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The Interview, the Sony Pictures movie that was pulled from theaters after alleged threats from a group of hackers, has earned the studio $15 million in online rentals and purchases in the four days since it was made available last week.

The $15 million figure was only slightly less than the $20 million the studio had estimated The Interview to generate in its opening weekend in theaters across the nation.

The film starting Seth Rogen and James Franco is a comedy that centers on a plot to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. But Sony's emails were hacked in the period leading up to the movie's planned Christmas Day release, and the group that claimed responsibility for the hack, the Guardians of Peace, also threatened violence against moviegoers if the movie made it to theaters. That prompted the nation's largest movie theater chains to say they won't screen The Interview. Sony, too, said it won't release the movie.

That seemed to be the end of the road for the film, which reportedly cost $44 million to make, until last week when it was announced that about 300 independent movie theaters would show The Interview. Sony also announced it would make the movie available for rent online for $4.95 on services such as YouTube Movies and Microsoft's Xbox video console, as well as a dedicated website, and for sale at $14.99.

Variety reported today that the movie was rented or bought more than 2 million times through Saturday. That figure will likely increase as Apple's iTunes service made the movie available over the weekend. The Interview also earned nearly $3 million through its screenings at 331 theaters. Bloomberg noted that the movie is Sony's top online film ever. The news service adds:

"The unconventional rollout of The Interview is the first big test for a simultaneous theatrical and online release. Typically, such debuts have been reserved for smaller films, such as independent movies that may not have enough widespread appeal to warrant a big theatrical marketing budget, according to Paul Dergarabedian, a senior media analyst at Rentrak."

The FBI initially accused North Korea of being behind the hack, but the communist country, while calling the hack "righteous," denied any role. Some experts say they doubt North Korea has the capability to carry out such an attack.

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"We answer everything," Caballero-Li tells NPR's Linda Wertheimer. "Patrons can call us and reach out to us for anything they feel curious about, any service that they need — and I think that surprises a lot of people."

In fact, she says there's a surprising amount of overlap between the questions from the archive and the questions she fields in 2014. "These are questions that we are answering still, today, and we will probably be answering tomorrow, as well," she says.

There are questions of etiquette, questions about the Bible and — especially in the days after Christmas — a lot of people want to know how download e-books onto their brand new e-readers.

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"How many neurotic people in U.S.?" New York Public Library hide caption

itoggle caption New York Public Library

"How many neurotic people in U.S.?"

New York Public Library

Caballero-Li says plenty of people call the library because they don't have access to the Internet, but others call after they couldn't find a satisfactory answer on Google.

"You can find a lot of information online, of course, and that's great," she says. "But when you can't, or when you have too many answers, or you can't quite distinguish fact from fiction, that's when you reach out to us."

Librarians are "information specialists," she says, and can help point patrons to resources that aren't available online. Also, sometimes there's just something about speaking to a human being.

And nothing is off-limits — really.

The Protojournalist

Before Google ... Who Knew?

"There are no stupid questions," Caballero-Li says. "Everything is a teachable moment. We don't embarrass people; we try to answer any questions they have with honesty and we try to refer them to appropriate resources that they might find useful."

Granted, the librarians have received a fair number of stumpers over the years. "We don't know everything," Caballero-Li says, "but we can always point you in the right direction."

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New York Public Library

New York Public Library

Romania is one of the poorest and most corrupt countries in Europe and it's been that way for years. It's a tough legacy to overcome, but there are signs the country is trying to make a fresh start.

Klaus Iohannis, an underdog presidential candidate who campaigned on a platform of fighting corruption, won a surprising victory last month over the ruling party's nominee. Iohannis, 55, was sworn into office last Sunday.

To make headway, he'll need to work in tandem with Laura Codrua Kvesi, who heads Romania's National Anti-Corruption Directorate. She faces the tall task of rooting out graft that has plagued the country since the fall of communism in Eastern Europe 25 years ago.

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Kvesi is lanky 41-year-old, a former teen basketball star with a tough-as-nails reputation. She says the legacy of her prosecutor father and her strong Romanian Orthodox faith inspire her to seek justice.

Kvesi says her agency sent some 890 defendants to trial, including former ministers, parliament members and even the ex-president's brother and the head of Romania's organized crime and terrorism investigation unit.

One of her high-profile cases involves software licenses sold at inflated prices for use in Romanian schools. Nine former cabinet ministers are under investigation in that case.

The nearly $200 million confiscated by the courts in connection with those cases are more than seven times the directorate's annual budget, she says.

"It is encouraging for the Romanian people to see that we take action, that the authorities function so well," says Kvesi. "It leads to an increased trust in our institutions and also encourages more people to come here and file complaints."

And yet Kvesi acknowledges that corruption is deeply ingrained in the Romanian psyche.

She and other anti-corruption figures say that attitude developed in the years following the collapse of communism, when law enforcement was weak and opportunities were rife for politicians and businessmen to make money from the shift to a market economy.

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Laura Codrua Kvesi, the chief prosecutor of Romania's National Anti-Corruption Agency, has a reputation for aggressively pursuing graft. Gabriel Amza for NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Gabriel Amza for NPR

Laura Codrua Kvesi, the chief prosecutor of Romania's National Anti-Corruption Agency, has a reputation for aggressively pursuing graft.

