Bullseye with Jesse Thorn Folgen

Tom Scott is a rapper from New Zealand's underground hip-hop scene. He's been rapping for over a decade now. He grew up in Auckland – the biggest city in a very small country. In 2018, Tom released an amazing, beautiful album under the name Avantdale Bowling Club. On the record, he reflects on his roots. His childhood. The friendships he's lost. The places he's been. His family. It's an intimate hip hop record with jazz instrumentation. Tom recently released Trees, a follow up to the self-titled debut album. We're taking a moment to revisit our conversation with Tom from 2019. Tom explains what it's like to write an album that brings back somber memories, and why he felt it was important to use original jazz songs, rather than jazz samples.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Before John David Washington was an actor, he was lacing up the pads every week for a career in professional football. It seems fitting, then, that when he took up acting, his breakthrough role was the portrayal of an NFL player on HBO's Ballers . Washington has since gone onto play a bunch of other big parts since Ballers. He has since had a lead part in Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman and a role in the brand new mystery comedy Amsterdam, which just hit theaters. In 2019, he joined us to chat about the many times he had to audition for his role on Ballers. Plus, what it was like to get a stunning offer for his role in BlacKkKlansman in a text message from Spike Lee.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hua Hsu is a staff writer for The New Yorker. He's written profiles and reviews of artists like Bjork, bell hooks, and Sandra Oh. He's also a professor of English at Bard College, with a passion for elevating underappreciated talent in literature. His new book, Stay True, is an intimate and probing memoir. In Stay True, Hsu looks back on his early twenties, when he was an undergrad at University of California, Berkeley. Stay True is about the most intimate relationships that defined his adolescence and young adulthood. Hua Hsu shares how writing this book reflected and refracted his relationship with his own American-ness.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy