“There are lots of people who say, ‘Nimby, nimby, nimby,’ and the people who say, ‘Nimby, nimby, nimby,’ they don’t live right next door to it.”

That’s what one retiree told Reveal’s Jonathan Jones when he traveled to upstate New York to find out why so many people in the rural town of Copake are fighting to stop a massive solar energy project from being built.

Jonathan’s story, a version of which first aired in January, sheds light on one of the key reasons why it’s so difficult to build the green energy infrastructure we need to transition away from fossil fuels—even in a deep-blue state. “We are not climate deniers, nor are we NIMBYists,” another resident told Jonathan. “We believe in the need for renewable energy, and we just want to have a say in how it’s done so that it’s reasonable and is consonant with the kind of community that we have and what we want.”

The result: The solar project—which is supposed to supply enough renewable power for 15,000 households—has been stalled for years.

The situation in Copake is far from unique. Once you’ve listened to the Reveal podcast, I also recommend reading Henry Carnell’s recent Mother Jones story about the decade-long legal morass that has delayed the completion of a transmission line that’s supposed to deliver power from 161 midwestern wind and solar projects.

As any schoolkid might tell you, US elections are based on a bedrock principle: one person, one vote. Simple as that. Each vote carries the same weight. Yet for much of the country’s history, that hasn’t been the case. At various points, whole classes of people were shut out of voting: enslaved Black Americans, Native Americans, and poor white people. The first time women had the right to vote was in 1919. This week’s episode of Reveal is about a current version of this very old problem.

For this show, host Al Letson does a deep dive with Mother Jones national voting rights correspondent Ari Berman about his new book, Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It.

They first discuss America’s early years and examine how the political institutions created by the Founding Fathers were meant to constrain democracy. This system is still alive in the modern era, Berman says, through institutions like the Electoral College and the US Senate, which were designed as checks against the power of the majority. What’s more, Berman argues that the Supreme Court is a product of these two skewed institutions. Then there are newer tactics—like voter suppression and gerrymandering—that are layered on top of this anti-democratic foundation to entrench the power of a conservative white minority.

Next, they trace the rise of conservative firebrand Pat Buchanan and how he opened the door for Donald Trump. Buchanan made white Republicans fear becoming a racial minority. And he opposed the Voting Rights Act, which struck down obstacles to voting like poll taxes and literacy tests that had been used to keep people of color from the polls. Buchanan never came close to winning the presidency, but he transformed white anxiety into an organizing principle that has become a centerpiece of much of today’s Republican Party.

Finally, the show follows successful efforts by citizen activists in Michigan to end political gerrymandering and reinforce the democratic principle of one person, one vote. Berman argues that this state-based organizing should be a national model for democratic reform.

I’ve been thinking about Chin Rodger’s words a lot lately. Chin is the subject of Mark Follman’s wrenching Mother Jones cover story about the massacre that her son, Elliot, perpetrated in the California college town of Isla Vista in 2014. Chin opened up to Mark about the depths of her grief and sorrow after the mass shooting and the almost unimaginable strength she’s shown in the aftermath. As Mark writes, Chin made the “grueling choice” to reconstruct her son’s path to horrific violence and suicide, so that she can help threat assessment experts understand what went wrong and how to avert future tragedies.

I had the privilege of editing Mark’s magazine story, so I’ve read Chin’s words over and over these past few months. They are haunting and deeply moving every time. But actually hearing Chin say them is something else entirely. The pain, the resilience, the determination to make a real difference for other children and parents—it all comes through so powerfully in a new audio investigation from our colleagues at ReveaI.

Please give it a listen. You can hear Chin speaking out publicly for the first time about the shooting and about her determination to help prevent future violence. You can hear about the trove of new evidence Mark found, shedding light on what drove Elliot to do what he did. And you can hear Mark’s interviews with the threat assessment practitioners who are using Chin’s insights in their efforts to reach troubled people before they harm themselves or others.

“The nightmare that I’m living, that the victims and the families are living, these nightmares are real, and these nightmares could be your reality any day,” Chin warns. “So we must work harder in coming together and try and prevent these horrific acts from happening again and again.”

If you or someone you care about may be at risk of harming yourself or others, call or text 988, or go to 988lifeline.org.

So when reporters at the Salvadoran news outlet noticed their cellphones acting strange all of a sudden—batteries draining, unexplained overheating—they had a weird feeling that someone was accessing their messages. They sent one reporter’s phone to Citizen Lab, a watchdog group, and the analysis found something shocking: It was infected with Pegasus, a military-grade surveillance software that can copy messages, harvest photos and even control the phone’s camera and microphone.

“Okay, I’m the target right now,” reporter Julia Gavarrete recalled. “But the thing was, it’s obvious that it’s not only me.”

