Post Reports

Jason Rezaian, Iran and the costs of press freedom

Ten years ago this month, Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian was freed from Iran’s Evin prison. He and his wife, Yeganeh, had been arrested at their home in Tehran and falsely accused of espionage. Since then, Rezaian has dedicated himself to advocating for press freedom, and now he’s the director of The Post’s press freedom initiatives. On Thursday, before a live audience at The Post, host Elahe Izadi sat down with Rezaian and his wife to talk about their reflections 10 years after their wrongful imprisonment. They were joined by ambassador Brett McGurk. As a presidential envoy, McGurk was integral to Rezaian’s release. They also spoke about what’s happening in Iran today, the widespread protests, what the United States could do and what this could all mean for the future of Iran.Subscribe to The Washington Post here.

Is Minneapolis a turning point in Trump's presidency?

Since the killing of Renée Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minnesota, President Donald Trump and his administration are feeling the pressure — not only from Democrats, but also from members of their own party. Some congressional Republicans have been critical of the administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement tactics and are worried about consequences for the midterms.“The more the image is out there that President Trump is pushing things very far … [and] is responsible for chaos,” senior national politics reporter Naftali Bendavid says, “the easier it is for Democrats to make the case that they are needed, if nothing else, to put some guardrails up.”Naftali spoke on this week’s episode of the “Post Reports” politics roundtable, alongside host Colby Itkowitz and Dan Merica, co-anchor of the politics newsletter The Early Brief. They discussed how Democrats are using the threat of a government shutdown as leverage to demand stronger reforms of the Department of Homeland Security.Colby, Naftali and Dan also reflected on the attack against Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) at a recent town hall. “We've seen people lose their lives in political violence moments last year,” Merica says, ”and you have to worry that it could happen again this year.”Today’s show was produced by Thomas Lu and Josh Carroll. It was edited by Martine Powers and mixed by Sean Carter. Subscribe to The Washington Post here. And watch us on YouTube here.

The quest to ‘destructively scan’ all the world’s books

In early 2024, executives at artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic ramped up an ambitious project they sought to keep quiet. It was code-named Project Panama, and internal documents filed in court described it as an “effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.”According to the filings, the company had spent tens of millions of dollars to acquire and slice the spines off potentially millions of books, before scanning their pages to feed knowledge into the AI models behind products such as Claude, its popular chatbot. A judge ruled this fair use.Details of Project Panama emerged in more than 4,000 pages of documents in a copyright lawsuit brought by book authors against Anthropic. The company agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle the case in August – but a district judge’s decision last week to unseal a slew of documents in the case more fully revealed Anthropic’s zealous pursuit of books.Today on “Post Reports,” technology reporter Will Oremus explains the lengths to which AI firms such as Anthropic, Meta, Google and OpenAI went to obtain colossal troves of data with which to “train” their software – a frantic and sometimes clandestine race to acquire the collected works of humanity. He and host Martine Powers discuss how AI companies’ efforts sometimes might have crossed over into the illegal, and how authors and artists might fare in an AI-centered future. Today’s show was produced by Rennie Svirnovskiy. It was edited by Dennis Funk and mixed by Sam Bair.Subscribe to The Washington Post here.

Why smaller houses can make us happier

Houses in the United States keep getting bigger, but the people in bigger houses aren’t necessarily happier. Bigger homes often come with higher costs and more maintenance and can pull people further away from the places and relationships that matter. For some, choosing a smaller home can actually make life feel easier, more connected and more satisfying.Elahe Izadi speaks with climate coach Michael Coren about the joys that come with living in a smaller house and what to prioritize when deciding where to live. Today’s show was produced by Sabby Robinson. It was edited by Dennis Funk with help from Ariel Plotnick and mixed by Sean Carter. Subscribe to The Washington Post here.

How Kristi Noem transformed immigration enforcement

After both Renée Good and Alex Pretti were shot and killed by Department of Homeland Security officers in Minneapolis this month, the story from the agency’s secretary, Kristi L. Noem, was that these individuals’ intentions represented acts of domestic terrorism. Confirmed as DHS secretary a year ago under President Trump, Noem has been one of the most visible defenders of Trump’s immigration agenda, executing a sprawling deportation campaign and backing the increasingly aggressive tactics of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and Customs and Border Patrol agents, which fall under her purview. Over several months, ICE and CBP officers have been fanning out across Democratic-run cities — entering neighborhoods and homes to make arrests, aggressively spraying protesters with tear gas, and even detaining U.S. citizens. Federal officers have been involved in 16 shootings since July and have killed three people, including two U.S. citizens. Yet this sweeping immigration agenda and the consequent actions by federal officers were not part of the original mission of DHS. Today, immigration reporter Marianne Levine discusses how former South Dakota governor Kristi Noem has transformed DHS and what that could mean for its future. Today’s show was produced by Sabby Robinson with help from Rennie Svirnovskiy. It was edited by Dennis Funk and mixed by Sam Bair.Subscribe to The Washington Post here.