‘Fresh Air’ Marks The 20th Anniversary Of The Premiere Of 'The Sopranos’

Critic David Bianculli offers an appreciation of the influential HBO drama. Plus, we listen back to archival interviews with series creator David Chase and Edie Falco, who played Carmela Soprano.

Kevin Hart Says Comedy’s Full Of ‘Flawed But Funny’ People, Himself Included

Kevin Hart said he’s “over” talking about the homophobic jokes that cost him the Oscars gig – but then he and Terry Gross talked about it anyway. They discussed  his upbringing in North Philly, how comedy is changing, and the fine line between edgy and offensive material. “The bad part about being a comedian is that sometimes you just aren’t funny,” he says. “Sometimes to grow as a comedian you got to go through the stupid part.” Hart’s new movie is The Upside.

Photo: Kevin Winter/Getty Images

‘Bad Behavior By People In High Office’: Rachel Maddow On The Lessons Of Spiro Agnew

There are countless presidential scandals in U.S. history, but very few of them have resulted in resignation or impeachment — which is precisely why MSNBC host Rachel Maddow was drawn to the story of Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon’s first vice president, who resigned in 1973.

Maddow notes there are many misconceptions concerning the former vice president — including the notion that his “big sin” centered on taxes.

“When I tried to sort of thumbnail in my mind what happened in the Agnew resignation, everything I thought about it was wrong,” she says. “I had assumed that it was a Watergate-adjacent scandal, that the FBI was looking into Watergate-related crimes and they stumbled upon something in Spiro Agnew’s taxes. … All of those things were completely wrong.”

Maddow and her former producer Mike Yarvitz created the podcast Bag Man to revisit Agnew’s story. Though his resignation was officially linked to tax evasion, they say that Agnew had engaged in bribery that dated back to the early 1960s, when, as Baltimore County executive, he demanded kickbacks in exchange for local engineering or architecture contracts. He continued the practice even after being elected governor of Maryland in 1967 and then vice president in 1969.

“He … started that scheme in local politics and then he carried it right into the White House,” Yarvitz says. “The men who were sort of streaming into his office at the White House were paying him money for contracts they had gotten in Maryland, and in some cases, he was trying to influence the awarding of federal contracts.”

After the Justice Department began looking into Agnew’s dealings, the vice president tried to pressure the U.S. attorney in charge of the case to halt the investigation — a response Maddow likens to the current administration’s reaction to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible ties to the Trump campaign.

“The parallels with what was going on in the Nixon and Agnew administration 45 years ago to the efforts by the Trump administration right now … is uncanny,” Maddow says. “The Agnew story is really helpful to understanding the way the system works when it confronts bad behavior by people in high office. We are capable of dealing with that as a country in a way that makes us proud of the people who are in public office who are dealing with it.”

Photo: AP Then-President Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew wave to the crowd at the Republican National Convention in 1972. Agnew would resign a year later

Ben Stiller Unlocks An ‘Old-Fashioned’ Prison Break In 'Escape At Dannemora’

Ben Stiller loves a good escape story. So when he heard about Richard Matt and David Sweat, two convicted murderers who used tools provided by a prison employee to break out of a New York state maximum security prison in June 2015, he was intrigued.

“What really interested me was how they were able to do this, how they were able to get away with this,” Stiller says. “It seemed like such an old-fashioned sort of escape, and I thought, 'Wow, how can that happen in today’s prison system?’”

Stiller explores the nuts and bolts of the escape — which involved sledge hammering through brick walls and cutting into and an 18-inch steam pipe — in his seven-part Showtime series Escape at Dannemora. The series also dives into the complicated relationship between Matt and Sweat (played by Benicio del Toro and Paul Dano) and Joyce “Tilly” Mitchell (Patricia Arquette), the civilian prison worker who enabled their escape.

In the series, Stiller shows Mitchell exchanging sexual favors with both Matt and Sweat prior to the escape. Mitchell and Sweat maintain that their relationship was not sexual, but research and interviews with David Sweat made Stiller feel that it was a relationship “beyond the bounds” of what they claimed. And Stiller chose to dramatize it: “I wouldn’t have put that in there if I didn’t feel that that was closer to the truth,” he says.

Stiller says that shooting on location at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, N.Y., from which Matt and Sweat had escaped, helped him tell the story.

“For me, going into that prison and spending a very little amount of time in that prison, the first thing I thought about was getting out,” he says. “It doesn’t shock me that anybody in there would want to get out — even if you knew that the odds were against you.”

Photos: Courtesy of Showtime 

Childbirth Injury Led A New Mom To Start A Parenting Podcast ‘To Feel Less Alone’

Almost 10 years ago, journalist Hillary Frank was pregnant and planning to give birth without medication or surgery — but things didn’t go according to her plan.

Instead, Frank experienced a prolonged and difficult labor that left her with a traumatic injury — chronic pain from an episiotomy that didn’t heal as expected, and had to be redone. For months she was unable to walk, sit or easily hold or nurse her newborn daughter, and didn’t fully recover for three years. To make matters worse, beyond the physical injury, she felt she couldn’t talk openly about what had happened to her.

“There is a general sense in our society that it’s not proper to talk about these kinds of injuries,” Frank says. “If I had gotten injured that severely on any other part of my body, of course I would have been talking about it with my friends. … But because it was in a private part of my body I couldn’t.”

Gradually, Frank realized that other women had similar experiences. She decided to start the podcast The Longest Shortest Time to talk about childbirth, sex and the dilemmas of parenting young children. Frank says the best part about starting the podcast was connecting with other parents. 

