Last year, we did an episode with Barton Gellman, who talked about the war games he was running with high-level military leaders and government officials to prepare for a second Trump term.  A bunch of you have been asking us to have Barton back, to find out what he’s doing, now that the second Trump term is here. So we called him up. Barton works at the Brennan Center for Justice. “Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s easy to get frustrated with the charade reporters are supposed to keep up, where they pretend they don’t have opinions or feelings or any kind of human thoughts about a story they’re telling. Plenty of journalists have been trying to break out of that charade. But the decision to do that: it can be a fraught one, with real implications. Dana Ballout struggled with this on a story she was investigating about Hassan Diab – a sociology professor who’s living as a free man in Canada, yet is convicted of a terrible crime in France. Dana and her co-host Alex Atack open up about their reporting on the series The Copernic Affair, and why Dana ultimately cut her own opinions out of the show, even though her co-host and editors wanted to include them.  And this prompts Brian to revisit his own experience dropping the charade in a previous podcast he made with Hamza Syed, for The New York Times and Serial: The Trojan Horse Affair.  You can check out The Copernic Affair wherever you get your podcasts or at https://www.canadaland.com/shows/the-copernic-affair/. Same with The Trojan Horse Affair: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/podcasts/trojan-horse-affair.html To get the phrase from Hamza’s interview that we’re asking people to remix into something danceable, sign up for Brian’s newsletter here: www.kcrw.com/questioneverything “Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Do you have questions for us? If so, we want to talk to you! If you have thoughts about Question Everything, critiques of our episodes, or anything you're curious about, that we're covering, or not covering…please tell us. We want to set up some conversations between listeners and Brian and our staff for an upcoming episode. Write to us at hey@placementtheory.com and someone from our staff may reach out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices