Alessandro Chesser is a 40-year-old Silicon Valley entrepreneur. He’s married with two kids and was the first in his family to attend college. His grandfather immigrated from Sicily and worked as a school janitor so his family could have a better life.

Skip forward a few generations, and Chesser is noticing the way wealthy investors hide their money to avoid paying taxes. He’s outraged and wants to upend the tax system, which he thinks is unfair to the everyday American worker. In Chesser’s mind, the realistic solution isn’t to reform the tax code, but to make it easier for average Americans to access one of the best-kept secrets of the superrich: trusts.

Trusts have become big business in the US. They are now an industry worth trillions of dollars. But no one knows the exact number, because the trust industry is extraordinarily private. Trusts can last forever (literally), but there is no public registry for them. In fact, they are one of the main reasons why watchdog groups consider America to be the most secretive financial jurisdiction in the world.

This week on Reveal, journalists Sally Herships and Leah McGrath Goodman investigate America’s shadowland of trusts. As the nation’s wealth gap keeps growing—and Americans brace for Tax Day—we uncover what’s at stake as US states race to become the most trust-friendly jurisdictions in the world.

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More To The Story: Earlier this year, parts of Minneapolis resembled a war zone. The Minnesota city had become the violent epicenter of President Donald Trump’s immigration raids as thousands of masked agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol roamed the streets in what was known as Operation Metro Surge. Thousands of immigrants, many of whom had no criminal record, were detained. Children were arrested. High schoolers were pepper-sprayed. And two US citizens—Renée Good and Alex Pretti—were shot and killed by immigration agents. Following weeks of protests, the White House reversed course and ramped down immigration enforcement. But hundreds of agents are still there as state officials like Attorney General Keith Ellison are left to clean up the mess.

On this week’s More To The Story, Ellison talks with host Al Letson about the economic damage from the Trump administration’s ICE raids and persistent fears within immigrant communities, his congressional confrontation with Sen. Josh Hawley over a Covid-19 fraud scheme, and why he refuses to back down from the what he describes as the “Trump onslaught.”

Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Copy editor: Nikki Frick | Digital producer: Josh Sanburn | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson

Listen: How Minneapolis Taught America to Fight Back (Reveal)

Read: Top Trump Official Says FBI Won’t Investigate Killing by ICE Agent (Mother Jones)

Watch: Minnesota and Immigration Enforcement Officials Testify Before Senate Committee (C-SPAN)

Read: Transcript of Feeding Our Future/Keith Ellison Audio Recording

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Here at the Center for Investigative Reporting, we excel at finding things: government documents, paper trails, the misdeeds people have tried to hide. It’s serious work. 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 personally meaningful questions?

That was the spark for our first-ever Inconsequential Investigations hour. We turned our journalistic strategies on our own biggest questions to see where the trail led.

This week on Reveal, we take up Mother Jones video correspondent Garrison Hayes’ quest to find the first short film he ever made, even though it was lost to the early 2000s internet. Yowei Shaw of the podcast Proxy brings us along as she meets her doppelganger and discovers the truth behind how people see her. And Reveal reporter and producer Ashley Cleek untangles her own unsolved mystery: Did reclusive rock star Jeff Mangum really call into her college radio show, asking her for a favor?

We plan to do more Inconsequential Investigations like this. If you have a personal mystery that needs looking into, please email Inconsequential@revealnews.org.

This is an update of an episode that first aired in October 2025.

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More To The Story: Few political figures occupy the sort of space in American history that Al Gore does. A longtime Tennessee congressman before becoming vice president, Gore lost the presidency in 2000 to George W. Bush after a highly controversial decision by the Supreme Court. But in the years that followed, Gore didn’t slink into history. Instead, he worked to sound the growing alarm on climate change, most notably with his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, which came out 20 years ago. A year later, he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Today, he’s still at it and in many ways more adamant than ever that now is the time to act on global warming, especially as the Trump administration rolls back environmental protections and condemns climate science. But he also has more on his mind than the state of the planet, namely the state of democracy and the direction of the country under President Donald Trump. On this week’s More To The Story, the former vice president admonishes the White House for making an “astonishing mistake” in its attack on Iran, looks back at his groundbreaking climate change documentary, and talks about why he believes political will in America is still a renewable resource.

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: Something Unexpected Is Happening With Norway’s Polar Bears (Vox via Climate Desk)

Listen: A New Year, a New War (Reveal)

Visit: The Climate Reality Project

Read: The Assault on Reason: Our Information Ecosystem, from the Age of Print to the Age of Trump (Penguin Books)

Note: If you buy a book using our Bookshop link, a small share of the proceeds supports our journalism.

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Last year, arts organizations and cultural institutions across the US received an alarming message: Their federal grants had been canceled.

The letters said their projects no longer aligned with new federal priorities and that money was being redirected toward the Trump administration’s agenda. The grants had funded museum exhibits, public art programs, historical research, and community arts initiatives.

Angela Sutton and a team of archaeologists were in the middle of excavating a long-forgotten Black neighborhood in Nashville when she got the news: “Just got an email out of the blue saying, ‘Please stop. You're done.’”

This week on Reveal, reporter Jonathan Jones travels to Nashville and beyond one year after the cancellations to meet the people living with the fallout. From musicians to visual artists, historians, and arts administrators, they’re confronting a new reality: Federal support now depends on the shifting political priorities in Washington. Some organizations are scaling back their work. Others worry artists will censor themselves just to survive. But many are fighting back.

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More To The Story: Back in November, two National Guard members were shot just blocks from the White House. One was killed. The suspect, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, is an Afghan national who came to the US through a Biden-era humanitarian parole program and had applied for a special immigrant visa, which allows Afghans who worked with the US military to obtain a green card. In the shooting’s aftermath, President Donald Trump halted the visa program and called for a review of all Afghans who have come to the US. Dozens of American organizations have formed in the past decade to help Afghans with the complicated visa application and resettlement process.

Jeff Holder is a pastor with one of them, an organization called Tarjoman Relief that’s made up of military and civilian volunteers. On this week’s More To The Story, Holder talks with host Al Letson about the Afghan allies now in limbo, the extensive vetting process they undergo to come to the US, and what he sees as lies about America’s Afghan communities being told by people in power.

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: Trump Has Turned the National Guard Into Mall Cops. Cost? $1 Million a Day. (Mother Jones)
Listen: How Minneapolis Taught America to Fight Back (Reveal)
Read: Trump is “Basically Shutting Down the Legal Immigration System” (Mother Jones)

Read: Neighbors in Faith (Jeff Holder)

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As news broke that Iran’s supreme leader had been killed, prominent critic Arash Azizi found himself trying to make sense of a moment he had long imagined.

For years, Azizi studied Iran’s political system and hoped for change from within. Now, with the man who defined that system gone, Azizi was left with questions: What comes next for Iran? And who gets to decide?

This week on Reveal, reporters Najib Aminy, Kiera Butler, and Nadia Hamdan follow the ripple effects of the war in Iran. Expats like Azizi wrestle with what the war could mean for Iran’s future, an influential group of Americans celebrate the conflict as a prophecy foretold, and residents of Lebanon grapple with the spiraling effects of the conflict.

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Take a trip to Mr. Rogers’ real life neighborhood in this special episode that celebrates the life and work of public media’s most famous defender. Reveal goes to WQED in Pittsburgh for a look at how Fred Rogers, the host of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, championed public television throughout its decadeslong struggle to survive Washington politics.

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