The Brief

For some who lived on the streets of Los Angeles, Inside Safe was a lifesaver — giving them a roof over their head for the first time in years, then helping them find a permanent home.

For others, it was a major disappointment.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is banking on her Inside Safe initiative to help her solve the largest homelessness crisis in California. The program, which brings people from encampments into hotels until housing becomes available, has moved hundreds of Angelenos into permanent homes.

But hundreds more have gone from those hotels back to life on the street.

Nearly two years in, the program is successful enough that it spawned a copycat county-wide effort. Yet it has not affected the vast majority of the nearly 30,000 Angelenos who sleep outside. A lack of long-term housing and a shortage of health care, mental health and addiction services remain huge obstacles, as does the program’s high price tag.

“Lots of people that have been brought inside under Inside Safe, and that’s great,” said John Maceri, chief executive officer of The People Concern, a nonprofit that runs two Inside Safe hotels. “We still struggle with the exit strategy: Where are people going to move to?”

Proponents say data proves the model works: Overall homelessness dropped slightly in the city of Los Angeles in 2024, and the number of people sleeping on the city’s streets is down 10%.

“Homelessness in LA is down for the first time in years,” Gabby Maarse, spokesperson for Mayor Karen Bass, said in an email. “ The progress made by a new comprehensive strategy, which includes Inside Safe, is a marked improvement since before the mayor took office and she will not be satisfied until street homelessness is ended.”

But the newer county-run copycat program, called Pathway Home, appears to be connecting people with services and permanent housing more quickly — suggesting there are ways the city program could continue to improve.

How LA’s program has improved, and where it still lags

Inside Safe is supposed to be an alternative to the aggressive, law enforcement-heavy sweeps ramping up since the U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled cities are free to ban camping even if they have no shelters. More than a dozen California cities already have passed new anti-camping ordinances or updated existing ordinances to make them more punitive.

Mayor Bass publicly eschewed that strategy, and as of July, police had made no arrests during Inside Safe operations, according to the city. Even so, a report by Human Rights Watch earlier this year accused LA of not doing enough to protect the rights of its unhoused residents.

Bass launched Inside Safe in December 2022. Seven months later, CalMatters reported that fewer than 6% of the people who moved into Inside Safe hotels later went into permanent housing. People living in the hotels weren’t getting the help they needed accessing everything from medical care to mental health and addiction services — something Bass acknowledged at the time was a problem.

“It was a little chaotic when it first started,” said Maceri.

Tents line the streets of the Skid Row neighborhood of Los Angeles on Oct. 8, 2024.

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There has been improvement since then, but challenges remain. To date, Inside Safe has cleared 67 encampments and moved 3,254 people into hotels — nearly 23% of whom have gone on to permanent housing.

That improvement from 6% to 23% is “great,” said Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez, who has hosted more than two dozen Inside Safe operations in his district. “But it’s obviously not where anybody wants to see it. At the end of the day, interim is interim and permanent is permanent. We want to see folks permanently housed.”

As of July, more people had returned to homelessness from Inside Safe than were permanently housed at the time — 819 compared to 650.

Getting medical and mental health care, addiction treatment and other resources inside the hotels is still an issue, as service providers continue to struggle with staffing shortages, Maceri said. But it’s gotten “a little bit easier.” The county now sets up resource fairs at the hotels. The mayor appointed Dr. Etsemaye Agonafer as the city’s first deputy mayor of homelessness and community health, tasked with coordinating those services. The mayor also brought in USC and UCLA’s street medicine teams to provide services at the hotels.

It’s still not enough, said Tescia Uribe, chief program officer for the nonprofit PATH, which operates three Inside Safe and three Pathway Home hotels. They have clients with severe mental health and addiction issues who need intensive care.

“We are absolutely not set up for that,” Uribe said.

In some cases, living in a hotel room behind a closed door actually allows people’s problems — such as domestic violence between a couple living together, or substance use — to escalate into a crisis, because staff don’t see what’s happening in time to intervene, she said.

Cost is another huge obstacle for the program: The hotel rooms cost the city an average of $121 per night, and it’s unclear for how long the city will be willing and able to keep paying that. The city bought one hotel in an effort to mitigate those expenses, and is looking into buying additional sites.

“The challenge ahead is about what is the next step?” said Councilmember Nithya Raman.

‘Ready to go:’ One woman’s experience with Inside Safe

When 51-year-old Shameka Foster moved from her tent on Skid Row into an Inside Safe hotel in October 2023, she was happy to be off the street.

A chef who makes vegan meats and cheeses from scratch, and who also works at a Skid Row nonprofit helping other unhoused people, Foster thought she’d be in a hotel for three to six months before she found permanent housing. Instead, she’s been in the program a year.

“(I’m) just ready to go,” she said. “Been ready, but I feel like it’s time now, like it’s past time.”

Shameka Foster outside the Los Angeles Community Action Network offices near where she used to pitch a tent in the Skid Row neighborhood of Los Angeles on Oct. 8, 2024.

