This weekend, listen to a collection of articles from around The New York Times, read aloud by the reporters who wrote them.
Written and narrated by Lisa Belkin
Before there were influencers and clicks and “authenticity,” there was Heather Armstrong. At the height of her clout, a decade or so ago, she had millions reading her blog, Dooce, which she started in 2001, back when if “you said you had a blog, people thought you had a venereal disease,” she said. But her willingness to discuss the mess and chaos of her life — her depression and alcoholism — in a voice that was raw, arch, vulnerable and often funny, opened the door for others to do the same. It also earned her a spot on the 2011 Forbes list of the most influential women in media.
She ruled her corner of the internet — a place where women, especially mothers, learned that they had a voice and that if they used it in long, thoughtful, deep and honest narratives about their lives, other women would read and rally round. So began a brief but golden age of women making themselves heard on the internet, proving what is now assumed but was then brand-new: that a woman writing about her life from her kitchen could make her life into a living.
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Written and narrated by Dan Barry
While the owners of the Stewart Hotel in Manhattan collect favorable rates for their fully booked hotel, they are also suing to evict the wisp of a man paying $865 a month for Room 1810: William Mackiw, who has lived there for so long that no one knows when he first appeared. It’s been decades.
At some point he moved in with the rent-stabilized room’s tenant, his aunt Louise. At some point she died. Again, it’s been decades.
And he just kept paying the modest rent with what he earned as a waiter in restaurants of casual fare. Your Howard Johnson’s. Your Beefsteak Charlie’s. Month after month, year after year.
Mr. Mackiw, 82 and retired, lives among the relics of a solitary life rooted in the past. Piles of old movies on VHS and DVD. Within his confined world, the tight boundaries of which include a church and a market, he lived mostly unseen. Until a few months ago, that is, when someone knocked on his door and handed him a document. Its message:
“Time for you to leave,” Mr. Mackiw recalled.
In 10 days.
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Written by Ceylan Yeginsu, Rebecca R. Ruiz and Nimet Kirac | Narrated by Rebecca R. Ruiz
The building began convulsing at 4:17 a.m. Firat Yayla was awake in bed, scrolling through videos on his phone. His mother was asleep down the hall.
The region along Turkey’s border with Syria was known for earthquakes, but this apartment complex was new, built to withstand disaster. It was called Guclu Bahce, or Mighty Garden. Mr. Yayla’s own cousin had helped build it. He and his business partner had boasted that the complex could withstand even the most powerful tremor.
So, as the earth heaved for more than a minute, Mr. Yayla, 21, and his 62-year-old mother, Sohret Guclu, a retired schoolteacher, remained inside.
At that very moment, though, Mr. Yayla’s cousin, the developer, was leaping for safety from a second-story balcony.
What Mr. Yayla and his mother had not known was that the system to ensure that buildings were safely constructed to code had been tainted by money and politics. That system prioritized speed over rules and technical expertise.
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Written and narrated by Oliver Whang
One day recently, on a table in Jean Oh’s lab in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, a robot arm was busy at a canvas. Slowly, as if the air were viscous, it dipped a brush into a pool of light gray paint on a palette, swung around and stroked the canvas, leaving an inch-long mark amid a cluster of other brushstrokes. Then it pulled back and paused, as if to assess its work.
The strokes, mostly different shades of gray, suggested something abstract — an anthill, maybe. Dr. Oh, the head of the roBot Intelligence Group at Carnegie Mellon University, dressed in a sweatshirt bearing the words “There Are Artists Among Us,” looked on with approval. Her doctoral student, Peter Schaldenbrand, stood alongside.
The process of moving from language prompts to pixelated images to brushstrokes can be complicated, as the robot, known as FRIDA, must account for “the noise of the real world,” Dr. Oh said. But she, Mr. Schaldenbrand and Jim McCann, a roboticist at Carnegie Mellon who also helped develop FRIDA (Framework and Robotics Initiative for Developing Arts), believe that the research is worth pursuing for two reasons: It could improve the interface between humans and machines, and it could, through art, help connect people to one another.
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Written and narrated by Kate Zernike
When the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last summer, advocates on either side presumed that the country would divide along the bright color lines: red states completely banning abortion, blue states protecting it.
That prediction failed to anticipate the Sister Senators.
The Sisters, as they call themselves, are the women in the South Carolina State Senate — the only women, three Republicans, one Independent and one Democrat, in a legislature that ranks 47th among states in the proportion of women. As a block, they are refusing to allow the legislature to pass a near-total ban on abortion, despite a Republican supermajority.
Three times in eight months, Republican leaders in the chamber have tried to ban abortion beginning at conception. Three times, the women have resisted, even as fellow Republicans have threatened primary challenges and anti-abortion activists have paraded empty strollers and groups of children heckling the women as “baby killers.”
The Times’s narrated articles are made by Tally Abecassis, Parin Behrooz, Anna Diamond, Sarah Diamond, Jack D’Isidoro, Aaron Esposito, Dan Farrell, Elena Hecht, Adrienne Hurst, Emma Kehlbeck, Tanya Pérez, Krish Seenivasan, Kate Winslett, John Woo and Tiana Young. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Ryan Wegner, Julia Simon and Desiree Ibekwe.