Fresh Air

As powerful a grip as King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table still exert on our imaginations, there haven't been enough great or even good movies made about them. There have been some, of course — I'm fond of the lush Wagnerian grandeur of John Boorman's Excalibur and will always love Monty Python and the Holy Grail — but they're more the exception than the rule.

Dana Spiotta's new novel, Wayward, is about a 53-year-old woman named Samantha — Sam — Raymond, who's going through menopause and becomes a little unhinged. She leaves her husband and her teenage daughter in the suburbs of Syracuse and impulsively moves into a dilapidated Arts and Crafts-style bungalow in a crumbling downtown neighborhood of that city.

Dr. Leana Wen advises that you should think of your COVID-19 vaccine like a very good raincoat: If it's drizzling or you're in a rainstorm? You're well-protected. "But if you're going in and out of thunderstorms every single day and now there's a hurricane — at some point you're going to get wet," she says.

The 60-year-old South Korean writer-director Hong Sang-soo is one of the most tirelessly productive filmmakers working today. He's made more than two dozen films over the past couple of decades, sometimes churning out one or even two a year. The consistency and quality of his work have earned him a significant following at film festivals and among arthouse audiences, who've come to love his wry and melancholy movies: slender, low-budget dramedies that are often focused on the fractious dynamics between women and men.

Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson is coming out of the pandemic a changed man. The co-founder of The Roots and the music director for The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon did something he never thought he'd do — he bought a farm in upstate New York.

"The last year has really been a big lesson for me in terms of self-love," Questlove says. "I was world famous for being a machine. ... I thought chaos was the only way that I could exist. But now I embrace quiet, and I can hear myself think."

When wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein was arrested in 2006 following an investigation into his sexual activities with teenage girls, the case ended in a lenient plea bargain in which Epstein served 13 months in a county jail.

Eleven years later, Miami Herald reporter Julie K. Brown decided to revisit the case, which she calls "a horrendous miscarriage of justice."

Fresh Air Weekend highlights some of the best interviews and reviews from past weeks, and new program elements specially paced for weekends. Our weekend show emphasizes interviews with writers, filmmakers, actors and musicians, and often includes excerpts from live in-studio concerts. This week:

The year was 1983. Alice Walker's The Color Purple won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award; Gloria Naylor's debut novel, The Women of Brewster Place, won the National Book Award for first fiction.

Having been fortunate enough to attend the Cannes Film Festival every year since 2006, skipping this year's event wasn't easy. Cannes is the most important event of its kind: a thrilling, maddening 10-day marathon of red-carpet glamor and behind-the-scenes deal-making as well as a showcase for some of the best new movies from all over the world.

In a new book, two New York Times journalists report that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg often doesn't see the downside of the social media platform he created. In their new book, An Ugly Truth, Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang write that Zuckerberg tends to believe that free speech will drown out bad speech.

What happens when a woman conceives of and creates an app — and then her husband becomes the face of the startup that monetizes it? That's the question Tahmima Anam set out to answer in the satirical novel, The Startup Wife.