Government & Politics

Pulitzer Prize winning author Matthew Desmond talks about the roots of American poverty and how he says so many affluent citizens benefit from government subsidies and exploitation of the poor. His new book is Poverty By America.

At 98, Carter is the oldest living president in U.S. history. After serving his term, he worked to promote safe housing, human rights and conflict resolution. Originally broadcast in '93, '95 and '96.

Journalist Will Sommer went to road shows and spoke to believers and their families while investigating QAnon. His book, Trust the Plan, makes the case that there are more conspiracy theories to come.

After 20 years away from the screen, actor Ke Huy Quan is back in front of the camera in the new film 'Everything Everywhere All At Once,' and he's getting lots of praise for his performance.

Guardian journalist Shaun Walker talks about Yevgeny Prigozhin, the tough-talking convict-turned-businessman who recruits soldiers from Russian prisons to fight in Ukraine. "It's just so out of the realms of fantasy that this former convict is going to fly around prisons in his helicopter and offer people salvation for fighting for him at the front, and then lead these battalions of prisoners to their almost certain death," He says. "It's so dystopian that it's really hard to believe. But yet it has happened."

Caro isn't solely interested in telling the stories of famous men. Instead, he says, "I wanted to use their lives to show how political power worked." Originally broadcast in 2013 and 2019.

Mark Pomerantz spent a year investigating Trump, from the hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels, to countless financial statements that wildly overstated assets. His book is People Vs. Donald Trump.

Jere Van Dyk has spent years in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where he got to know leaders of the Haqqani network, responsible for many suicide bombings and kidnappings. His new book is Without Borders.

Siddharth Kara talks about how cell phones and electronic vehicles are powered by cobalt mined by workers in slave-like conditions in The Democratic Republic of Congo. Cobalt is an essential component of the rechargeable batteries used in devices and EV's. He has researched modern day slavery and human trafficking for over twenty years.

Historian Matthew Connelly says government records are marked as "classified" three times every second — and many of them will never be declassified. We talk about what that means for the public and how this might change. His new book is The Declassification Engine.

New York Times journalist Catie Edmondson says the new Republican-controlled House of Representatives will likely leverage their subpoena power to enact vengeance on the Biden administration.

Legal historian Mary Ziegler has chronicled the legal, political and cultural battles around abortion, and says the debate is far from over: "We're at a moment of almost unprecedented uncertainty in the United States when it comes to abortion," Zielger says. Her book is Roe: The History of a National Obsession.

Jonathan Escoffery grew up in Miami, the son of Jamaican immigrants. In a world where identity was linked to race, he says it was often confusing to figure out where he fit in.

Reporter Luke Broadwater says the committee hired a former news producer to hit Trump where it hurt: "His whole career was built on television, and they were able to use that very medium against him."

In 1977, gunmen led by a charismatic Muslim leader stormed three locations in Washington, D.C., taking more than 100 people hostage. Journalist Shahan Mufti examines the incident in a new book.

Maddow's podcast uncovers the widespread anti-Semitic, pro-German sympathies active among major religious and political leaders in the U.S. in the lead-up to U.S. entering WWII.

Author Adam Hochschild says Wilson used the first World War as an excuse to spy on Americans, censor the press and plan for the mass deportation of immigrants. His new book is American Midnight.

Journalist Luke Harding began reporting from Ukraine in December 2021 and was in the country's capital of Kyiv on Feb. 23, the night before the Russian invasion began. He's been reporting from the war for the British newspaper The Guardian ever since.

James Gray's new film was inspired by his childhood in Queens in the 1980s. Though his grandparents had fled antisemitism in Ukraine, his family didn't recognize their own biases against Black people.

It's been five years since New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey first wrote about Harvey Weinstein's history of sexual assault allegations and helped ignite the #MeToo movement. Now there's a new movie called "She Said," based on their Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation and their subsequent book about their investigation. The movie stars Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan and opens this week in theaters.