The watchdog checked more journalists’ phones, and it quickly became clear that El Faro was under a massive surveillance campaign. But who was behind it?

In this episode, Reveal partners with the Shoot the Messenger podcast to investigate one of the biggest Pegasus hacks ever uncovered.

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in September 2023.

It took days for Old Bull to learn that the officer who chased her son worked for a new tribal police force patrolling the southeast Montana reservation: the Crow Nation Tribal Police Department. She went to its headquarters in a former Subway sandwich shop looking for answers. It was abandoned. The windows had been covered up.

The police department had just vanished, without any explanation. This week’s episode of Reveal, in partnership with Mother Jones reporter Samantha Michaels, focuses on the years-long search to find answers. 

After you listen to the episode, also check out filmmaker Mark Helenowski’s stunning film on the search for accountability, and how the US federal government has routinely failed tribes.

You can listen to more episodes of Reveal at PRX. 

Also in this episode, reporters speak with Dutch researcher Dr. Tessa Roseboom, who has been studying how famine affects the development of babies in the womb, and Dr. Ghassan Jawad, an OB-GYN who had worked at Al-Shifa hospital before it was left in ruins by an Israeli military attack. 

According to the groundbreaking work of Dutch researcher Dr. Tessa Roseboom, the impacts of near starvation are also likely being experienced by generations not yet born. Roseboom, a biologist and professor of early development and health at the Amsterdam UMC/University of Amsterdam, has been studying the long-term consequences of prenatal malnutrition for almost 30 years.

Much of her work focuses on people like her parents, who were born around the time of the Dutch “Hunger Winter” at the end of World War II. In dozens of studies, Roseboom and her colleagues have provided some of the first direct evidence in humans of the intergenerational impact of in-utero exposure to stresses such as famine. Their work suggests that malnutrition during pregnancy can have lasting consequences not only for the future health of the child but for subsequent generations. “It’s one of the things that makes me very passionate to talk about how the decisions we make today will have an effect for many, many decades,” Roseboom says. “I really feel the generations before me urging me to speak out.”

Audio journalists Neroli Price, Salman Ahad Khan, and Gabrielle Berbey talked with Roseboom as part of their investigation into how Israel’s blocking of aid trucks carrying food and medical supplies is leading to a maternal and infant health disaster. Excerpts of their conversation can be heard on the latest Reveal radio episode, “In Gaza, Every Pregnancy is Complicated,” (available for listening on nearly 600 NPR stations or for download).  Given the timeliness and urgency of the subject, we are presenting a longer digital version here. 

Let’s start with the Hunger Winter. What was the confluence of events that made the winter of 1944-1945 so devastating for people in the Netherlands?

The Hunger Winter was a period of famine that occurred at the end of the Second World War, in the part of the Netherlands that had not been liberated by the Allied forces. [After the D-Day invasion in June 1944], the Allies liberated France and Belgium and retook the southern part of the Netherlands. The Dutch government-in-exile called for a railway strike to support the Allies, but the operation failed before they could retake the north and west of the country, which included the capital, Amsterdam. The German occupying forces retaliated for the railway strike by banning all food transports from rural parts of the country to urban areas. Suddenly, rations that had been around 2,000 calories a day during the entire war dropped to around 400 to 600 calories a day. Two slices of bread, two potatoes, and half a sugar beet was the typical ration for adults during that period.

The blockade coincided with a very early and extreme winter, which froze all the waterways in the Netherlands—and canals are an important way of transporting food. So it was really a combination of this harsh winter and the blockade that suddenly led to a very acute period of famine, which lasted until the Netherlands was liberated and the war ended, in May 1945.

How did that extreme level of famine affect mortality?

During the first six months of 1944, when there was sufficient food, mortality rates were half what they were in the first six months of 1945, during the famine period. It is estimated that a total of 25,000 people died during the Dutch Hunger Winter.

What do you know about what happened to your family during this period?

My father was born in the first weeks of the famine and my mother was born in the month after liberation, so they don’t remember anything of course. But my grandmothers remember what it was like to be pregnant during a war and during a period in which there was very little food available.

Luckily both my parents were born in the rural part of the country, where the famine was much less extreme. My father’s mother told me how she delivered my father at home when there was no light and bombings were going on. She told me how families from Amsterdam came fleeing to the part of the country where she lived, looking for food. Even though my father was only 10 weeks old, he was already heavier than the 10-month-old boy from Amsterdam.

When you began to study the broader effects of this famine, what did other people tell you?

Even though I spoke to them decades later, they still remember it as such a traumatic period. I remember one woman who was so undernourished after the birth of her first baby, she couldn’t breastfeed. She told me that her baby looked like a skinned rabbit– that’s how skinny he had become after a few days. So she went to church to try and find someone willing to take him because she realized, “He’s going to die if I keep him with me.” Luckily, someone helped her get milk and food, so she could feed herself and her baby. But she felt so guilty all her life that she had considered giving him away. It took her almost 50 years before she told her son this story.

