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 Catherine Porter
Even filled with grass and wildflowers, the craters remain so deep and wide that you can still sense the blasts of bombs that carved them 79 years ago.
At the pockmarked entrance of an old German bunker, you can almost feel the rattle of machine-gun fire. Peering over the 100-foot cliff to the ocean below, you see clearly how exposed the young American men were as they climbed up grappling ropes early that morning of June 6, 1944.
Of all the D-Day sites, none quite convey the horror and heroism of that pivotal moment during World War II as the Pointe du Hoc.
But it is disappearing, fast.
The Nazi defense and lookout point between two landing beaches in Normandy, which American Rangers conquered, suffered another three landslides this spring. Inspections revealed that waves had chewed a cavity more than two and a half yards deep into their base.
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Written and narrated by Danielle Friedman
On a recent Sunday morning jog through Prospect Park in Brooklyn, Martinus Evans was received like a conquering champion. Every few minutes, a passing runner would smile and nod, congratulating him as they sped by.
But the runners weren’t applauding him for winning any races. You might even say they were celebrating him for his track record of finishing last.
Mr. Evans is the founder of Slow AF Run Club, a virtual community for back-of-the-packers with more than 10,000 members worldwide. At 300 pounds, he is a beloved figure among runners who have felt left out of the sport. He has graced the cover of Runner’s World, posed nude for Men’s Health and appeared in an Adidas ad. His Instagram account, @300poundsandrunning, has more than 75,000 followers. And this month, he’s releasing his first book, “Slow AF Run Club: The Ultimate Guide for Anyone Who Wants to Run.”
The story still resonates: More than 60 years ago, Los Angeles police officers were routinely harassing the gay and transgender people who gathered at Cooper Do-nuts, a 24-hour spot in the city’s seedy gay circuit known as the Run.
Then one evening in May 1959, some fed-up drag queens, hustlers and other customers pushed back, barraging officers with hot coffee and half-eaten crullers. Outnumbered, the police fled but called for backup, and arrests were made. John Rechy, the author of the landmark 1963 gay novel “City of Night,” has recalled seeing coffee cups fly.
The Cooper Do-nuts melee has long been noted as a gay uprising a full 10 years before the more famous June 1969 riot outside the Stonewall Inn in New York City. It has become such a benchmark of L.G.B.T.Q. resistance that on Wednesday, the Los Angeles City Council is set to approve the installation of a street sign commemorating a Cooper Do-nuts shop as part of what it calls “the ongoing work to make Los Angeles a more inclusive place.” Does it matter that there’s little evidence the Cooper Do-nuts riot happened?
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Written and narrated by Matt Richtel
For generations of Colorado children, arguably the most commonly shared experience involved Casa Bonita, a vast, filthy, poorly lit underground restaurant with food that many diners deemed barely edible. The dinner entertainment was a child’s fever dream: waterfalls, cliff divers, Black Bart’s Cave, faux gold and silver mines, puppet shows and a person in a gorilla costume being chased by a sheriff, who sometimes joined in on the cliff diving.
Casa Bonita’s curious childhood grip was chronicled in an episode of “South Park.” After that episode ran, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the show’s creators, were regularly asked whether such a place actually existed.
Then, in 2020, Casa Bonita went bankrupt, hit by the pandemic slump. The place was already in disrepair, crumbling from deferred maintenance, rife with electrical hazards, the ventilation systems coated with grease and the carpet encrusted into something like concrete.
But in the coming weeks, the enormous casita will reopen with new owners: Mr. Parker and Mr. Stone, both native Coloradans, who have spent upward of $40 million to tear it down, rebuild it and, they joke, keep everything the same, except now sanitary.
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Written and narrated by David Enrich
“Is fire alive?” the journalist and author John Vaillant asks early in his new book, “Fire Weather.” At first, David Enrich of The Times rolled his eyes, even as Vaillant ticked off a dozen lifelike characteristics — it grows, it breathes, it travels in search of nourishment — because the answer seemed so obvious: No. Of course not.
Some 300 pages later, the question didn’t feel quite so ludicrous.
Vaillant tells the story of a colossal wildfire that, in the spring of 2016, burned much of Fort McMurray, a small city carved out of central Canada’s boreal forest. It is a tale of firefighters, homeowners and local authorities confronting a conflagration so intense that it generated its own weather systems, complete with hurricane-force winds and bolts of lightning. More than that, it is a real-life fable about the causes and consequences of climate change.
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.