Reveal

More To The Story: The Voting Rights Act is widely considered one of the most effective laws in prohibiting racial discrimination in voting. One of its key provisions has long allowed states to take race into account when drawing voting maps to ensure that nonwhite voters have electoral power. But earlier this year, the Supreme Court narrowed that provision. In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan described the court’s decision as the “now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.” “The notion that everyone deserves equal access to the ballot, that everyone deserves equal access to elections, that one person ought to mean one vote, and that there ought to be some measure of political equality has never really sat well with the political right in this country,” says Jamelle Bouie, a political columnist for the New York Times. On this week’s More To The Story, Bouie and host Al Letson talk about how the Voting Rights Act has been defanged by the Supreme Court, why the Democratic Party is made up of “a bunch of weenies,” and why he believes the country is experiencing a constitutional emergency.
This is an update of an episode that originally aired in August 2025.
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 Trump Exploits Working-Class Pain (More To The Story)
Read: Republican Gerrymandering Schemes Target Minority Voters and Their Representatives (Mother Jones)
Listen: Not All Votes Are Created Equal (Reveal)
Read: The Nation’s Landmark Voting Rights Law Just Turned 60. It May Not Survive Trump. (Mother Jones)
Watch: Blame John Roberts for Destroying the Voting Rights Act (Mother Jones)

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The 911 system functions as a sort of promise: Call for help and someone will be there to respond quickly. But in many American cities, it’s a broken promise.
Thanks in part to a widespread understaffing crisis across 911 dispatch centers, hundreds of thousands of callers are left waiting on hold during their most harrowing moments every year.
Reporter Byard Duncan has spent more than a year reporting on America’s flailing 911 system and what it might take to fix it. This week on Reveal, in partnership with Type Investigations, he traces the issue from California to Wisconsin and a final stop on Capitol Hill.

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More To The Story: When Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, went looking for government agencies to axe last year, one of its first targets was the US Agency for International Development. Established during the Cold War to counter Soviet influence, USAID spent billions of dollars on food aid, public health, and emergency relief for some of the world’s most vulnerable populations. In return, the US hoped to gain allies and goodwill. Call it a decades-long exercise in soft power. But since President Donald Trump returned to office, soft power is out. And so is USAID, which has been slashed and reorganized. The Trump administration is trying to close the agency altogether by September. This has led to some horrific consequences for the people who relied on USAID to survive. On this week’s More To The Story, ProPublica’s Anna Maria Barry-Jester and Brett Murphy join host Al Letson to talk about their on-the-ground reporting from Africa and how the Trump administration’s aid cuts are leading to devastating, even deadly, consequences.

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

Read: Russell Vought Raided USAID Budgets He Helped Gut to Pay for His Own Security (Mother Jones)
Listen: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping Our Country (More To The Story)
Read: Trump Officials Celebrated With Cake After Slashing Aid. Then People Died of Cholera. (ProPublica)
Listen: Paper Trail (ProPublica)

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Virginia might be for lovers, but more recently, it’s for data centers. The state has more data centers than anywhere in the world, and companies are pushing to build more of them, including around some of the most hallowed ground in the country: the Manassas National Battlefield Park. 
“The amount of surface land that is being displaced by data centers and everything that goes with that, I don’t think people understand what’s really happening,” says Elena Schlossberg, a leading activist against data center development in Northern Virginia. “There’s NIMBY and there’s NOTE, and NOTE is ‘not over there, either.’”
This week on Reveal, we look into our AI future and the local machinations that are pitting neighbor against neighbor. And we listen in as our “tech lords” talk about the future they are planning for us, whether we want it or not. 

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More To The Story: Voters are heading to the polls for this year’s midterms, but the electoral maps are shifting under their feet in real time. Last month, the Supreme Court narrowed a provision in the Voting Rights Act that allowed states to consider race when redrawing maps. That decision set off a mad scramble by GOP state legislatures to alter their maps ahead of November’s elections, a move that could disenfranchise Black voters. Meanwhile, Democrats were dealt a major blow last week when their own redistricting efforts in Virginia were struck down by the state Supreme Court. On this week’s More To The Story, Mother Jones national correspondent Tim Murphy and host Al Letson try to make sense of this unprecedented midterm season, gauge the Democrats’ chances of taking back Congress, and examine how President Donald Trump’s threats to the electoral system could play out in November.

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: Stop the Steal Never Stopped (Reveal)
Read: The Future in Texas Is Bright and Terrifying (Mother Jones)
Read: Can James Talarico Convince Democrats He’s the Fighter They Need? (Mother Jones)

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