• RFK Jr lauds Italy's addiction treatment. Can it work here?
    Mar 29 2026
    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.

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    30 mins
  • Trailer: The Sunday Story
    Mar 23 2026
    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.

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    2 mins
  • The Betrayal of Trans Troops
    Mar 22 2026
    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.

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    30 mins
  • Emotional Abuse in College Sports
    Mar 15 2026
    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.

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    45 mins