You’ve authored or coauthored numerous papers about how the Hunger Winter affected the long-term health of people conceived or born during that period. What are some of the impacts you’ve found?

In almost three decades of studying men and women who were being shaped inside their mother’s womb during the Dutch famine, we know that the lack of nutrients left lasting marks on on the organs and tissues that were forming at the time.

The babies who were conceived during the famine and whose mothers were undernourished while their brains were being built—those brains were smaller. When those people were adults, their brains were wired in a different way. They were more susceptible to stress and addiction, their cognitive function was affected. They were less likely to participate in the labor market.

We found that babies who were conceived during the famine had a higher risk of depression in particular. They also had a higher risk of schizophrenia and antisocial personality disorders.

Their metabolism was altered as well. It makes a lot of sense that if you are taking in very few nutrients in utero, your body will develop a very, very efficient way of metabolizing the calories you do get. But then, because of your efficient metabolism, when food becomes more plentiful later in life, you have a higher risk of becoming obese. Our research found more obesity and Type 2 diabetes, higher cholesterol levels, and people developing cardiovascular disease at a younger age.

Were these effects immediately apparent when the Hunger Winter babies were born?

No. It’s fascinating, but based on the size of babies who were born just after the Dutch famine ended, one wouldn’t have thought that they were that much impacted. At birth, babies were not particularly small, particularly thin, or particularly any different from most babies. So for a long time, we thought maybe they’re not going to be affected by famine. They’re safe inside their mother’s womb. We shouldn’t be too worried.

But based on our research now, we know that the structure and function of their organs are different. And it’s only as we age that problems with our organs tend to arise as damage accumulates across the life course.

Separate from the effects of famine, did you find any impacts of maternal stress on babies during that period?

In general, [the fetus is] protected from the stress hormones that the mother has in her own bloodstream. But when women are undernourished, the enzyme in the placenta that protects the fetus from getting exposed to this stress hormone is not functioning properly anymore. So with high stress levels and low nutrition, the baby will get exposed to the stress levels that the mother is experiencing.

Your research didn’t stop with people born around the time of the Hunger Winter. You also studied their children. What did you find?

We saw that both through the mother and the father, these effects can be transmitted to future generations.

As a biologist, I often talk about the fact that each and every one of us, every human being, started as a single fertilized egg. But the egg that made you and me didn’t arise just before it was fertilized. It was actually formed when our mothers were in our grandmothers’ wombs. So the egg that made me was formed during the Hunger Winter.

Human beings are very sensitive to their environment, particularly in early life during development. And we know that the environment, whether it is nutrition or whether it’s a traumatic experience, has an impact on the expression of the genetic code—what we call epigenetic effects. The environment has a big impact on the extent to which your genetic potential is being expressed. The Dutch Famine Study, as well as other studies looking at other crises and catastrophic events—9/11, climate disasters such as flooding and fires—they’ve all consistently shown that there are epigenetic effects. Not so much of the DNA structure is changed, but the extent to which our genes are expressed is altered by the environment in which we grow and develop, and even these effects are transmitted from one generation to the next.

The blockade of food transports by the German occupying forces seems like a parallel to what’s happening in Gaza right now.

I think there is a strong parallel with what’s going on in Gaza. And because of the research I’ve done, I’m not worried only about the people currently experiencing the situation there. I’m very worried about the long-term consequences this will have for the generation that isn’t even born yet.

We’ve spoken with ob-gyns from Gaza who ran out of basic medical supplies to take care of women and babies back in October. How might that kind of collapse in the medical infrastructure affect fetal development?

I can only guess what the impact might be. Based on the studies that we’ve been doing on the Dutch famine, I have no proper comparison of the medical system collapsing because, quite surprisingly, during the war and the famine, the medical system continued to operate. Doctors and nurses continued to provide care and record details of the pregnancies that we’ve been able to see because these records were kept.

But based on other studies of disruptive situations, like flooding, that didn’t allow pregnant women to go to their doctors or midwives, we know that increases stress levels and has a negative impact on the development of the [fetus]. You can actually still see [this] in the way that their genes are expressed, in the way that these children develop, and in their risks of chronic diseases later in life.

I’m imagining a mother who is living through what has been happening in Gaza, who may be wondering if there was any way to protect her infant from those negative long-term effects.

It’s a very difficult question because during your time in the womb, your organs are formed and you cannot do that again. You cannot rebuild your brain. But the scientific evidence is quite clear that in terms of stress, the effects can be greatly reduced if people get social support. Even if you cannot get out of that stressful situation, getting social support can be very important in helping reduce the negative impact.