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Foster’s time in the hotel hasn’t always been easy. She’s had multiple bad or humiliating experiences — such as when a staff member walked into her room while she was changing, when the nurse in the hotel wouldn’t give her her blood pressure medication, or when she got food poisoning from a breakfast served, she said. There’s a long list of rules that she sometimes chafes under: Guests aren’t allowed, for example, and residents can’t get fresh toilet paper rolls after 2 p.m., she said. Foster doesn’t know how to access the counseling she wants to help her process the stress and trauma of everything she’s been through in the past few years.

“I’ve been going through it and shedding a lot of tears,” Foster said, “getting angry and stuff, and sick, humiliated, and just treated like I wasn’t a human.”

Her journey into housing has been frustrating, too. Whenever Foster had a question, such as how to apply or what next steps she should take, her case managers never knew the answer, she said. It took six months for her even to be matched with a housing navigator who had more expertise, she said.

Eventually, she took matters into her own hands, applied for an apartment in a newly constructed building, pestered the manager with emails and showed up at the building’s ribbon cutting.

Management at the building told her she should be able to move in by the end of the month. But she’s trying not to get her hopes up.

A tale of two encampment programs

Eight months after the city of LA launched Inside Safe, LA County kicked off its copycat program, dubbed Pathway Home. The approach was basically the same: Clear encampments throughout LA County, move the occupants into hotels, and then move them from there into permanent housing.

But the county learned from the city’s challenges. Before the county removes an encampment through Pathway Home, it makes sure it has enough rental subsidies for every camp occupant who is expected to need one. As a result, people are getting housed faster.

The nonprofit The People Concern runs two city hotels and one county hotel. People stay at the city hotels an average of 240 days, according to Maceri. At the county hotel, it’s just 99 days.

Nonprofit PATH, which operates three city and three county hotels, sees a similar disparity. And people in the county program also are more likely to get permanent housing. Just 36% of those who moved out of PATH’s city-sponsored hotels went into permanent housing, compared to 63% of those who moved out of the county-sponsored hotels, according to the nonprofit.

The county’s program is smaller than the city’s. Pathway Home has moved 145 people into permanent housing so far, while Inside Safe has moved 741.

It’s also easier for residents in the county hotels to access resources such as mental health care because the county is the one running those programs, according to Maceri and Uribe. When the county clears an encampment through Pathway Home, everything from animal control to the department of mental health has staff on site, Uribe said. That’s incredibly helpful, she said, because people are connected with those services from the beginning.

“The county, definitely, they bring the resources,” Uribe said. “It is very different.”

Some cities have said no to those resources. City councils in West Covina and Norwalk both voted down the county’s proposals to open Pathway Home hotels there, after a backlash from the community.

But the program made a big difference in Signal Hill, a tiny city of fewer than 12,000 people near Long Beach. In March, LA County helped Signal Hill move about 45 people from encampments directly into permanent housing.

As a result, the city achieved the elusive white whale status of “functional zero,” which means it has the ability to quickly find housing for anyone who becomes homeless.

“Immediately after the operation we had zero, literally zero, because everyone we knew was housed, including people living in cars,” said Signal Hill City Manager Carlo Tomaino. “That was literally everybody.”

The city had started trying to move people indoors a year earlier, and its outreach team had developed relationships with everyone living on the street, Tomaino said. But Signal Hill, which has no homeless shelters of its own, wouldn’t have been able to house everyone without the county’s resources.

The city has kept its functional zero status since then.

One couple falls through the cracks; someone else gets housing

LA County launched its Pathway Home program in August 2023 by clearing an encampment known as The Dead End along a cul-de-sac in unincorporated Lennox, near the airport. The operation moved 59 people indoors.

On a recent Tuesday more than a year later, that stretch of road was empty — no tents in sight.

But nearby, a handful of people had pitched tents under the 405 Freeway overpass. Perched on a milk crate on a hill above those tents, 52-year-old Jennifer Marzette ate Burger King for lunch with her partner, Enrique Beltran, as cars whizzed by.

The couple lived at The Dead End encampment off and on for about eight years. But when county workers came to move the camp’s residents into a hotel, Marzette and Beltran were told they weren’t on the list, Marzette said. She speculates they probably weren’t at their tent when staff first came by to collect names.

Jennifer Marzette and her partner Enrique Beltran kiss each other while in a cove under the 405 freeway in Inglewood on Oct. 8, 2024.

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So they’re still sleeping on the street, now a few blocks away from their former camp. They’ve been trying to get into housing or a shelter program together, but have had multiple false starts. They got a housing voucher, but it expired in January, before they could find an apartment that would take it, Marzette said.

In February or March, they were told they could move into a “family room” at Exodus Recovery’s “Safe Landing” shelter, she said. But they were two hours late to their appointment (the complexities of life on the street sometimes make it hard to get to places on time, Marzette said) and lost the spot. Then, earlier this month, a caseworker said they would get a room at a local hotel. That fell through, Marzette said, and she suspects it’s because they found out she was arrested for domestic violence and jailed briefly in December, over what she says was a misunderstanding during an argument with Beltran.

“I was crying the other day,” she said, as she recounted all of the missed opportunities for someone to help her. “I felt like…that’s just how it goes.”

