Best Of: Lucy Liu / Zadie Smith

This election season, let the NPR Politics podcast save your time and your sanity, will help you understand key races, which polls you can safely ignore, and what might happen if power shifts in Congress. Our short daily episodes come out every afternoon so you can spend less time scrolling through each chaotic news cycle. Make NPR Politics your hub for midterm election coverage. Follow our podcast on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. From WHYY in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend.

I'm Tanya Mosley. Today, Lucy Liu joins us to talk about her new film, Rosemead, where she stars as a terminally ill woman grappling with her teenage son's escalating mental health crisis and the impossible choices she faces to protect him. It's based on a true story. And Zadie Smith joins us to talk about her new collection of essays. Dead and Alive.

The essays, like much of her fiction, reflect on issues that directly affect her life, like aging, she just turned fifty, race, she's biracial, class, her mother grew up poor in Jamaica, and her father grew up poor in England, and generation gaps. Plus film critic Justin Chang shares his list of the best films of the year. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend. Austin Tice is an American journalist who disappeared over a decade ago while reporting in Syria. And for years we've been searching for him.

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