Dave Itzkoff examines Williams' life and death in a new biography. Williams took his own life in 2014; an autopsy later revealed he had Lewy body dementia.
Jessica Knoll's new book The Favorite Sister combines murder with a reality TV show about powerful, ambitious women. She tells NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro reality TV is her guilty pleasure.
Dave Zirin's new biography portrays a black liberation activist with a conservative streak, a man with an alleged history of violence against women and maybe the greatest running back in NFL history.
Scholar Stephen Greenblatt says Shakespeare wrote his histories as a commentary on the era he lived in — and those plays still have important things to say about our current political climate.
In Locking Up Our Own, Pulitzer Prize-winning author James Forman Jr. argues that African-American leaders helped shape policies that harmed black communities. Originally broadcast July 17, 2017.
Jon Klassen and Mac Barnett are writing a children's book trilogy about shapes who are just like us. The second installment follows a straight-laced square who wonders if he's really a genius.
Filmmaker siblings Jay and Mark Duplass have been making movies together since they were kids. More recently, Mark says, "We had to dig out space from that beautiful co-dependence."
Bastianich grew up eating farm-to-table meals with her Italian family. After they fled Europe as refugees and emigrated to America, she drew on those childhood meals in opening her first restaurant.
Allison Pataki was on an airplane with her husband when he suffered an extremely rare, nearly fatal stroke. NPR's Michel Martin speaks with Pataki about her memoir Beauty in the Broken Places.