Reveal

More To The Story: When President Donald Trump returned to office last year, he promised to largely steer America clear of foreign entanglements. But over the last year, his administration has captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, threatened to take over Greenland, openly talked about making Canada the 51st state, and most recently attacked Iran. In some ways, it might appear that Trump is trying to revive the American empire. Not so, says Daniel Immerwahr, a Northwestern University history professor and author of How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States. What Trump is really doing, he says, is undermining the international system itself. On this week’s More To The Story, Immerwahr sits down with host Al Letson to examine Trump’s attack on Iran, why Trump is ripping apart the post-World War II international order, and the long-term consequences of the president’s impulsive foreign policy.
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: Al Gore: Trump Administration Is the Most Corrupt in History (More To The Story)
Read: Trump’s New Nuclear Nightmare in Iran (Mother Jones)
Read: How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (Picador)

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The forest floor was nothing but patches of brown. No ferns, no brush, no flowers, and definitely no wildlife. Everything was dead except for rows of hand-planted baby trees.

This is what reporter Nate Halverson found while mushroom foraging in the California wilderness near Lassen Peak. He would learn the area had been sprayed with the controversial weed killer glyphosate, more commonly known by its brand name, Roundup.

This week on Reveal, Halverson’s yearlong investigation reveals that the US Forest Service and timber companies are spraying glyphosate in record amounts in California’s forests in an effort to regrow timberland that’s been decimated by years of megafires.

“The wedding of the chemical industry and the Forest Service has got to be seriously and deeply looked at,” Craig Thomas, a fire restoration expert, says about the spraying. The Forest Service is “addicted to herbicide use and glyphosate, and we need to get them into rehab.”
Read: We Are Bombarding America’s Forests With Roundup (Mother Jones)
Watch: The Secret Plan to Cover the World in Herbicide (Mother Jones)

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More To The Story: As NASA’s Artemis II journeyed into space earlier this month, one of the astronauts took a photo of Earth lit by the moon known as “Hello, World.” It’s the first published photograph of our planet taken by a human since 1972. The Artemis mission has reinvigorated mankind’s awe of our planet. But for Earth to remain a habitable place for humans to flourish, it requires us to take care of it.
On this special Earth Day episode of More To The Story, we’re featuring interviews with three influential environmental leaders: former Vice President and founder and chairman of the Climate Reality Project Al Gore; longtime activist Catherine Coleman Flowers; and journalist, author, and activist Bill McKibben. All three acknowledge the challenges of fighting climate change to protect our planet, especially at a time when the Trump administration is rolling back federal environmental protections. But they’re surprisingly hopeful about our capacity to protect the Earth for future generations.

Listen: The Great Arizona Water Grab (Reveal)
Read: Rooftop Solar Is a Miracle. Why Are We Killing It With Red Tape? (Mother Jones)
Read: Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization (W.W. Norton & Company)
Read: Holy Ground: On Activism, Environmental Justice, and Finding Hope (Spiegel & Grau)
Learn more: The Climate Reality Project

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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 companies. Rudolph went on to explain how his firm, First Wap, could provide sophisticated phone-tracking software capable of pinpointing any person in the world. The potential buyer? A private mining company, owned by an individual under sanction, who intended to use it to surveil environmental protesters. “I think we’re the only one who can deliver,” Rudolph said.
What Rudolph did not know: He was talking to an undercover journalist from Lighthouse Reports, an investigative newsroom based in the Netherlands.
The road to that conference room in Prague began with the discovery of a vast archive of data by reporter Gabriel Geiger. The archive contained more than a million tracking operations: efforts to grab real-time locations of thousands of people worldwide. What emerged is one of the most complete pictures to date of the modern surveillance industry. 
This week on Reveal, we join 13 other news outlets to expose the secrets of a global surveillance empire.
This is an update of an episode that originally aired in October 2025. 

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Earlier this year, Daniel Holz from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that its experts were moving the hands of the Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds before midnight. The hands have been moved only 27 times since the clock’s creation in 1947, and they’re now the closest they’ve pointed to imminent global destruction. On this week’s More To The Story, in an update of an episode that first aired in July 2025, Holz sits down with host Al Letson to talk about the history of the Doomsday Clock, why we’re closer to destruction than ever before, and what we can do to reverse course.
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: Weapons With Minds of Their Own (Reveal)
Learn more: NUKEMAP
Read: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Read: Why Iran’s Nuclear Program Is So Essential to Its Identity (The Guardian via Mother Jones)

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