This story was originally published by Inside Climate News in partnership with Puente News Collaborative and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

On a Saturday morning in March, high school students, mountain bikers and soldiers from a nearby Army base climbed the winding path up Mount Cristo Rey. From the summit, they could see most of El Paso, the sprawling city that dominates a stretch of desert where New Mexico, Texas and the Mexican state of Chihuahua meet. 

They paused to trace the line of the Rio Grande, where it divides Mexico and the United States, and then touched the smooth tiles lining the base of the Christ the King statue, a cherished monument that gives the mountain its name.

Two days later, on a Monday morning, explosions rattled the same site. Contractors were blasting the south side of Mount Cristo Rey to prepare the terrain for construction of the border wall President Donald Trump has long promised would run from San Diego in California to Brownsville in Texas.

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.

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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 This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. 

NASA just released the first photos taken by astronauts aboard Artemis II– the first crewed mission to the moon in more than 50 years. The images show Earth from space, in one photo swathed in clouds and in another almost obscured in darkness.

The four-person crew includes pilot Victor Glover, the first Black astronaut to travel to deep space, and mission specialist Christina Koch, the first woman on a lunar mission. On Day 6 of their 10-day journey, they’ll loop around the far side of the moon without landing and continue home.

“You look amazing. You look beautiful,” said Glover looking back at Earth in an interview with CBS News. “From up here you also look like one thing… No matter where you’re from or what you look, like we’re all one people.”

Back on Earth, NASA’s future is less certain. The White House has proposed cutting the agency’s science budget by 47%, and for the first time in 40 years, NASA has not committed to starting any new science missions.

President Donald Trump’s dumping of Attorney General Pam Bondi on Thursday was the kind of shrewd personnel change one might expect from an executive who made a name for himself by firing people. Bondi presided over the unraveling of the Department of Justice. Under her leadership, the DOJ has lost the respect of judges and juries, its ranks have been decimated by lawyers fleeing like rats from a sinking ship, and it racked up embarrassing losses at an unheard of clip. Almost impressively, Bondi has turned the Justice Department from an august symbol of the rule of law into a limping, corrupt enterprise. 

But Bondi wasn’t ousted for her disastrous leadership. Her incompetence, magnified in her handling of the Epstein files, in which she managed to make sure a bad story for her boss wouldn’t go away, contributed to Trump’s growing frustration. But Trump reportedly soured on Bondi because she failed to failed to lock up his political enemies. The irony of the situation, of course, is that Trump’s own involvement is what doomed not just those sham prosecutions, but ultimately the DOJ itself.

Trump spent his first term pining for a Justice Department that would protect him, and an attorney general who would serve like his personal attorney—or hit man. In his second term, Bondi willingly tried to fill that role. But her tenure is living proof of a problem whose origin ultimately lies with the rightwing push for a so-called unitary executive who controls every inch of the executive branch: that sort of presidential power breeds distrust, corruption, and ultimately failure. 

Before Trump returned to the White House, the Supreme Court granted him criminal immunity for official acts. That instantly infamous opinion, Trump v. United States, also emphasized that the Justice Department was the president’s personal playground. The attorney general was no longer the nation’s chief law enforcement official but, in the words of Chief Justice John Roberts, “acts as the President’s ‘chief law enforcement officer.’” Trump could direct investigations and prosecutions; he could even utilize the department’s prosecutorial powers in furtherance of crimes, including politically motivated investigation and charges. 

“I had come to Poland to seek out the story of Count Rzewuski and other Polish adventurers who had traveled from the Ukrainian farmlands and Russian steppes south to the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula in their quest for the pure-bred Arabian horses that gave any cavalry an enormous military advantage,” writes one high-spirited contributor to a 2001 issue of Aramco World, the free magazine published by the U.S. subsidiary of the Saudi Arabian Oil Company.