Chris Felts had a much different experience. He was homeless for two decades, sleeping on sidewalks and in parks, or in doorways when it rained. The 68-year-old had tried several times to get into housing, but it always took so long that he got discouraged and gave up. In February, the county moved him into a hotel in Santa Monica through Pathway Home. Then, in June, he got his very own studio apartment, subsidized with a rental voucher.

Now, he’s re-learning how to live indoors. He’s practicing his cooking and trying to take care of his health by walking between 5,000 and 7,500 steps a day in his neighborhood.

But the best part, Felts said, is finally having privacy.

“I have a chance to just be by myself,” he said. “When you’re homeless you don’t really have that opportunity. There’s always going to be people around.”

A ping pong hustler for the ages, a Neil Diamond interpreter for the '80s, choral music both comic and spiritual, plus tormented teens, twisted families, and a giant snake on the loose. It's quite the jolly holiday at your local cineplex.

They join a new Avatar sequel, a Bradley Cooper-directed drama, and more in theaters.

Marty Supreme

In theaters Thursday

I feel as if I should tell you to speed-read this review, preferably with Fats Domino's "The Fat Man" blaring in your ear. Josh Safdie's adrenaline-fueled, screwball comedy about a table tennis hustler who dreams of world domination — in a sport that hasn't registered yet with the American public — is a mesmerizing cinematic tour de force. Timothée Chalamet plays Marty Mauser (loosely based on real-life 1940s and '50s U.S. ping pong champ and petty criminal Marty Reisman), graduating from determined kid-with-a-passion to aggrieved also-ran-in-full-melt-down mode, attracting and then alienating everyone he comes across. We meet him as a New York shoe salesman having storeroom trysts with his married childhood sweetheart (Odessa A'zion) and prepping for a bout in England for which he can't even afford plane fare.

Marty establishes with a series of heists and scams that he's got no problem cheating or stealing to get there, then regales the press with a pugnacious racist routine that lands him on front pages before his first serve. Chalamet's live-wire approach is neatly countered by a serenely sensual turn by Gwyneth Paltrow as an aging movie star who finds Marty amusing and alarming in about equal measure. And the film's just getting started at that point, careening towards a championship in Japan with the propulsive, harrowing, rush-to-judgment feel of Safdie's Uncut Gems mixed up with dizzying comedy. It's a thrill ride, pure and simple. — Bob Mondello

Song Sung Blue

In theaters Thursday

Mike and Claire Sardina, the real-life, blue-collar Milwaukee couple who formed a Neil Diamond tribute act in the 1980s, get the sequin-and-spangle treatment in this Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson love-fest. Writer and director Craig Brewer keeps the music central and the sentiment tolerable as the couple meets cute, bonds quick, and forms a musical act known professionally as Lightning and Thunder. The stars are well-matched and appealing — Hudson does a winning Patsy Cline impersonation, and Jackman completely nails Neil Diamond's sound and bearing. The couple's story, which has more downs than ups, doesn't quite match the mood of a movie determined to be ever-and-always-up. Still, the stars are engaging, the supporting cast great fun, and the music rousing. — Bob Mondello

Anaconda

In theaters Thursday

The original Anaconda movie came out almost 30 years ago, sending an assortment of '90s movie stars down the Amazon, where they were menaced and occasionally crushed and/or devoured by giant deadly snakes. That film, starring Jennifer Lopez and Ice Cube, was a hit that spawned a handful of lightly regarded sequels.

Heavy on meta references to the original film, the new Anaconda is not quite a reboot, it's not quite a sequel, and it's played for laughs. Jack Black and Paul Rudd star as lifelong friends who grew up wanting to be filmmakers. But they've followed different career paths — Paul Rudd's character is a struggling actor whose biggest role was a bit part on the TV show S.W.A.T., while Jack Black's character makes wedding videos while yearning to shoot something more creative. They gather their old friends and collaborators — played by Thandiwe Newton and Steve Zahn — and head to the Amazon to shoot a meta reimagining of Anaconda. As you can imagine, this proves harder than it sounds. — Stephen Thompson

The Plague

In limited theaters Wednesday

The first image is an eerie, underwater shot — sun-dappled blues, greens, and greys — its peace suddenly exploded as bodies plunge into the pool. Middle school boys, limbs all akimbo, almost literally at sea, as they struggle for equilibrium. It's an apt beginning for the story of a youngster trying to figure out where he fits in among the cliques at a summer water polo camp. Ben (Everett Blunck) is the camp newbie, Jake (Kayo Martin) its smirking cool kid who picks up on his fellow campers' idiosyncrasies and exploits them.

He tells Ben that Eli (Kenny Rasmussen), a withdrawn boy with a rash, has the "plague" and must be avoided. Ben, seeing the obvious pain the outcast is in, can't square that with his own sense of decency, but also doesn't want to be ostracized, and his attempt to split the difference leads the film into Lord of the Flies territory. Charlie Polinger's directorial debut looks breathtaking, feels unnerving, and traffics cleverly in body-horror tropes as it basically establishes that 12-year-old boys are savages who should never be without adult supervision. — Bob Mondello

Father Mother Sister Brother

In limited theaters Wednesday

You might expect Jim Jarmusch to look at family relationships with a certain eccentricity, but not necessarily in the elegantly framed way he does in this triptych about adult children and the parents they don't begin to understand. The Father segment casts Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik as siblings who are stiff with each other, and even less comfortable with their garrulous con man of a dad (Tom Waits). Driver's come with provisions and cash, Bialik's come armed with an arched eyebrow, and Waits is ready for them both.