“I wanted to know that I wasn’t alone in struggling after having had a child,” she says. “What was remarkable to me was how much variety there is in that struggle, just how much diversity there is in that struggle. And that made me feel less alone.”

Frank’s new book is called Weird Parenting Wins.

Photo: Richard Frank/Penguin Random House

Suspenseful ‘Water Cure’ Dips Into 2019’s Dystopian Zeitgeist

Sophie Mackintosh’s debut novel centers on four women living in a decrepit hotel on an isolated island. Critic Maureen Corrigan says The Water Cure is “everything this age seems to be demanding.”

Opinion: Migrant Girl’s Death Reveals A Need For More Interpreters Along The Border

Seven-year-old Jakelin Caal died in U.S. custody in December. Linguist Geoff Nunberg says her death might have been prevented had border agents spoken the Mayan language Q'eqchi’.

‘Vice’ Traces Dick Cheney’s Ascent From Yale Dropout To D.C. Power Player

Former Vice President Dick Cheney was the quintessential behind-the-scenes political power player. “He really has no signature speech — there’s no great Dick Cheney moment where he was in front of a pulpit delivering a great line,” says filmmaker Adam McKay. “He’s always kind of just been in the background.”

McKay aims to bring the powerful former vice president into the foreground in his new film, Vice, a dark comedy starring Christian Bale. The movie combines the work of investigative journalists with some speculation and comedy (McKay also directed Anchorman and The Big Short) to tell the story of Cheney’s ascent from Yale dropout, to West Wing operative under president George W. Bush.

“I think a lot of the ways that people like Cheney have gained power is that they rely on us being bored. They rely on us looking at what they do and assuming that it’s just bureaucracy and who cares?” McKay says. But, “when you really dig into it, it’s very exciting stuff. And it’s major stuff that changes the world.”

It’s hard for people to really fathom just how unfairly the misdemeanor system strips poor people of their wealth, or more accurately, wealth they don’t have.

— Alexandra Natapoff on the injustice Of America’s misdemeanor system

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Carrie Fisher, New York City - 1980

Yesterday was the two year anniversary of Carrie Fisher’s death. Terry Gross spoke with her just a few weeks before she died. Here’s that amazing interview.

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‘A Distinctive Voice’: Tracey Thorn Goes On ‘Record’

The Everything but the Girl singer stepped away from performing two decades ago in order to start a family. Now, she sings about the different stages of women’s lives on her latest solo album, Record.

On ignoring a famous singing teacher’s advice to sing in her “head voice” instead of in her natural chest voice

I don’t think she was very tolerant, really, of pop singers wanting to sing in their disastrous pop voices. I mean, most pop singers sing all wrong. … Most pop singing is about having a distinctive voice and using it in a distinctive way, which technically might be completely incorrect. When you go to a singing teacher, they usually try to correct those things and what you then come up against is that anxiety of, “Well, am I going to lose the thing that makes me distinctive if I start trying to sing properly? Do I just turn into a not-very-good proper singer?” …

I think I completely ignored that piece of advice from her. I didn’t have very many lessons, to be honest. I found bits of it helpful. I found some of it helpful as sort of warm up exercises, but then when it came to actually singing my songs, I would go back to singing in the voice that seemed like mine.

We’re replaying this interview today as part of our Best of 2018 series. 

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Hugh Masekela, 1956, after receiving a trumpet from Louis Armstrong. Photo by Alf Kumalo

Celebrating The Lives Of 6 Jazz Greats Who Died In 2018

Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead remembers the musical contributions of Hugh Masekela, Jerry González, Roy Hargrove, Buell Neidlinger, Randy Weston and Vancouver Jazz Festival founder Ken Pickering.

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‘Reluctant Psychonaut’ Michael Pollan Embraces The ‘New Science’ Of Psychedelics

Author Michael Pollan had always been curious about psychoactive plants, but his interest skyrocketed when he heard about a research study in which people with terminal cancer were given a psychedelic called psilocybin — the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms” — to help them deal with their distress.

“This seemed like such a crazy idea that I began looking into it,” Pollan says. “Why should a drug from a mushroom help people deal with their mortality?”

Pollan, whose previous books include The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense Of Food, started researching different experimental therapeutic uses of psychedelics, and found that the drugs were being used to treat depression, addiction and the fear of death.

Then he decided to go one step further: A self-described “reluctant psychonaut,” Pollan enlisted guides to help him experiment with LSD, psilocybin and 5-MeO-DMT, a substance in the venom of the Sonoran Desert toad.

Each of Pollan’s experiences with psychedelics was proceeded by worry and self-doubt. But, he says, “I realized later that was my ego trying to convince me not to do this thing that was going to challenge my ego.”

Pollan’s new book, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, recounts his experiences with the drugs and also examines the history of psychedelics as well as their possible therapeutic uses.

Photo: Images Etc Ltd/Getty Images

We re-aired this interview with Michael Pollan yesterday as part of our Best of 2018 series. Check your podcast feed! 

I think [social media] widens and deepens the experiences of what kids are going through. It forces kids to not just live their experience but be nostalgic for their experience while they’re living it — [to] watch people watch them.

— Bo Burnham, comic and director of Eighth Grade (Part of our Best of 2018 series)

Venture ‘Into The Spider-Verse’ For An Exuberant, Visually Stunning Thrill

If you thought you’d seen enough characters in red masks and blue suits to last a lifetime, well, you ain’t seen nothing yet: This new animated film puts a fresh spin on the Spider-Man saga.