More To The Story: Tennessee Rep. Justin J. Pearson first caught national attention when he was expelled from the state’s House of Representatives after demonstrating in support of gun law reforms. Today, he’s the Democratic candidate for Tennessee’s 9th Congressional District. It’s an area newly transformed by redrawn voting maps and sprawling data centers, putting Pearson at the center of some of the country’s biggest national fights. On this week’s More To The Story, Pearson talks about how redistricting has upended Tennessee and the many ways gun violence has become a deeply personal issue for him. He also looks back at the opposition to his 2023 demonstration for gun law reform when he was dubbed part of “the Tennessee Three.”

Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Copy editor: Nikki Frick | Digital producer: Artis Curiskis | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson

Listen: How Redistricting Is Upending America’s Midterms (More To The Story)

Read: Republicans Don’t Need to Win Elections Anymore. They Just Need Their Judges. (Mother Jones)

Listen: Not All Votes Are Created Equal (Reveal)

In medical school, Aaron Baugh, like most doctors in training, was taught that Black people have smaller lungs than white people. His professors explained that it came down to evolution and body proportions.

A spirometer measures lung capacity and helps doctors diagnose and treat most lung diseases, including asthma, COPD, and cystic fibrosis. And for generations, it had a so-called race equation built into it. When a patient breathes into the machine, their lung capacity is compared to what is considered normal for their age, gender, and race. For Black patients, that normal range was 10 to 15 percent lower than for white patients. For years, doctors believed that a race “correction” made the test more accurate.

But after becoming a pulmonary and critical care physician, Baugh discovered that historical assumptions embedded in the spirometer were not only wrong, but were based on racist science that can be traced back to American slavery. And they were leading to misdiagnoses in thousands of Black patients, including military veterans. 

“This is not a small test,” Baugh says. “It is used in diagnosis of lung disease. It is used for job hiring. It is used for disability assignments. It is used for different medical treatments. So it can touch people in a lot of important ways if you’re doing this wrong.”

This week on Reveal, we team up with The Race Equation podcast series from the New England Journal of Medicine to examine a standard medical test with a brutal history that is harming Black patients and is still being used in hospitals across the country.

More To The Story: Ben McKenzie might seem like an unlikely choice to launch an investigation into the complicated world of cryptocurrency. But the television actor known for shows like The O.C. and Gotham did exactly that. His documentary film, Everyone Is Lying to You for Money, is a deep dive into the people and companies at the heart of crypto. The film focuses on McKenzie’s journey to discover why people continue to invest in digital currency even while knowing the risks of this highly under-regulated market. 

On this week’s More To The Story, McKenzie shares his concerns for what he calls the cult-like behavior of those investing in digital currency, talks about his interview with disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried just months before his arrest, and discusses the poignant conversations he had with everyday people who trusted the power of digital currency and lost everything—yet are still crypto believers.

Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Copy editor: Nikki Frick | Digital producer: Artis Curiskis | Intern: Joni Binder | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson

Read:Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud (Abrams Press)

Watch:Everyone Is Lying to You for Money (The Forge)

Listen:The Secret Story of FTX’s Rise and Ruin Part 1 (Reveal)

Listen: So You Don’t Understand Crypto. Buckle Up. (More To The Story)

The loss of land for Black Americans started with the government’s betrayal of its “40 acres” promise to formerly enslaved people—and it has continued over decades. 

Today, researchers are unearthing the details of Black land loss long after emancipation. 

“They lost land due to racial intimidation, where they were forced off their land [to] take flight in the middle of the night and resettle someplace else,” said Karcheik Sims-Alvarado, an assistant professor of Africana studies at Morehouse College. “They lost it through overtaxation. They lost it through eminent domain…There's all these different ways that African Americans acquired and lost land.”

This week on Reveal, we dive into the examination of American history happening at the state, city, even county level as local government task forces are on truth-finding missions. Across the country, government officials ask: Can we repair a wealth gap for Black Americans that is rooted in slavery? And how?

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

More To The Story: Sen. Adam Schiff is often on the receiving end of President Donald Trump’s rage online. It should be no surprise. Back in 2020, the California Democrat was the lead prosecutor during the first Trump impeachment trial as a member of the House of Representatives. Now a senator, Schiff has been laying out a different strategy for how Democrats might challenge the president if they reclaim Congress. Much of that strategy focuses on how the president has enriched himself in the White House—all at the expense, Schiff argues, of the American people. On this week’s More To The Story, Schiff describes what it’s like to be an ever-present target of Trump’s ire, how the Israeli government has pushed longtime supporters like himself to criticize it more openly, and lays out his proposals for rebuilding America’s institutional guardrails in a post-Trump era.

Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Copy editor: Nikki Frick | Digital producer: Artis Curiskis | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson

Listen: The Gaza Flotilla Story You Didn’t Hear (Reveal)

Read: 10 Ways to Enrich the Trumps and the MAGA Movement (Mother Jones)

Listen: Al Gore: Trump Administration Is the Most Corrupt in History (More To The Story)

Watch: Cost of Corruption: Ten Ways Trump Is Profiting off the Presidency While You Lose (YouTube/C-SPAN2)

Skidaway Island, Georgia, is home today to a luxurious community that the mostly white residents consider paradise: waterfront views, live oaks, and marsh grass alongside golf courses, swimming pools, and other amenities. 

In 1865, the island was a thriving Black community, started by freedmen who were given land by the government under the 40 acres program. They farmed, created a system of government, and turned former cotton plantations into a Black American success story.

But it wouldn’t last. Within two years, the government took that land back from the freedmen and returned it to the former enslavers. 

Today, 40 acres in The Landings development is worth at least $20 million. The history of that land is largely absent from day-to-day life. But over a two-and-a-half-year investigation, journalists at the Center for Public Integrity unearthed records that prove that dozens of freed people had, and lost, titles to tracts at what’s now The Landings. 

“You could feel chills to know that they had it and then they just pulled the rug from under them, so to speak,” said Linda Brown, one of the few Black residents at The Landings.

This week on Reveal, with the Center for Public Integrity, we also show a descendant her ancestor’s title for a plot of land that is now becoming another exclusive gated community. And we look at how buried documents like these Reconstruction-era land titles are part of the long game toward reparations.  

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

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 hearing over the Covid-19 pandemic. Public health stories are everywhere right now. So that’s why we invited epidemiologist and science communicator Jessica Malaty Rivera back onto the show. Malaty Rivera fills a vital role through her work translating medical breakthroughs and sorting through conflicting health advice. It’s a role she says the public needs now more than ever. On this week’s More To The Story, Malaty Rivera talks through the ongoing efforts to link vaccines and autism at the highest levels of the Trump administration, which produce we should (and shouldn’t) be eating right now, and the many ways the federal government’s response to public health crises today are driven by politics rather than science.

Producers: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Intern: Joni Binder | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Copy editor: Nikki Frick | Digital producer: Artis Curiskis | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson

Read: Covid Truthers Are Claiming Fauci’s Diary Was ‘Scrubbed’ (Mother Jones)

Listen: The Covid Tracking Project (Reveal)

Listen: How RFK Jr. Is Dismantling America’s Health Policies (More To The Story)

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 sacred land here,” Bailey says, “’cause it's my ancestors and I feel it.” 

Union General William T. Sherman’s Special Field Orders, No. 15—better known as 40 acres and a mule—implied a better life in the waning days of the Civil War. Hutchinson is among the formerly enslaved people who received land through the field orders, which are often thought of as a promise that was never kept. But 40 acres and a mule was more than that. 

It was real.

Over a more than two-year investigation, our partners at the Center for Public Integrity unearthed thousands of records once buried in the National Archives. In them, they found more than 1,200 formerly enslaved people who were given land by the federal government through the field orders—and then saw that land taken away. 

None of the land Bailey lives on today is part of Hutchinson’s 40 acres. Instead, her family’s wealth is built on her ancestor’s determination to get and keep land of his own, after losing what he thought he had gained through the field orders.

This week on Reveal, with the Center for Public Integrity, we’re revisiting our three-part series in which we tell the history of an often-misunderstood government program. We explore a reparation that wasn’t—and the wealth gap that remains.

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

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, host Al Letson talks with Slobodian about how the world’s richest person has reimagined the relationship between business and government, his unique brand of futurism, and how Musk’s early life in apartheid South Africa ultimately shaped his worldview.

Producers: Joni Binder and Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Copy editor: Nikki Frick | Digital producer: Artis Curiskis  | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson

Read: Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed (Harper)

Read: Elon Musk’s Reward for Calling for a Race War? Becoming a Trillionaire. (Mother Jones)

Listen: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping Our Country (More To The Story)

Learn more: Quinn Slobodian's website

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.”
 

Foster is the founder of the Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project, a clinic whose work is one major player in why abortions are up. Massachusetts and almost half the states in the US have passed shield laws that legally protect abortion providers. The one Foster operates under allows her to prescribe abortion pills to patients in states with abortion bans. 

And while the battleground may be shifting as medication abortions grow more common, the war is far from over. 

This week on Reveal, we explore post-Roe America through the eyes of three women with three very different missions: Foster, who offers medication abortions nationwide; a courier who risks arrest to stockpile abortion pills for an uncertain future; and a conservative activist whose life’s work is trying to stop them both.