The second part, Mother, finds a sublimely chilly Charlotte Rampling hosting an awkward once-a-year tea for her daughters, one primly nervous (Cate Blanchett), the other pink-haired and boisterous (Vicky Krieps). And the final third, Sister Brother, finds Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat bonding in their recently deceased parents' now-empty Paris apartment. This segment seems less about estrangement, until you realize how little they actually know about their dear departed folks. There are running jokes about Rolexes, the expression "Bob's your uncle," and toasts to tie things together, along with a sweet, reflective tone that makes this one of the year's most compassionate films. — Bob Mondello

The Choral

In limited theaters Thursday

Director Nicholas Hytner and screenwriter Alan Bennett, who previously teamed up on The Madness of King George, The History Boys, and The Lady in the Van, are plumbing shallower depths in this gentle dramedy about an amateur chorus in 1916. When their choirmaster leaves to fight in World War I, grieving mill owner Roger Allam, who funds the chorus, reluctantly hires Dr. Guthrie (Ralph Fiennes), a gifted choirmaster but a divisive choice in this intensely nationalistic moment — because he's spent the last few years in Germany. He also exhibits "peculiarities" (code for being gay) but this seems less important to the locals.

Fiennes is briskly dismissive of local traditions, snippy about English appreciation for the arts, and celebrated enough in music circles to persuade composer Edward Elgar (Simon Russell Beale) to let them perform his oratorio "The Dream of Gerontius." Elgar is less thrilled when he discovers the chorus is turning the oratorio into a story about the war, casting its elderly hero as a young soldier and generally making it what later generations would call "relevant." It's all sweet and sentimental, and though it's being released during awards seasons, feels as if it really wants to be considered for best picture of 1933. — Bob Mondello

No Other Choice

In select theaters Thursday

"I've got it all," says paper factory supervisor Man-su as he hugs his family at a barbecue in the backyard of his elegant Korean home. He's grilling some eels given to him by the paper company's new American owners, secure in the knowledge that this must mean they value him. This being a social satire by director Park Chan-wook, it's reasonable to expect he will shortly be dealt a blow, and one day later, he's been axed. (The film is based on Donald E. Westlake's 1997 horror-thriller novel The Ax). He's distraught but can't express, or even really understand, that he feels he has lost his manhood, his mojo, and his reason for being.

On top of that, his industry is consolidating, so finding another job before his severance pay runs out and he loses his house (his childhood home) will be tricky. Asked if he'd consider a job outside the paper industry, Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) says that for him there is "no other choice," echoing the words his American bosses uttered about bringing down costs as they did layoffs. But with the end of severance payments looming, he hatches a plan to knock off his job market competition one by one. Isn't this mass murder? Well, he has "no other choice."

At first it seems as if we're in serial-killer comedy territory, but the filmmaker widens the frame to include narrative side trips — a stepson who's stealing cellphones, a daughter who's a cello prodigy, a wife who's working for a dentist that Man-su suspects has designs on her. Oh, and pig-farm trauma from his youth, and a passion for greenhouse gardening. Director Park has a lot going on, and a final paper-plant-mechanization sequence suggests that all these stabs at human agency may just have been humanity's last gasp. — Bob Mondello

The Testament of Ann Lee

In limited theaters Thursday

Ambitious, stylized, intense, and thoroughly unorthodox, Mona Fastvold's religious biopic tells the story of Shakers founder Ann Lee (a wild-eyed, fiercely committed Amanda Seyfried) as a full-scale musical drama. That's not to say there are finger-snapping tunes. The score adapts 18th century Shaker spirituals, and the choreography involves the thrusting limbs and clawing fingers of the seizure-like dancing that earned this puritan sect of "Shaking" Quakers their nickname.

We meet Ann as a pious youngster more interested in spiritual matters than matters of the flesh. Marriage to a man who enjoys inflicting pain during sex, and the deaths of her four children in infancy lead Ann to the conclusion that lifelong celibacy is among the keys to salvation. With the help of her younger brother (Lewis Pullman), she finds adherents to a religious philosophy that also emphasizes gender equality and simple living, and leads them to found a utopian, crafts-based community in America. Director Fastvold and her co-writer Brady Corbet (the couple flipped roles from last year's The Brutalist) serve up Ann's spiritual journey in ecstatically musical terms, which is at once distancing and … well, ecstatic, though it pales a bit over the course of two-and-a-quarter hours. — Bob Mondello 

Copyright 2025 NPR

In the 1940s and '50s, New York City table tennis was a gritty subculture full of misfits, gamblers, doctors, actors, students and more. They competed, bet on the game or both at all-night spots like Lawrence's, a table tennis parlor in midtown Manhattan. A talented player could rake in hundreds in cash in one night. In this world, a handsome, bespectacled Jewish teenager named Marty Reisman was a star.

