James Gandolfini starred in The Sopranos for six seasons. The show, which ended in 2007, was considered an instant classic and permanently linked Gandolfini to his character, Tony Soprano. Gandolfini died in 2013, but a new biography tells the story of his life. In Gandolfini, Jason Bailey portrays the actor as an unlikely star who struggled after The Sopranos to grow as an artist. In today's episode, the author joins NPR's Scott Simon for a conversation about Gandolfini's path to HBO stardom, a famous pay negotiation, and the actor's struggle with personal demons.
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Tucked in the city’s municipal code is a law that prohibits the production, storage and launching of nuclear weapons in Chicago. We find out why the city decided this law was necessary.
Located in the middle of San Francisco Bay is one of the Bay Area’s most iconic landmarks: Alcatraz. It is one of the most popular tourist attractions in the country, with over a million visitors every year.
Most people know of Alcatraz as a prison, yet it only served as a prison for a very short period of time.
During its history, it has served multiple different functions and has had many different lives.
Learn more about Alcatraz, its past, present, and possible futures, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
As a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, Kevin Fagan embedded with the city's unhoused population. Now retired, he's written a book built around two of the people he got to know through his reporting. The Lost and the Found zooms in on the lives of Rita and Tyson, who ended up chronically homeless in San Francisco through a cascade of circumstances. In today's episode, Fagan speaks with Here & Now's Deepa Fernandes about their stories, Fagan's own experience with poverty and housing insecurity, and the Reagan-era policies that led to an increased unhoused population in the 1980s.
To listen to Book of the Day sponsor-free and support NPR's book coverage, sign up for Book of the Day+ at plus.npr.org/bookoftheday
The U.S. is known around the world for its problem with gun violence. The vast majority of murders in the U.S. are committed using guns. But what leads one person to shoot another? The "conventional wisdom" says gun violence is usually the act of calculated criminals or people acting out of desperate economic circumstances. But economist Jens Ludwig believes the conventional wisdom is wrong. Today on the show, he explains why he believes many of us fundamentally misunderstand the problem of gun violence and how behavioral economics reveals some potential solutions.
On April 15, 1912, one of the greatest disasters in modern nautical history took place.
The RMS Titanic, one of the most celebrated ships of its era, struck an iceberg and sank on its inaugural voyage.
While the story of the Titanic is well known, it has been exaggerated throughout the years, and there are many misconceptions about the ship and its sinking that have persisted to this day.
Learn more about the RMS Titanic, its conceptualization, building, and sinking on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Where does NPR get its funding? Today on the show, we open our books and share a brief history of public radio. And we learn what's at stake with President Trump's executive order to cut off federal funding to NPR.
Under NPR's protocol for reporting on itself, no corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.
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Julie Chan has an average life working as a cashier at a grocery store. But she's constantly getting mistaken for a famous influencer, her estranged identical twin Chloe. One day, Julie receives a mysterious phone call that results in her decision to swap lives with her sister, adopting Chloe's followers and the glamorous lifestyle that comes with them. That's the setup of Liann Zhang's debut novel, Julie Chan Is Dead. In today's episode, Zhang talks with NPR's Ayesha Rascoe about the author's own experience as a teenage "skinfluencer" – and Zhang's views on influencer culture today.
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