Audio narrations from AskWhy.News. We contextualize the news, the facts, the disputes, and the historical throughline behind every story, answering the question the headlines skip: but why? Long-form articles and evergreen throughlines, read aloud.
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Today's stories and the historical context you need to understand them, in one audio briefing from AskWhy.News.
Venezuela occupies the Caribbean coast of South America and sits on one of the largest accumulations of crude oil ever found.
The relationship now popularly described as a blank cheque began with an American arms embargo.
The standoff between the United States and Iran is usually introduced as a nuclear story.
American immigration enforcement is governed by a body of constitutional law that applies nowhere else in the American legal system.
American housing policy began as land policy. Long before Washington insured a mortgage or paid part of anyone's rent, it gave land away, with a stated preference for the person who would actually live on it.
In December 2014, with the West African Ebola epidemic still spreading, Congress finalized appropriations that included roughly 5.4 billion dollars in emergency Ebola funding, about 3.7 billion of it directed to the…
Every export control begins from a single, slightly unnerving proposition: that selling something can itself be a strategic act.
There is no single body of law called "transgender law." There are at least four separate legal tracks, built on different machinery, developed by different institutions at different times, answering different questions.
Almost everything that follows rests on one sentence written in 1787.
A trade secret is the strangest asset in intellectual property, because it is the only major one that dies the moment its owner shows it to the world.
Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment on February 26, 1869, and it was ratified on February 3, 1870.
Almost every public argument about federal finance founders on two numbers that sound alike and measure different things.
American law did not begin by asking how an image was made. It began by asking what an image did to whoever happened to see it, and it answered that question in its harshest possible form.
American immigration law learned to sort people before it learned to welcome them.
The Second Amendment is twenty-seven words long, and scarcely one of them was new.
A judge has paused the compulsory parts of the new Postal Service ballot rule for fourteen days, and the deciding question has narrowed to a single one: where in the postal statutes did Congress give the agency power over elections?
A letter released under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit contradicts what the health secretary told two Senate committees about his 2019 trip to Samoa, though the record neither shows he caused the measles epidemic there nor points to any prosecution.
The criminal conflict-of-interest statute imputes to a federal official the holdings of a spouse and a minor child, and exempts the President entirely, which is why a $620 million Pentagon loan, a 6 percent stake in a drone-defense startup and $900 million of federal settlement money can all be lawful at the same time.
Right to repair is a claim about permission. It holds that the owner of a product, or an independent shop the owner chooses, may fix that product without the manufacturer's authorisation.
Nearly every argument about who may lawfully build in the West Bank, and on whose ground, runs back to a statute promulgated by the Ottoman Empire in 1858.
Arms controllers sort missiles by how far they fly, because range decides who can be hit, and who can be hit decides the politics.
The federal government's first venture into the care of small children was not, in its own terms, about children at all.
Every American president for the past twelve decades has been able to do something that would have puzzled the men who wrote the Constitution: appoint a body of outsiders, or of hand-picked insiders, to go hunting…
The State Department says it will cancel visitor visas issued over a ten year span to anyone who ever applied for asylum, using a revocation power Congress deliberately placed almost beyond the reach of the courts.