His game was electric. "Marty had a trigger in his thumb. He hit bullets. You could lose your eyebrows playing with him," someone identified only as "the shirt king" told author Jerome Charyn for his book Sizzling Chops and Devilish Spins: Ping-Pong and the Art of Staying Alive.

The new movie Marty Supreme recreates this world. Timothée Chalamet's character, table tennis whiz Marty Mauser, is loosely inspired by Reisman.

Nicknamed "The Needle" for his slender physique, Reisman represented the U.S. in tournaments around the world and won more than 20 major titles, including the 1949 English Open and two U.S. Opens.

Like Chalamet's Marty Mauser, Reisman was obsessed with the game. In his 1974 memoir The Money Player: The Confessions of America's Greatest Table Tennis Champion and Hustler, Reisman wrote that he was drawn to table tennis because it "involved anatomy and chemistry and physics."

One of the game's "bad boys"

Reisman was a daring, relentless showman, always dressed to the nines in elegant suits and hats. "His personality made him legendary," said Khaleel Asgarali, a professional player who owns Washington, D.C. Table Tennis. Asgarali would often see Reisman at tournaments. "The way he carried himself, his charisma, his flair, the clothing, the style … Marty was a sharp dresser, man."

He was also one of the game's "bad boys," just like the fictional Marty Mauser. In 1949 at the English Open, he and fellow American star Dick Miles moved from their modest London hotel into one that was much fancier. They ran up a tab on room service, dry cleaning and the like and then charged it all to the English Table Tennis Association. When the English officials refused to cover their costs, the players said they wouldn't show up for exhibition matches they knew were already sold out. The officials capitulated — but later fined the players $200 and suspended them "indefinitely from sanctioned table tennis" worldwide for breaking the sport's "courtesy code."

Marty Reisman demonstrates an under-the-leg trick shot in 1955.

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Ping pong offered quick cash — and an outlet 

Reisman grew up on Manhattan's Lower East Side. His dad was a taxi driver and serious gambler. "It was feast or famine at our house, usually famine," Reisman wrote. His parents split when he was 10. His mother, who had emigrated from the Soviet Union, worked as a waitress and then in a garment factory. When he was 14, Marty went to live with his father at the Broadway Central Hotel.

Hustling was "just baked into his DNA," said Leo Leigh, director of a documentary about Reisman called Fact or Fiction: The Life and Times of a Ping Pong Hustler.

"I remember [Reisman] telling me that when he wanted to eat, he would wait until there was a wedding in the hotel, put on his best suit and just slip in and just sit and eat these massive, amazing meals," said Leigh, "And then he'd be ready for the night to go and hustle table tennis."

Reisman suffered panic attacks as early as nine years old. Playing ping pong helped with his anxiety. "The game so engrossed me, so filled my days, that I did not have time to worry," he wrote.

"Finding this game of table tennis — and finding that he had this amazing ability — became almost like an escape, a meditation," said Leigh.

Marty Reisman shows a behind-the-back trick shot in 1955.

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"Einstein, Hemingway, and Louis wrapped into one"

Reisman wanted to be the best ping pong player in the world. "To be an Einstein in your field, or a Hemingway, or a Joe Louis — there could be nothing, I imagined, more noble," Reisman wrote. "And table tennis champions were to me Einstein, Hemingway, and Louis wrapped into one."

The game was respected throughout Europe and Asia, turning ping pong stars into big names: In Marty Supreme, one who was imprisoned at Auschwitz tells the story of being spared by Nazi guards who recognize him. (Reisman's memoir tells a similar true story of the Polish table tennis champion Alojzy "Alex" Ehrlich.)

But in the U.S., ping pong was considered a pastime people played in their basements. New York City was an exception: "Large sums of money were bet on a sport that had no standing at all in this country," wrote Reisman.

Reisman dazzled spectators with his flair on the table.

"If you look at footage of Marty in the '50s and '60s, you could almost compare it to the footage of Houdini," said Leigh. "He would blow the ball into the air and then he would, you know, knock it under his leg or just do some acrobats. It was almost like putting on a show."

One of his gimmick shots was breaking a cigarette in two with a slam.

Marty Reisman after winning the final men's singles game at the English Open in 1949.

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Chasing a dream "that no one respected"

Marty Supreme co-writer and director Josh Safdie grew up playing ping pong with his dad in New York City. "I had ADHD and found it to be quite helpful," he told NPR. "It's a sport that requires an intense amount of focus and an intense amount of precision." Safdie said his great uncle played at Lawrence's and used to tell him about the different characters he met there, including Reisman's friend and competitor Dick Miles.

It was Safdie's wife who found Reisman's book in a thrift store and gave it to him. When he read it, Safdie was finishing a dream project that was years in the making, the 2019 movie Uncut Gems starring Adam Sandler. "Every step of the way, there was either a hurdle or a stop gap or a laugh in my face," said Safdie, "And very few believers in that project."

Safdie likened the experience to Reisman's obsession with becoming a table tennis champion "who believed in this thing and had a dream that no one respected."

