Listen to Reveal
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“It pulls off the impressive feat of entertaining, educating, and infuriating us at the same time.”
—The New Yorker
“Its stories – told via episodes that run long enough to feel lived-in – call into question how the U.S. treats its people and demand that listeners engage with injustice.”
—The Atlantic
“Reveal is what happens when time, care and money are put into telling a single story.”
—The Financial Times
Reveal is the country’s first weekly investigative public radio show and podcast. Peabody Award-winning host Al Letson takes listeners across the country and the world, exposing wrongs and holding the powerful accountable. Whether it’s Amazon’s poor workplace safety record, inequity in the juvenile justice system or exploitation at drug rehabs, Reveal connects with listeners through gripping and compassionate storytelling. Reveal is co-produced with PRX. Browse our archive of past episodes here.
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This Week’s Episode
The Black Market for a Lifesaving Cat Drug
A fatal cat disease was finally cured, but the treatment wasn’t legally available. So a group of cat lovers created an international black market.
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Here are some of our favorites from the archive. Check out all our past episodes here.
Mississippi Goddam Chapter 1: The Promise
Billey Joe Johnson Jr. was a high school football star headed for the big time. Then, early one morning in 2008, the Black teenager died during a traffic stop with a White deputy. His family’s been searching for answers ever since.
40 Acres and a Lie Part 1
Our historical investigation found 1,250 formerly enslaved Black Americans who were given land – only to see it returned to their enslavers.
The Bitter Work Behind Sugar
On a vast plantation in the Dominican Republic, Haitian migrants still use machetes to harvest sugarcane that’s exported to the U.S. The workers are protesting poor working and living conditions.
American Rehab: Shadow Workforce
For decades, work-based rehabs have spread across the country. No one knows how many are out there, so we counted them ourselves.
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Meet our host, Al.
Al Letson is the Peabody Award-winning host of Reveal. Born in New Jersey, he moved to Jacksonville, Florida, at age 11 and as a teenager began rapping and producing hip-hop records. By the early 1990s, he had fallen in love with the theater, becoming a local actor and playwright, and soon discovered slam poetry. His day job as a flight attendant allowed him to travel to cities around the country, where he competed in slam poetry contests while sleeping on friends’ couches. In 2000, Letson placed third in the National Poetry Slam and performed on Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry Jam, which led him to write and perform one-man shows and even introduce the 2006 NCAA Final Four on CBS.
In Letson’s travels around the country, he realized that the America he was seeing on the news was far different from the one he was experiencing up close. In 2007, he competed in the Public Radio Talent Quest, where he pitched a show called State of the Re:Union that reflected the conversations he was having throughout the US. The show ran for five seasons and won a Peabody Award in 2014. In 2015, Letson helped create and launch Reveal, the nation’s first weekly investigative radio show, which has won two duPont Awards and three Peabody Awards and been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize twice. He has also hosted the podcast Errthang; written and developed several TV shows with major networks, including AMC+’s Moonhaven and Apple TV+’s Monarch; and is currently writing a comic for DC Comics. (He loves comics.)
When he’s not working, Letson’s often looking for an impossibly difficult meal to prepare or challenging anyone to name a better album than Mos Def’s Black on Both Sides.
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