With more information coming at you all day every day, it can be hard to know where to focus.

The new, consider this newsletter from NPR, can be that focus.

Every weekday afternoon, we take one of the day's biggest stories and break it down in a simple

skimmable format so you can get a better grasp of one important topic and what

it means for you in a couple of minutes. Sign up for free at NPR.org

consider this newsletter.

You're listening to Code Switch, the show about recent identity from NPR.

I'm Gene Demby.

On Thursday, the family of O.J. Simpson announced that he had died. He was 76.

O.J spent the first half of his life, known as a record-breaking football superstar in college and then later in

the NFL.

But of course in the back half of his life, he was the defendant in one of the most highly

publicized murder trials in American history. That trial in which O.J. Simpson was accused of killing his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ron Goldman in 1994 was covered with the kind of zeal and thoroughness that seems like impossible today.

There are some estimates that somewhere between 95 to 150 million people watched the verdict live when it was announced.

And race became central to OJ's defense and the trial in some ways became

the rickety platform upon which the American public would well litigate their feelings about race, to the point where that discourse often eclipsed the two homicides at the center of the trial.

The irony is that O.J Simpson had spent much of his public life to that point actively trying to not touch race. He was famously

quoted as saying, quote, I'm not black, I'm OJ. end quote. He wanted to be marketable and

bankable and post-racial decades before that was even a coinage.

But OJ Simpson would become an avatar for so many of the anxieties and

resentments around the way race and class and celebrity function in the United States.

Back in 2016 I spoke with Ezra Edelman,

...