A new racket changes the game

In 1952, Japanese player Hiroji Satoh stunned the table tennis world by winning the Men's Singles at the World Championships playing with a new type of racket that had thick foam rubber. Unlike the traditional hardbat, the sponge rubber silenced the pock of the ball hitting the racket. Reisman wrote that the new surface caused the ball "to take eerie flights … Sometimes it floated like a knuckleball, a dead ball with no spin whatsoever. On other occasions the spin was overpowering."

"Marty really liked the sound of the old hardbat," said Asgarali, "When the sponge racquet came out, Marty wasn't competitive anymore. He totally fell out of the game."

Leigh said Reisman would tell just about anyone who would listen how Hiroji Satoh destroyed his game.

He was "constantly analyzing and reanalyzing his personality, who he is, where he's going," said Leigh. He would "sit with all these academics and these writers and these almost philosophers and just talk for hours" about how the rubber bat "completely" ruined his game. "He was always searching for something."

In 1958, Reisman bought the Riverside Table Tennis Club on Manhattan's Upper West Side, a popular spot frequented by celebrities including Matthew Broderick and Dustin Hoffman. In 1997, at age 67, he won the United States Hardbat Championship.

Marty Reisman died in 2012 at age 82. A The New York Times profile of him less than a year prior started with the headline, "A Throwback Player, With a Wardrobe to Match."

Copyright 2025 NPR

As journalists, we measure success not just in clicks or conversions, but in what happens after a story makes its way into the world. Impact isn't always immediate or easily quantified. It can surface quietly — in an email from a listener, a shift in public understanding, or a decision made differently because someone finally has the information they need. In a nonprofit newsroom, those moments matter as much as any headline.

Over the past year, NPR's reporting has met audiences where they are, reflecting the realities they're living every day. Coverage of tariffs, affordability and the cost of living connected sprawling economic policy to household grocery receipts and credit card balances. Investigations explained how decisions made in Washington ripple outward — to farmers, veterans, federal workers and families struggling to stay afloat.

For many listeners and readers, the impact was practical and validating: tools to manage debt, clarity about a confusing economy, or simply the feeling of being seen.

Other stories carried consequences far beyond the personal. Reporting helped reinstate sidelined CDC scientists, prompted congressional investigations and new legislation, restored lifesaving grants, and pushed companies and institutions toward greater transparency and accountability. From the ethics of AI-generated music to secretive government data practices, NPR journalists illuminated systems often hidden from public view — and those stories didn't stop at awareness; they led to action.

And in places where the human cost is hardest to capture, NPR stayed present. From Gaza to Zambia, from immigration courts to National Guard group chats, our reporting centered the lived experiences behind policy and power. In response, listeners told us they donated, spoke up, reconsidered long-held assumptions, or felt less alone.

What follows is just a sampling of the stories NPR staff believe made some of the deepest ripples this year — reminders of what rigorous, compassionate journalism can do, and why the work remains as urgent as ever.

— Thomas Evans, editor in chief of NPR

Extensive coverage of tariffs, the cost of living and affordability reflects NPR audience's reality

"The tariffs story highlighted how big, macroeconomic stories like tariffs were impacting individual Americans, bringing home why politics matters — and telling stories in the way NPR does best," says reporter Emily Feng.

NPR reporters stayed on top of this coverage, from asking Americans to send in their receipts to show tariffs in effect to polling Americans about how they're feeling about the economy. NPR journalists also kept a tracker of Trump's tariff threats and trade deals, as well as continued coverage of the cost of living crisis many Americans are feeling.

Life Kit also created a month-long newsletter series (that you can still sign up for!) about how to pay down credit card debt. More than 100 people emailed us saying how much they appreciated the newsletter and how it helped validate the measures they were taking to pay off their credit card debt. "With helpful newsletters like this, I'm confident I can start and stay on the right path," one subscriber said.

An investigation contributes to CDC lab scientists getting reinstated

When all 27 scientists in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Division of Viral Hepatitis were put on administrative leave in April, they were in the middle of investigations in several states. No other lab in the world has the capacity to genetically trace hepatitis outbreaks — which can be spread in food or by sharing needles — to their source.

NPR exclusively interviewed five scientists at the CDC about the lab's closure and explained the nature of the work the lab does in an investigation. In June, all 27 of the lab's scientists were told they could come back to work at the CDC, along with more than 400 other workers whose layoffs were revoked. "People who worked at the lab attributed getting their jobs back in part to NPR's early reporting on their predicament," reporter Chiara Eisner says.

Reporting on DOGE leads to an independent investigation and new legislation

Jenna McLaughlin's exclusive reporting on how DOGE may have taken sensitive labor data quickly led to outcry from more than 50 lawmakers demanding an independent investigation into DOGE's activities at the National Labor Relations Board, the Inspector General for the NLRB launching an investigation, and congressional demands that Microsoft provide information about DOGE's use of code to remove sensitive data.

