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Public education used to enjoy strong bipartisan support, but across the country, there’s a growing push to offer students alternatives to traditional public schools. The idea behind “school choice” is that competition improves education. President Trump and Republicans have attacked public education for failing students and for being too “woke,” while Democrats who strongly oppose school choice often dismiss valid criticism of public schools. Today on The Sunday Story, NPR education correspondent Cory Turner travels to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to understand how school choice can change a city's education landscape. Are students better served when schools compete in a free market? You can find more of Cory's reporting from Cedar Rapids here. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy

Dozens of Tuskegee Airmen went missing in action during World War II. Most of them have not been found. Who were these men and what happened to them? In her book, "Forgotten Souls," NPR investigative correspondent Cheryl W. Thompson tells their stories. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy

Since taking office last year, the Trump administration has pushed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to ramp up deportations. This increase in enforcement operations has meant that American citizens and lawful residents have increasingly been entangled in ICE’s activities. Today on The Sunday Story, we talk to NPR’s Kat Lonsdorf and Meg Anderson about the growing trend of Americans getting caught up in ICE’s growing web of tracking and surveillance. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy

As many as 50 million people in the United States are thought to struggle with an addiction to drugs or alcohol. The majority don’t get treatment for it, and of those who do seek treatment, about half relapse within the first year.  Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has his own story of addiction and credits Alcoholics Anonymous with keeping him sober. But Secretary Kennedy has said that a treatment program in Italy that has shown great success in keeping people sober should serve as the vision for what addiction treatment could be here in the US. On this episode of The Sunday Story, WBUR’s Deborah Becker travels to Italy to see firsthand how a treatment program at an Italian vineyard has created so many success stories. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy

Every news the week just keeps on coming; it's hard to make sense of it all. The Sunday Story from NPR is for people who want to go deeper. Every week, we dive into the political forces reshaping our country. Hosted by Ayesha Rascoe. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy

In his first term, President Trump required transgender service members to register with the diagnosis of gender dysphoria in order to continue serving openly in the military. Now, amidst Middle East deployment plans, that documentation is being used to find and separate thousands of highly trained troops. This week on The Sunday Story, how the Pentagon’s push to remove trans troops is affecting active duty service members—and how it may also affect the military’s mission readiness. To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below: See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy

March Madness is here. The high-stakes, sudden-death college basketball tournament is a beloved tradition in American sports.  For the players, it’s a chance to showcase the skills they’ve developed through years of hard training of the body and mind. In many cases, that push produces incredible feats of athletic performance. But an investigation by reporters Julia Haney and Elizabeth Santos has found instances in which athletes allege that the push from coaches goes too far. Emotional abuse by coaches, some athletes maintain, can cause lasting, even irreparable damage. On this episode of The Sunday Story, we hear from athletes who fought back.*A warning that today’s story includes mentions of sexual and emotional abuse, suicide, bullying and includes explicit language. To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below: See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy

For years, India was thought of as the Wild West of the fertility industry. But in 2021, a new law in India made it illegal for women to sell their eggs or serve as paid surrogates. That law clashed with a growing demand for human eggs within the country. The result: a thriving black market for human eggs. Today, some of the most marginalized Indian women and girls are supplying reproductive material, often with little compensation and at great personal risk. This week on The Sunday Story, NPR correspondent Diaa Hadid and co-reporter Shweta Desai investigate the supply chain of human eggs in India, from fertility clinics catering to the wealthy to the slums of Mumbai and Chennai. And we meet women who have given up some of the most intimate parts of themselves – to survive. To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below: See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices NPR Privacy Policy

In 1987, Ben Spencer, a young black man from Dallas, Texas was convicted in the killing of a white businessman. He was sentenced to life in prison by an all-white jury. There was no physical evidence linking him to the crime and he had an alibi. Over the years, eyewitnesses recanted their testimony and a judge, after reviewing all the prior evidence, declared Spencer to be an innocent man. Nonetheless, Spencer remained in prison for more than three decades. For seven of those years, former NPR correspondent Barbara Bradley Hagerty follows and followed the twists and turns of this case. Her dissection of wrongful convictions and the criminal justice system is at the heart of her new book, Bringing Ben Home: A Murder, A Conviction And The Fight to Redeem American Justice.Today on The Sunday Story from Up First, part one of a two-part series looking at why it is so hard to get a conviction overturned even when evidence of innocence is overwhelming. Part two is also available now on the Up First podcast feed.

Before Roe v. Wade, when a young, unmarried girl got pregnant, she was often sent away – to a place called a maternity home. There, she would give birth in secret, surrender her baby, and return to her life as if nothing had happened. That shadowed history is the setting of Grady Hendrix's latest horror novel, Witchcraft for Wayward Girls. Today on The Sunday Story from Up First, Ayesha Rascoe talks with Hendrix about the truth that inspired his timely fiction — and what happens when people with little choice, discover a new kind of power.

Today on The Sunday Story, author Simone Stolzoff discusses his book The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work, about our complicated relationship with work. Stolzoff explains how as jobs have changed over generations, so has the meaning we derive from working. Stolzoff shares his findings on our modern relationship with work and ways we can find more balance in our lives.

The rise of prediction markets means you can now bet on just about anything, right from your phone. Apps like Kalshi and Polymarket have grown exponentially in President Trump’s second term, as his administration has rolled back regulations designed to keep the industry in check. Billions of dollars have flooded in, and users are placing bets on everything from whether it will rain in Seattle today to whether the US will take over control of Greenland. Who’s winning big on these apps? And who is losing? NPR correspondent Bobby Allyn joins The Sunday Story to explain how these markets came to be and where they are going.

Two of this year’s top contenders for the Academy Awards were filmed using a technology from the 1950s: VistaVision. Filmmakers are reviving this visually stunning yet finicky film format at a time when movie theaters are struggling to get audiences back into theaters. Today on The Sunday Story, NPR’s culture correspondent Mandalit Del Barco tells the story of the changing movie industry through the lens of VistaVision technology.

How do you find the strength to face the unimaginable? In September of 2024, Gisèle Pelicot took the stand in an unprecedented mass rape trial in France. On trial was her former husband, along with 50 other men. Police had found images and videos of her husband and dozens of men raping Pelicot while she was drugged and unconscious. In this episode of The Sunday Story, Gisèle Pelicot sits down with NPR’s Michel Martin to talk about the pain of discovering what had happened to her, the harm it did to her family, and her decision to reject shame and speak up on behalf of victims of sexual assault.Pelicot’s new memoir, “A Hymn to Life,” will be released on February 17th.

Forty years ago, the space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff. Seven astronauts were killed, including teacher-in-space Christa McAuliffe. It was a devastating blow to the U.S. space program and a national tragedy for the country. In the days after the explosion, the search for answers began. Two NPR reporters, Howard Berkes and Daniel Zwerdling, focused their reporting on the engineers who managed Challenger's booster rockets. On February 20, 1986, Berkes and Zwerdling broke a major story, providing the first details of a last-minute effort by those engineers to stop NASA from launching Challenger.In this special NPR documentary, Howard Berkes unfolds an investigation spanning forty years, from those desperate efforts in 1986 to delay the launch, to decades of crushing guilt for some of the engineers, and to the lessons learned that are as critical as ever as NASA's budget and workforce shrink.