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Among the protesters' grievances is the requirement in New Zealand that certain workers get vaccinated against the coronavirus, including teachers, doctors, nurses, police and military personnel.

In her new work Safe in Hell, now on stage in Southern California, playwright Amy Freed renders the Salem witch trials as black comedy. The play centers around the dysfunctional relationship between two historic figures involved in the 17th-century trials: moralist Increase Mather and his son, Cotton. Freed talks with NPR's Renee Montagne.

NPR's Liane Hansen speaks with clinical psychologist and sociologist Thomas J. Cottle, author of When the Music Stopped: Discovering My Mother (SUNY Press). Cottle's mother, Gitta Gradova , was an established concert pianist of the 1920's and 30's, and she relished her budding career and rubbed elbows with the musical greats of the day. She gave it up to raise a family, and her son contends it led her into depression.

NPR's Scott Simon talks to author Daniel Silva about his new novel A Death in Vienna. The former journalist, now a prolific writer, brings back his hero, Gabriel Allon, a European art restorer who hunts down Nazi criminals who have escaped justice. (The book is published by G.P. Putnam & Sons.)

Pulitzer prize-winning author Jane Smiley's nonfiction book A Year at the Races chronicles her lifelong love affair with horses and the race tracks where they battle to the wire.

Rachel Cohen's book A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, 1854-1967 describes encounters -- sometimes fleeting, sometimes influential -- between such luminaries as Mark Twain and Ulysses S. Grant, for example, or Richard Avedon and James Baldwin. Hear NPR's Liane Hansen and Cohen.

Professor Michael Maar has unearthed an obscure 1916 short story published in German called "Lolita." It tells of a middle-aged man's fixation with a young girl. Scholars are now left to debate what it might mean if Vladimir Nabokov -- author of the later novel Lolita -- knew of the story. NPR's Liane Hansen talks with Maar.

The new documentary Mayor of the Sunset Strip looks at the life of Los Angeles disc jockey Rodney Bingenheimer, who helped introduce such artists as David Bowie, the Sex Pistols and Nirvana. Director George Hickenlooper considers his subject the personification of America's obsession with fame. Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan has a review.

New Orleans, where roughly one-third of residents can barely read, has become the latest of several U.S. cities to use the book A Lesson Before Dying in a campaign to fight illiteracy and promote reading. Set in 1948, the novel addresses literacy, poverty and race relations in the segregated South. NPR's Bob Edwards speaks with author Ernest Gaines.

Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory dies at age 85 after a long illness. McGrory won a Pulitzer Prize for her commentary during the Watergate scandal. Hear NPR's Bob Edwrds and Post columnist David Broder.