Another thing that people could do if they have been unnourished or have a child who is unnourished during pregnancy is to make sure they eat healthy diets and exercise as they grow up, which will help reduce the risk of developing cardiovascular disease or Type 2 diabetes.

If you could grab all the world’s leaders, and get on your soapbox, what is the one message you would tell them about mothers and babies and war and famine?

I’d say that we as human beings have all been shaped by the environment that our ancestors created. The world that we live in, the knowledge that we have access to, our societies, our cities, our families are shaped by those who came before us. What we do today is literally shaping the environment in which future generations will be allowed to develop to their full potential.

And these future generations are not some imaginary future creatures that are not around already. As I said before, the egg that made you and me was already there when our mothers were in our grandmothers’ wombs. The future generations are already here, in the present, and we are affecting them with our actions right now.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

This week, Associated Press reporter Erika Kinetz examines the costs of people who leave Russia’s military with the help of Idite Lesom, an antiwar group whose name translates roughly to, “Get Lost.” As Russia’s war on Ukraine enters its third year, the group has helped thousands of people desert military service or evade it altogether.

For the man at the center of the episode, sacrifices are constant. “You can only leave wounded or dead,” another former military Russian officer tells Kinetz. “No one wants to leave dead.” He decides his best option is to ask a comrade to shoot him in the leg.

Former soldiers like him are waiting for a welcome from western nations that hasn’t come. This week, in partnership with the Associated Press, we’ll hear about why these defectors are not finding sanctuary in the West, and how staggering casualty rates may affect the future of the war. We’ll also meet a Ukrainian man on a quest to give fallen soldiers—Russian and Ukrainian alike—a final resting place. Don’t miss this gripping story on this week’s episode of Reveal, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Lurie’s reporting reveals a symbiotic relationship between child welfare agencies, which don’t have enough foster homes for all the kids in custody, and large for-profit companies like Universal Health Services, which have beds to fill. Children admitted to UHS facilities have reported on the use of violent restraints and being put in seclusion rooms, among other alarming allegations (UHS has said it complies with regulations related to some of these practices and is committed to reducing the use of restraints and seclusion). Even though government and media reports have documented these complaints, Lurie’s investigation found that some foster kids continue to spend months or even years in United Health Services facilities. 

One of those kids was Trina Edwards, a former foster kid who first was admitted to a UHS psychiatric hospital called North Star in Alaska when she was 12. In this podcast episode, an updated version of a previous show, Lurie speaks to Edwards about her experience.

Since this episode first aired in October, two bills have been introduced in Alaska’s state legislature that aim to address some of the problems Lurie worked to uncover. Lurie wrote about the proposed legislation earlier this month: 

Though neither bill mentions North Star by name, it looms large as the state’s only private psychiatric hospital for children.

HB 363 would require a court to review a foster child’s placement at a psychiatric hospital within 72 hours to determine if that child meets medical criteria for hospitalization. (There’s no statute on when an initial hearing should take place, though a preliminary injunction requires a hearing within 30 days.) 

A second bill, HB 366, would require health department employees to conduct unannounced visits to residential psychiatric facilities at least twice a year, and to interview at least half of the patients during such visits. It would also require facility staff to report incidents of seclusion or restraint to the state within a day of the incident, and allow weekly, confidential video visits with parents or guardians. Rep. Maxine Dibert, a Fairbanks Democrat and the legislature’s sole female Alaska Native lawmaker, was reportedly inspired to introduce the bill by the prevalence of Native children in psychiatric residential treatment facilities. (The same legislation was also introduced in the Senate.)

As time went on, Valentino wasn’t just a correctional officer; he also became a whistleblower. Valentino died just days after he had spoken up about corruption and abuse by his fellow officers.

This week’s episode of Reveal delves into the confusion surrounding his sudden death after an apparent overdose at age 30. Was it connected to the prison? His family still isn’t satisfied with how the tragedy was investigated, and years later, Valentino’s death has also raised questions from the FBI and his mentor in the elite investigative unit where they both worked. The episode features reporting by Sukey Lewis, Julie Small, and their On Our Watch investigative team at KQED, as they meet Valentino’s father, Val Sr., who begins to share evidence he’s collected surrounding his son’s death. As Lewis tells us during the episode, “He wants to understand what happened to his son and why and who’s responsible. But instead of finding answers, Val Sr. just keeps finding more questions.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

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This season of On Our Watch, parts of which are featured on this week’s Reveal, delves into Rodriguez’s experiences, the culture of silence in the prison, and the aftermath of his death. Through interviews with Valentino’s wife Mimy, texts from his phone, and disciplinary records, the reporters uncover harassment and disproportionately high rates of force at the facility compared with other California prisons.