The complexities of our national quest for a more perfect union—the preamble phrase referenced in the title of “More Perfect,” the Supreme Court-focussed podcast spinoff of WNYC’s popular long-running show “Radiolab”—didn’t take long to become apparent in the show’s first season, which came out last summer. The show is often subtly astonishing. It’s both sobering in its thoughtful investigations of the United States government’s unfairness to many of its own citizens and quietly optimistic in its desire to make us understand. With brio, liveliness, and impressive reporting, Season 1 explores the Supreme Court’s role in justice and its opposite, in stories about cases involving the death penalty, redistricting, anti-sodomy laws, race-based jury selection, and beyond. Some cases it dives into are recent; others are historical, with timely implications. Season 2, which began last week, feels even more topical. “Last season, I feel like we were surfing the tail of the wave in some way,” the show’s host, Jad Abumrad, told me recently. This season, he said, “I feel like we’re really in the froth.” Topics so far include Japanese-American internment, the legacy of Dred Scott, gerrymandering, and, this week, the Second Amendment.

Season 2 opens with an episode about Korematsu v. United States, the case that upheld President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s executive order mandating the internment of American citizens of Japanese descent during the Second World War—a case that’s still on the books despite being a source of national shame. (The parallels to the Trump era are clear; in a clip, we hear a Trump supporter on Fox News citing Korematsu as a “precedent” that would “hold constitutional muster” for a Muslim registry.) The episode features a stellar and sensitive re-creation of the story of Fred Korematsu, a Japanese-American who resisted internment. It begins in the sixties, with a bit of “To Sir with Love,” and an account from Korematsu’s daughter, Karen Korematsu, about listening to a fellow high-school student give a book report about Japanese internment and the Korematsu case. She is startled: she has never heard a word about it. She asks her father about it that night, and he says that he did what he thought was right and that “the government was wrong.” But he’s still in so much pain that he can’t discuss it further.

Then the show takes us to 1941—some Big Band, some American joie de vivre, and archival audio of Fred Korematsu telling his story. It’s a beautiful day in the Bay Area, and he and his girlfriend, Ida, who is white, are driving around, looking at views of the Golden Gate Bridge and contemplating a picnic. Then they hear an announcement on the radio about the bombing of Pearl Harbor, by Japan. Korematsu is twenty-one; he has tried to enlist in the Army but was rejected because of his heritage. He returns to his parents’ house, next to their family business, a garden center. His parents, proud Japanese-Americans, are shocked, scared, and in despair. Authorities shine spotlights on their garden center at night, and a guard watches them; soon, the family is sent to an internment camp. Fred decides not to go—a decision that makes history. Eventually, Korematsu is turned in by a shop clerk in his neighborhood and sent to the holding facility where is family is. It’s a racetrack. He finds his family living in a stable of a horse barn.

The story unfolds from there, with perfect emotional and historical pitch. A lawyer from the A.C.L.U. takes Korematsu’s case. (“A.C.L.U., A.C.L.U.,” a robotic voice sings quietly.) At the camp, Korematsu’s fellow Japanese-Americans are ambivalent, fearing that making waves will invite retribution. “If you’re Fred at this point, it sounds lonelier than you can imagine,” Abumrad says in the episode. Korematsu had grown up saluting the flag and pledging allegiance; the Army hadn’t wanted him; his girlfriend had abandoned him; his community was wary of him; his case went to the Supreme Court, and he had lost.

Abumrad wants “More Perfect” to give listeners a portal to the past—and into the Supreme Court. Part of this is achieved through some truly incredible audio—Supreme Court testimony, archival recordings, interviews with living subjects and experts—and part through innovative sound design. Abumrad, who is forty-four, is a veteran radio journalist and composer who won a MacArthur “genius” grant, in 2011, and who, in 2012, produced and hosted a piece for WNYC about Wagner’s “Ring” cycle. He is known for his innovative and experimental sound design; his skills are manifold and his zeal is unending. The sonic wizardry on “Radiolab” can be sublime; at times, for my taste, it’s too much of a good thing, distracting from rather than enhancing the narrative. This impulse feels appealingly reined in on “More Perfect,” which tends to retain the sophistication and innovation of “Radiolab” without going over the top.

The trippiest “Radiolab”-style effect comes in the show’s intro, which we hear more of on Season 1 than we have so far on Season 2. It features the musical sound of Alfred Wong, who served as the Supreme Court marshal from 1976 to 1994, saying, “Oyez, oyez, oyez”—the traditional opening call, meaning “Hear ye,” in the court—enhanced by actual music. Abumrad has been to the Supreme Court a couple of times, and the “oyez” is “this beautiful ritualistic moment—a beautiful musical kind of chant,” he said. “We’re working with a composer here who’s just a goddam genius, Alex Overington,” Abumrad told me. Overington composed around the “oyez,” and the result “feels like a kind of an invocation, like a shaman who is standing at the portal of a dream world and he’s inviting you in,” Abumrad said. “There’s some way in which that resets expectations. I just love it as a pure musical object.”

Abumrad likes creating portals, especially with “empathic leaps” in the show’s storytelling, which bridge the gap between journalism and imagination, and between the listener and the ideas. I asked him what he was going for with the sound of “More Perfect.” “I don’t want it to feel like history,” he said. “I don’t want it to feel like law. I want it to feel like a dream that keeps shifting and changing, so the music that we’re trying to create has that sense of genres blending into one another. The first sort of sound of the thing, it’s almost like dub techno.” He laughed. “It has this kind of weird ‘Where am I?’ feeling, you know? I want that to be an unstable aspect to all of it.”

A few years ago, “Radiolab,” which Abumrad created, in 2002, and co-hosts, with Robert Krulwich, was “chugging along,” and he was getting a little restless. “We’d done a string of stories that were all interesting for their own reasons, but they started to feel similar, of a piece,” he said. He wanted to shake things up. “I was having these editorial tantrums where I’d be, like, ‘Damn it, we need to do sports!’ ” he said. One day, the Supreme Court released its docket, and, reading it, he saw eleven potential stories. As an experiment, he asked the staff members to make a couple of phone calls on a case and then report back. “None of us had gone to law school or knew one thing about the Supreme Court, which was sort of the fun of it,” he said. One staffer, Tim Howard, chose a case called Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl. After Howard made his calls, Abumrad said, “he just came back and was, like, ‘Fuck, this is really interesting. At the center of this case, you have what seems like a super-small, run-of-the-mill custody battle.’ ” (Adopted baby; biological father wanting custody.) “But he was, like, ‘The fate of this two-year-old girl is connected to massive questions about Native American sovereignty in this country. And it’s connected to a history of Native American kids being abducted off of reservations. Like, literally abducted. And it’s connected to this law that we passed that people are trying to challenge, and it’s somehow peripherally related to casino interests,’ ” Abumrad said. “I was just, like, ‘Wait, what?’ As a storyteller, it was one of those things you’re always searching for—the Whitman-esque universe in a blade of grass. And he had found that in this case.” The resulting episode, which came out on “Radiolab,” in 2013, and is featured again in Season 1 of “More Perfect,” is fascinating. As a listener, your perspective shifts several times; your loyalties divide and become complicated. All the while, your mind is reeling, yet again, about the long and ongoing history of white supremacy in this country.