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** THE WEEKLY REVEAL
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Saturday, December 27, 2025


** Traveling? Download These Reveal Episodes Now For Your Trip.
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** Michael Ciaglo/Getty
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Check out our homepage ([link removed])

If you’re anything like me, finding a good podcast for holiday travel is non-negotiable. Listening to an engaging story helps me pass the time on my annual train ride from New York City to my mother’s house; bonus points if the story is also informative.

Lucky for you: We’ve got you covered with hours of reporting that is both engaging and educational. As a small gift from us to you, we’ve curated them into a convenient list:

The Secret Story of FTX’s Rise and Ruin, Part 1 ([link removed]) and Part 2 ([link removed])

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.

Through the voices of customers, FTX’s new leadership, experts who studied the case up close, and Bankman-Fried himself, we tell the story of one of the most controversial bankruptcies in history.

A Midnight Phone Call. A Missing Movie. Decades of Questions. ([link removed])

Here at the Center for Investigative Reporting, we excel at finding things: government documents, contact information, the misdeeds people have tried to hide. It’s serious work that we use for serious tasks—but that gave us an idea. What would happen if we used these skills for things that are less about accountability and more about joy? If we turned our energy toward meaningful, personal questions?

That was the spark for our first-ever hour examining our favorite inconsequential investigations. We turned our tried-and-true journalistic strategies on our own biggest questions to see where the trail led.

The Gaza Flotilla Story You Didn’t Hear ([link removed])

Earlier this fall, hundreds of activists from all over the world crowded onto several dozen boats and set sail for Gaza. Their goal: Break through Israel’s blockade of the territory and end one of the worst humanitarian crises on the planet.

But before reaching Gaza, the flotilla was attacked by drones, and activists were arrested by the Israeli navy.

We go aboard the Global Sumud Flotilla for a firsthand look at what activists faced on their journey and whether their efforts made any difference.

Exposing a Global Surveillance Empire ([link removed])

An 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 explained 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, intended to use it to surveil environmental protesters.

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.

I Study Fascism. I’ve Already Fled America. ([link removed])

Jason Stanley isn’t afraid to use the F-word when talking about President Donald Trump. The author of How Fascism Works and Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future is clear: He believes the United States is currently under an authoritarian regime led by a fascist leader.

At a time when the Trump administration is putting increasing pressure on private and public universities to conform or lose funding, Stanley recently left his position at Yale University and moved his family to Canada, where he’s now the Bissell-Heyd chair in American studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto.

The move, he says, has allowed him to talk about the US in a way that wouldn’t have been possible if he remained in the country.

-Arianna Coghill
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🎧 Other places to listen: Spotify ([link removed]) , Overcast ([link removed]) , iHeartRadio ([link removed]) , or wherever you get your podcasts.


** The Bible Says So…or Does It?
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Illustration by Joshua Lott/The Washington Post/Getty

Dan McClellan has spent much of his life learning—and relearning—what the Bible and its authors were trying to tell us. But the years he spent in graduate school studying Hebrew texts, Near Eastern cultures, and the concept of deity taught him something else: The way scholars talk about the Bible is much different from how churchgoers—or most people on social media—talk about it.

So several years ago, McClellan began pushing back against what he saw as misguided biblical interpretations online and found an audience. 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. (He confesses to also being a comic book nerd.)

But one strand of thought that weaves through many of his videos is how Christian nationalists have recently used the Bible to gain political power.

“The hot new thing right now is to be a Christian nationalist,” says McClellan, who also wrote The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues. “And I think a lot of people are jumping at the opportunity to get on board this attempt to take over the government on the part of Christians. And unfortunately, it means hurting an awful lot of people along the way.”

For the holidays, let’s revisit this episode of More To The Story in which McClellan sits down with host Al Letson to talk about the ways people throughout history have used the Bible to serve their own interests and describes a time when his own perspective of the Bible was challenged.

Find this episode wherever you listen to Reveal, and don’t forget to subscribe:
Apple Podcasts ([link removed]) | Spotify ([link removed]) | iHeartRadio ([link removed]) | Overcast ([link removed])
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** In Case You Missed It
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** 🎧 Why Trump Deemed Basic Sanitation Illegal DEI ([link removed])
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Activist Catherine Coleman Flowers examines how the Trump administration’s environmental rollbacks could supercharge the movement to protect the planet.

Photo Credit: Lance Cheung/US Department of Agriculture

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** 🎧 Fancy Galleries, Fake Art ([link removed])
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It was the largest art fraud in modern US history, totaling more than $80 million. We look at how it happened and why almost no one was ever punished by the authorities.

Photo Credit: Illustration by Brian Britigan for Reveal
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** 🎧 Lessons From Trump’s “War” on Chicago ([link removed])
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The government is using face-scanning apps to check if random people on the street are citizens. And agents say you cannot refuse.

Photo Credit: United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement
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** 🎧 Trump’s Gilded White House Makeover Is All About Power ([link removed])
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Why is the president so focused on remaking Washington in his own image? According to art historian Erin Thompson, it’s all about symbolizing power.

Photo Credit: Aaron Schwartz/CNP/Zuma
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This issue of The Weekly Reveal was written by Arianna Coghill and edited by Nikki Frick. If you enjoyed this issue, forward it to a friend ([link removed]) . Have some thoughts? Drop us a line (mailto:[email protected]) with feedback or ideas!

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