Malcolm Gladwell

Richard Pryor had many of those moments.

He's called one of the greatest comedians who ever lived, as if what he was doing was simply funny.

But it was more than that.

It was a confession.

It was a man standing on a stage and saying things that people were not prepared to reckon with about race, about pain, about desire, about what it costs to be honest in a dishonest world.

Today, I'm sharing a preview of a new podcast that reexamines the icons we think we understand, including Richard Pryor.

It's called Big Lives, hosted by journalists Kai Wright and Emmanuel Josie.

They dig into the BBC archives to explore the story behind the icons who shape our culture.

Trailblazers like David Bowie, George Michael, Muhammad Ali, and Tina Turner to better understand how each legend set the stage for our contemporary cultural landscape.

Their episode on Richard Pryor refuses the easy version of the story.

Kai and Emmanuel trace Pryor's life from a childhood in a Peoria brothel to his complex rise to fame, and they don't flinch from any of it.

The racism he survived, the self-destruction, the volcanic honesty that cost him everything.

Here's a preview.

If you like what you hear, find more episodes of Big Lives wherever you get podcasts.

Hello, hello, revisionist history listeners.

As many of you will know, we did a seven-part series last fall called The Alabama Murders, the story of the death of a preacher's wife in the shoals in northwestern Alabama 35 years ago and the tragic reverberations of that case.

I honestly think it's one of the best things we've ever done on revisionist history.

And almost the exact time that our series dropped, HBO aired a brilliant documentary called The Alabama Solution.

The revisionist history series was about the death penalty in Alabama.

The Alabama Solution was about the prison system in Alabama.