Gabriel Amza for NPR

"The transition period is one in which law enforcement bodies were weak, when even police were afraid to go out on the street," recalls Monica Macovei, an EU parliament member and outspoken Romanian anti-corruption activist. "So you have a lot of money in the public budget being transferred into private hands without knowing how to do it."

Macovei says an independent judiciary and Kovesi's directorate are forcing Romanian politicians to be more accountable, something the Romanian public is demanding with a vengeance.

During November's Romanian presidential elections, thousands of Romanians took to the streets in Bucharest and other European capitals to protest mismanagement of the polls.

At issue was the right to vote abroad. Many expat Romanians were prevented from voting during the first round at their embassies in Paris, London and Munich, among other cities.

Those complaints sent a surge of sympathetic voters to the second round and swept Iohannis to victory over the candidate of the ruling Social Democratic Party, Prime Minister Victor Ponta.

Iohannis, the former mayor of the Transylvania city of Sibiu, is of German descent and is the first Romanian president from one of the country's ethnic minorities.

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A young girl waves the Romanian flage at a recent anti-corruption rally in Timisoara, Romania. Gabriel Amza for NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Gabriel Amza for NPR

A young girl waves the Romanian flage at a recent anti-corruption rally in Timisoara, Romania.

Gabriel Amza for NPR

"We are a nation that has shown the world that we embrace democratic values, that we want courage and that we want change," Iohannis said earlier this month.

He agreed in writing to 10 measures to clean up corruption and ensure transparency, says Macovei.

"I have some worries deep inside, but I don't want to discourage him or anyone else. I just wish him to be strong and not to listen to those in the parties, so I wish him not to listen to these voices coming from a dark past," Macovei says.

In Iohannis' hometown of Sibiu, many believe he can succeed.

He served as mayor for 14 years in the city, where he once taught high school physics and has one of the few homes here outfitted with solar panels. He is credited with turning the city into a popular tourist destination.

The president's Lutheran pastor in Sibiu, Kilian Doerr, says when Iohannis was first elected as mayor, a local taxi driver commented: "Now we can leave all the doors open here, no one will steal anything anymore."

That may be wishful thinking, but Doerr believes that under Iohannis, "corruption and misuse of public funds won't be allowed anymore."

Romania

In the winter of 1905, in the London neighborhood of Bloomsbury, a group of friends began meeting for drinks and conversation that lasted late into the night. The friends – writers like Lytton Strachey, artists like Roger Fry and thinkers like economist John Maynard Keynes — continued to meet almost weekly for many years. Eventually, they came to be known as the Bloomsbury Group.

In the beginning, their clubhouse was the home of the Stephen siblings — two brothers and two sisters. Today, the women are better remembered than their brothers: They were the painter Vanessa Bell and the writer Virginia Woolf.

Priya Parmar has written a novel about the group, and especially about the Stephen women. It's called Vanessa and Her Sister and it's written in the form of Bell's journal. Parmar tells NPR's Linda Wertheimer that she chose to put Bell at the center of her novel because, compared to her sister, her voice has been largely unheard.

Interview Highlights

On the Bloomsbury Group's love lives and how they influenced her decision to write the book

I was reading the letters of Vanessa Bell, not with the idea of writing about her but just because I love reading people's letters, especially from this period. And she had written a letter rejecting a marriage proposal. And she told him, you know: You're just a little bit too available. Could you maybe go away for a year and come back? And maybe I'll like you a little better then, and maybe I'll say yes.

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And so their romantic lives were a huge draw for me, but she was really the thing that pulled me in. She was so modern and so interesting and it was sort of her that I was interested in. I didn't realize quite how entangled they were until I got into it.

On how much she relied on the letters and journals Bell, Woolf and their friends and family left behind

Vanessa Bell did not keep a diary, so this is entirely fictional. But I did use all of the primary material I could find to get an idea of, you know, their lives and their voices and their writing styles and just who they were. It was invaluable. It was amazing. They left behind huge amounts of correspondents. They wrote letters the way we write email, basically.

On why she chose to put Bell at the center of her novel

She was the most interesting to me by far in the group. She was the sort of voice that I felt at home with. And she didn't leave a journal and her voice is the least, I guess, publicly known. You know, Virginia's diaries are so famous and her letters are so famous, whereas only a very, very few of Vanessa Bell's letters are published. So her voice is largely unheard and I was really interested in that.

On sharing her book with Bell and Woolf's descendants

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Their descendants are very much alive and with us, and they themselves write about Bloomsbury. So, yes, it was a daunting, daunting thing. ... [The family has] been wonderful and just so supportive and so lovely and took me to Charleston, Vanessa Bell's home. And [Bell's granddaughter] Virginia Nicholson — who's a wonderful, wonderful writer, nonfiction writer — she took me and introduced me to her mother and it was just a magical, magical day.

On whether there were any parts of the book the family disapproved of

Virginia Nicholson gave me notes and her biggest note was that her grandmother would have used the word "napkin" instead of the word "serviette." So that was her biggest note all the way through the book.

Read an excerpt of Vanessa and Her Sister