The article, which has no discernible news peg, explains how nineteenth-century Poles—like Count Wacław Rzewuski, a Warsaw aristocrat-turned-sheik, who disappeared in battle at age fifty-four—contrived to bring Arabian horses to Eastern Europe. Following in the count’s footsteps, the reporter, also a Saudi airline employee, meets Poland’s state inspector of Arabian horse breeding, enumerates the most valuable Arabian mares to “set hoof on Polish soil”—their names were Gazella, Mlecha, and Sahara—and explains how the manuscript of the “count’s account,” Sur les chevaux orientaux et provenants des races orientales, can be viewed by special appointment in Warsaw. 

It’s pretty standard fare for this defiant relic of midcentury publishing, which takes as its loose remit the entire Islamic world. Other articles in that issue cover Kashgar, a predominantly Muslim city in China, and mosque design in the United States (headline: “Import, Adapt, Innovate”). Less typical is the front-of-book feature, a four-page photo spread of a patriotic candlelight vigil by Arab Americans in Brooklyn, five days after 9/11. This was the magazine’s first issue after the attacks, which changed everything for Muslims everywhere. “I wanted to show people that we care, too,” reads a quote from the thirteen-year-old Nasser Al-Subai, who had immigrated from Yemen four years prior. A later article on Arab musicians notes that a composer and oud virtuoso named Simon Shaheen had lost friends in the attacks ten days before playing a festival in Bloomington, Indiana, with what one local reviewer described as “immeasurable grace.” 

As with most of Aramco World’s coverage, the spread studiously avoids overt political commentary. But the feature nonetheless broke with the frothing bipartisan Islamophobia that marked the post-9/11 years—the era of “WHY THEY HATE US” (the October 2001 Newsweek cover story, illustrated by a turbaned child with a rifle) and “WHY THEY HATE EACH OTHER” (a 2007 cover story in Time). Aramco World’s insistence on the fullness of Arab American life, even immediately after 9/11, captures the magazine’s singular ethos. In 2009, with the forever wars in full swing, the editors noted somewhat euphemistically that “interest in Arab cultures and Islam soared after the horrors of 9/11 and the wars that followed [and] Saudi Aramco World was no longer alone as an intercultural voice.” I would say, rather, that it threw the magazine’s utterly unique sensibility into stark relief. When I stumbled upon it some years later, I subscribed immediately.

A version of the below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

Often political movements end up as circular firing squads, especially when there’s a competition for leadership. The same can be true for cults. With Trump’s misnamed Make America Great Again cult movement, the firing squad is shaped more like a Möbius strip. In the past year or so, MAGA World has been racked with a series of cross-cutting feuds, with incoming and outgoing fire ricocheting across the Trumpian landscape in all directions, causing chaos and confusion, as multiple conspiracy theories clash and vitriolic accusations pile up. An outsider cannot keep track of the infighting without a program or a wire diagram that would make Carrie Mathison proud.

You may have caught particular episodes in this sweeping saga. One of the main ones occurred when Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and commentator Tucker Carlson got into a dust-up last year over Israel, with Carlson, an America First anti-interventionist, decrying Cruz for being a pro-Israel warmonger and Cruz slamming Carlson for hosting on his show Nick Fuentes, the antisemitic white nationalist and Hitler fanboy. Cruz accused Carlson of being “complicit in…evil” for platforming Fuentes. This tiff led to a civil war inside the influential Heritage Foundation between those who backed Carlson (including its president) and those who found his association with Fuentes despicable.

This row reflected a deepening fault line among Trump followers between isolationists and hawks, with Israel as the fulcrum and antisemitism (actual or false charges of) imbuing the debate. With this baseline split, it was no surprise that the Iran war has led to more MAGA-on-MAGA catfighting. Fox News loudmouths Sean Hannity, Brian Kilmeade, and Mark Levin, along with conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, have been cheerleaders for Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s war against Tehran, with Carlson and Megyn Kelly blaming Israel for dragging Trump and the United States into this conflict.

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