NPR's exclusive reporting on a DOGE staffer's high-level access to an internal farm loan database also prompted immediate reaction on Capitol Hill, demands for answers from lawmakers, and even spurred lawmakers to pen new legislation in response. "The story illuminated the impact of DOGE's secret activities on Americans outside of Washington, particularly farmers who rely on government subsidies and have already been struggling under the collective weight of tariffs, climate change, agricultural consolidation, and other challenges," McLaughlin says.

An exploration of the ethics of labeling AI-generated music helps lead to more transparency

"After an AI project posing as a group of human musicians blew up on Spotify over the summer, I wanted to understand how streaming platforms are responding to the rise of generative AI," reporter Isabella Gomez Sarmiento says. She spoke with a professor of digital forensics, the research team behind an AI detection tool, and a journalist/author who investigated Spotify's business practices. They all emphasized that transparency about generative AI usage is key to empowering both musicians and music fans. "A month later — and after I asked Spotify directly if they had considered implementing an AI tagging system — the company announced it would roll out a new AI spam filter on the platform," Gomez Sarmiento says.

Reporting helps reinstate a grant that could save kids' lives

Elissa Nadworny reported on a 4-year-old named Caleb who has a failing heart, and how a university researcher's federal grant, which could help kids like him, was canceled. That story helped Cornell University make a deal with the White House, reinstating the doctor's grant. "Calling Caleb's mom Nora and telling her the good news was certainly a career highlight," Nadworny says.

Caleb had a question after learning his story might help families like his. "Did I change the whole world?" he asked. Yes, Caleb. You might just have.

"Then, on Thanksgiving, I got more great news: Our story had led to changes in a clinical trial, which meant Caleb was able to switch to a different driver for his artificial heart," Nadworny says. Instead of just 30 minutes running on battery, his new one can be unplugged for up to 8 hours.

An investigation leads to Congress calling for a crackdown on companies charging disabled vets

A group of 43 members of Congress have called for action against unaccredited companies that charge veterans for help filing for disability benefits with the Department of Veterans Affairs.

The move came in response to reporting from NPR that showed the claims consulting industry is using aggressive tactics to make millions off veterans, despite warnings from the VA's lawyers that doing so may be in violation of federal law.

In an encrypted group chat, a group of National Guard members expressed worry over Trump's deployments. NPR sat down with them to hear more

"During a year of President Trump's extraordinary deployments of the National Guard to several cities around the country, this was one of the first times we heard in depth from several guard members about how they're feeling and what they're thinking about," reporter Kat Lonsdorf says.

Telling their stories helped people with HIV get life-saving medication

A few months after President Trump abruptly dismantled USAID, a reporting team went to Zambia to investigate the impact. They found people with HIV whose U.S.-funded clinics, which had provided their daily medication to suppress the virus, had shut their doors without warning. Without the pills, people were getting sick and showing signs of HIV developing to AIDS.

After our stories ran, the Zambian government doubted our reporting — until they did their own investigation. They then worked with a local pastor we'd profiled to help people in the community get their life-saving medication.

We tracked the loss of thousands of jobs as corporate America moves away from DEI

NPR financial correspondent Maria Aspan was first to report on several parts of corporate America's retreat from diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. Her in-depth reporting about one veteran DEI executive told the wider story of the emotional and personal toll this corporate rollback has taken on people working in this once-red-hot field.

Aspan's reporting resonated deeply with NPR's audiences. "As someone who has dedicated over two decades to DEI work, I felt every word of this," one reader wrote in response.

Reporting on missing children in Syria who were likely being trafficked leads to arrests and other action

"This reporting has had a cascading impact," senior producer Liana Simstrom says. It helped trigger the arrests of several senior orphanage workers that NPR had interviewed and photographed, including one who was widely suspected of trafficking the children. It also helped lead to the creation of a high-level government committee to trace the missing children. Our story also led to the SOS Children's Village acknowledging that they did not know the full extent of the trafficking of children that happened under their watch.

A steady stream of stories from Gaza kept a spotlight on the conflict

An NPR exclusive dove deeply into how U.S. policy on Israel's war in Gaza led to a declaration of famine in the enclave after nearly two years of war. In interviews with more than two dozen former senior U.S. officials, NPR reporters found that many people who were directly involved in shaping U.S. policy were now asking: Did we do enough to prevent this? "We were struck by just how many former U.S. officials wanted to talk. The conversations were emotional and raw, and offered a look into the incredibly difficult and complicated relationship between the U.S. and Israel as the conflict progressed," reporter Kat Lonsdorf says.

It has been difficult to chronicle the enormous losses to Palestinian families during Israel's offensive in Gaza, one of the most destructive in recent history. An Israeli strike on a Gaza apartment building -- one of the deadliest of the Israel-Hamas war -- killed 132 members of one family last year. The few survivors documented the dead. Working with journalists in Gaza, we reconstructed what happened to this large family in a single moment.

NPR reporter in Gaza Anas Baba reported on the quest for food in the territory. He wrote: "I faced Israeli military fire, private U.S. contractors pointing laser beams at my forehead, crowds with knives fighting for rations and masked thieves — to get food from a group supported by the U.S. and Israel called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation." The foundation has since stopped operations.

