Fresh Air Weekend: Snowden Leaks, Billie Jean King And Jonathan Lethem

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:

Reporter Had To Decide If Snowden Leaks Were 'The Real Thing': Before whistle-blower Edward Snowden became a household name, he was an anonymous source. The Washington Post's Barton Gellman recounts how he began corresponding with Snowden and the process of reporting on the government's Internet data mining program.

Pioneer Billie Jean King Moved The Baseline For Women's Tennis: A new PBS documentary looks at King's legacy as a both a tennis champion – she has a record 20 Wimbledon titles – and the leader of a female player uprising that demanded fairer treatment and pay. She tells Fresh Air about the challenges of being a female player before there was a women's league.

For Novelist Jonathan Lethem, Radicalism Runs In The Family: His new book, Dissident Gardens, follows three generations of an activist family, from Rose, a secular Jew and communist, to Sergius, her commune-raised grandson. The book is fiction, but its characters were inspired by Lethem's own family story.

You can listen to the original interviews here:

• Reporter Had To Decide If Snowden Leaks Were 'The Real Thing'
• Pioneer Billie Jean King Moved The Baseline For Women's Tennis
• For Novelist Jonathan Lethem, Radicalism Runs In The Family

Copyright 2015 Fresh Air. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/.