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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 and Part 2
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.
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
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
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.
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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