Many people wrote in response to Planet Money's reporting on money falling apart in Gaza, saying that it represented the human day-to-day experience of life in Gaza and of being connected and wanting to help someone in the enclave. "Many listeners also tell us they donated to the characters in the piece as a result," executive producer Alex Goldmark says.

We told stories of the chaos of the Trump administration's cuts to the federal workforce and the people impacted

Throughout all the twists and turns, labor and workplace reporter Andrea Hsu was there every step of the way covering developments to the federal workforce and speaking to people directly impacted. "We stayed on top of the story and reported on what ultimately happened in these cases, and the impact it had on people's lives," Hsu says.

Early on during the chaos of the first "fork in the road" buyout offer and the purge of probationary employees — mostly more recent hires — multiple lawsuits against the Trump administration cited news stories, including from NPR. "There was so little official information coming out at the time that the lawyers were relying on media reports," Hsu says, including NPR's reporting.

Hsu shared stories from some of the 317,000 workers who are now out of the federal government throughout the year, interviewing military veterans who were summarily fired from their civilian jobs and dedicated civil servants who chose to walk away, among many others.

Reporting on a Trump administration citizenship tool finds U.S. citizens removed from voting rolls

For much of the year, NPR's Jude Joffe-Block and Miles Parks have reported on the DOGE-aided expansion of a federal data system known as SAVE and how it's been turned into a de facto tool to verify U.S. citizenship. Trump and his allies have long falsely claimed that U.S. elections are rife with noncitizens voting.

Joffe-Block and Parks broke the first story about how the administration overhauled SAVE in June and have been on the story aggressively ever since, reporting on how states were being encouraged to run their entire voter lists through it and how close to 50 million registered voters have been scrutinized.

More recently, Joffe-Block found that U.S. citizens are being flagged by the tool, and told the story of one U.S. citizen who was removed from the rolls as a result. Their reporting has been cited in multiple lawsuits around the system.

From ICE to immigration judges, NPR continued to report on immigration issues

NPR was the first to highlight the administration's practice of firing immigration judges and tracked multiple rounds of dismissals over the course of the year. Ximena Bustillo's reporting on understaffed immigration courts, for example, showed the human cost of the layoffs, as well as the cost to due process. She also worked with intern Anusha Mathur to show that judges with a background in immigrant defense were more likely to lose their jobs. The reporting helped uncover a lesser-known facet of the administration's crackdown and set the bar for coverage for other outlets.

"My story explicitly calling out DHS for calling on DACA recipients to self-deport definitely caused a stir," Bustillo says. "It's in the vein of exclusive reporting on how other people who had some immigration process or deportation protection have seen that pulled away and the impact that has had on the ground."

After NPR's reporting, legislation was introduced to ensure judges who retire or resign can't avoid some investigations into misconduct

Following NPR's reporting, the top Democratic lawmaker on the House Judiciary Committee introduced legislation that would ensure judges who retire or resign are not able to avoid or short-circuit investigations into allegations of misconduct. The Judicial Conference of the United States — the policymaking body for the federal courts — proposed new rules that would cover attorneys' fees for clerks and other employees who file meritorious workplace complaints and that would guarantee that judges who preside over complaints would not work in the same district as the alleged wrongdoers.

Federal court employees told NPR reporter Carrie Johnson that some individual judges have discussed the story with their clerks. She also heard that at a recent training session in Washington, D.C., attendees asked questions about the limitations of the judiciary's current system for assessing claims of misconduct by citing the NPR stories.
Copyright 2025 NPR

A Powerball player in Arkansas won a $1.817 billion jackpot in Wednesday's Christmas Eve drawing, ending the lottery game's three-month stretch without a top-prize winner.

The winning numbers were 04, 25, 31, 52 and 59, with the Powerball number being 19.

Final ticket sales pushed the jackpot higher than previous expected, making it the second-largest in U.S. history and the largest Powerball prize of 2025, according to www.powerball.com. The jackpot had a lump sum cash payment option of $834.9 million.

"Congratulations to the newest Powerball jackpot winner! This is truly an extraordinary, life-changing prize," Matt Strawn, Powerball Product Group Chair and Iowa Lottery CEO, was quoted as saying by the website. "We also want to thank all the players who joined in this jackpot streak — every ticket purchased helps support public programs and services across the country."

The prize followed 46 consecutive drawings in which no one matched all six numbers.

The last drawing with a jackpot winner was Sept. 6, when players in Missouri and Texas won $1.787 billion.

Organizers said it is the second time the Powerball jackpot has been won by a ticket sold in Arkansas. It first happened in 2010.

The last time someone won a Powerball jackpot on Christmas Eve was in 2011, Powerball said. The company added that the sweepstakes also has been won on Christmas Day four times, most recently in 2013.

Powerball's odds of 1 in 292.2 million are designed to generate big jackpots, with prizes growing as they roll over when no one wins. Lottery officials note that the odds are far better for the game's many smaller prizes.

"With the prize so high, I just bought one kind of impulsively. Why not?" Indianapolis glass artist Chris Winters said Wednesday.

Tickets cost $2, and the game is offered in 45 states plus Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Copyright 2025 NPR