reporter Nate Halverson and Panamanian journalist Andrea Salcedo investigate how the Trump administration’s threats to reclaim the Panama Canal are fueling protests and destabilizing a longtime ally. Trump has said military force may be necessary to retake control of the canal from China.

“China is operating the Panama Canal, and we didn't give it to China, we gave it to Panama, and we're taking it back,” Trump said in January.

But the administration’s allegations about China’s control over the canal perplex many Panamanians.

“We just said wow, how many people can be wrong about the Chinese having a lot of influence over the Panama Canal?” says Jorge Luis Quijano, the canal’s top administrator from 2012 to 2019.

The Trump administration’s threats against Panama are also reviving painful memories of the 1989 US invasion that claimed the lives of an estimated 500 Panamanians.

For wider context, host Al Letson speaks with Mother Jones reporter David Corn, who wrote about the Panama Canal in his book American Psychosis. Corn talks about how reclaiming the canal has been used as a political cudgel by conservatives in the US, from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump. Letson also speaks with Emma Ashford, a foreign policy expert at the Stimson Center, about how Panama fits into the Trump administration’s other moves on the international front.

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Ibram X. Kendi vs. America’s “Antiracism Backlash” Jul 23, 2025

Show notes

Just a few years ago, historian and activist Dr. Ibram X. Kendi seemed to be everywhere. At the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, Kendi became one of the leading voices on racism in America—and particularly what he described as antiracism. But over the last few years, as a backlash grew against the BLM movement, Kendi also came under attack. His ideas urging people to be actively antiracist were often the target of conservative critics fighting against DEI policies and the teaching of critical race theory. Kendi was also accused of mismanaging an antiracism center at Boston University, which laid off much of its staff before closing last month (BU cleared Kendi of financial mismanagement.) On this week’s More To The Story, Kendi responds to the criticism he faced at BU, argues that the Trump administration’s policies are harming both white and Black Americans, and discusses Malcolm Lives!, his new book for young readers about Malcolm X.
Producer: Josh Sanburn with help from Zulema Cobb and Julia Haney | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Deputy Executive Producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson

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Listen: Black in the Sunshine State (Reveal)

Read: I’m Racist. You’re Racist. We’re All Racist. Here’s How to Fix It. (Mother Jones)

Read: Ibram X. Kendi Introduces Malcolm X to a New Generation (The New York Times)

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The Landlord Gutting America’s Hospitals Jul 19, 2025

Show notes

In April 2024, medical staff testified before Louisiana’s House Health and Welfare Committee about just how bad things had gotten at the Glenwood Regional Medical Center.

The West Monroe hospital had been under fire from the state Health Department over lapses in patient care that seemed to be escalating. The hospital had stopped paying bills for oxygen supplies, the blood bank, and repairs to the elevators that take patients up to surgery.

Former Glenwood nurse Debra Russell testified that there wasn’t a cardiologist available when a man suffered a heart attack or a $5 piece of equipment she needed for a routine procedure.

“You would send a nurse to go get it,” Russell said. “And she would come back and say, ‘Oh, Miss Debra, I don’t have any.’ I said, ‘Go to another unit.’...‘We don’t have one.’”

Glenwood was run by Steward Health Care, at the time one of the country’s largest for-profit health care operators. But its building was owned by Medical Properties Trust—a real estate company based in Birmingham, Alabama, that charged Glenwood monthly rent.

State Rep. Michael Echols, a Republican whose district includes Glenwood, had been flooded with concerns from community members. Echols had begun to wonder whether the high rent to MPT was fueling Glenwood’s financial crisis. He struggled to get real answers.

Glenwood is just one of nearly 400 health care facilities owned by MPT and rented out to hospital chains. Nine companies that leased hospitals from MPT have gone bankrupt—including Steward, Glenwood’s former operator. And while dozens of hospitals have been sold, entangled in bankruptcy proceedings, or become depleted shells, MPT’s top brass has earned millions.

This week on Reveal, Mother Jones reporter Hannah Levintova and Reveal producer Ashley Cleek dig into MPT—its history, its business model, and how treating hospitals like financial assets leaves them gutted.

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The Real Conspiracy Behind the Texas Floods Jul 16, 2025

Show notes

David Sirota is a journalist, former speechwriter to Bernie Sanders, and co-writer of the Oscar-nominated movie Don’t Look Up, about the threat of climate change. On this week’s More To The Story, Sirota joins host Al Letson to discuss how climate change is fueling more intense weather events like the recent floods in Texas, how the country’s leaders are failing to address climate disasters while avoiding accountability, why Trump’s domestic policy bill is “class war in legislative form,” and why some Democrats still don’t know how to react to socialist Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral primary win in New York City.

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Listen: Master Plan (The Lever)
Listen: 2024 Broke The Democrats. Can They Put Themselves Back Together? (Reveal)
Read: How Zohran Mamdani Tied Climate Policy to Voters’ Pocketbook Issues (Mother Jones)

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