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 Charlie Savage
Last October, when Roger Waters brought his “This Is Not a Drill” tour through Austin, Texas, he also took the time to record a nearly three-hour appearance on the podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience.” During the episode, Rogan said he had to ask Waters — the former lead lyricist, bassist and co-lead vocalist for Pink Floyd — about the synchronicity that arises from watching “The Wizard of Oz” while listening to “The Dark Side of the Moon.”
This phenomenon is sometimes called “The Dark Side of the Rainbow”: If you start the album at just the right time, the music and lyrics uncannily align with the movie’s visuals. Some coincidences are lyrical, as when Dorothy runs away from home at the line “No one told you when to run.” Some are tonal, as when the tornado sequence seems practically choreographed to Clare Torry’s wordless vocals in “The Great Gig in the Sky” — rising to a frenzy as the twister rolls in and then shifting to dreaminess just as Dorothy is knocked unconscious.
Charlie Savage, who wrote the first article about the phenomenon as a summer intern at The Journal Gazette in his hometown, Fort Wayne, Ind., looks back at the discovery he made known when he was 19.
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Written and narrated by Sheryl Gay Stolberg
One year after Justice Clarence Thomas said the Supreme Court should reconsider whether the Constitution affords Americans a right to birth control, Democrats and reproductive rights advocates are laying the groundwork for state-by-state battles over access to contraception — an issue they hope to turn against Republicans in 2024.
The justice’s argument in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that overturned Roe v. Wade and the right to abortion, galvanized the reproductive rights movement. House Democrats, joined by eight Republicans, promptly passed legislation that would have created a national right to contraception. Republicans blocked a companion bill in the Senate.
Now, reproductive rights advocates are pressing their case in the states. Even before Dobbs, some states had taken steps to protect the right to contraception, by either statute or constitutional amendment; 13 states and the District of Columbia currently have such protections, according to KFF, a health policy research organization.
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Written and narrated by Cara Buckley
Standing in front of a classroom at Slackwood Elementary School north of Trenton, N.J., one afternoon in June, Michelle Liwacz asked her first graders to consider a problem: Antarctica is getting warmer. What could the penguins that live there do to adapt?
The children, most of them age 7, murmured excitedly. One boy said the birds could cool off in the water, but reconsidered after remembering all the hungry orcas awaiting them there. “Maybe they could migrate to another cold place, like the United States in winter?” the boy, whose name is Noah, asked. A girl named Aliya suggested that humans give them floaties. Gabi thought maybe the penguins could build igloos. A few of them, Gabi added, could live inside her fridge.
New Jersey has the distinction of being the first, and so far only, state to require that climate change be taught to all students from kindergarten through 12th grade. The topic is woven into lesson plans across most subject areas, even physical education classes.
The math and reading performance of 13-year-olds in the United States has hit the lowest level in decades, according to test scores released by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the gold-standard federal exam.
The last time math performance was this low for 13-year-olds was in 1990. In reading, 2004.
Performance has fallen significantly since the 2019-2020 school year, when the coronavirus pandemic wreaked havoc on the nation’s education system. But the recent downward trends began years before the health crisis, raising questions about a decade of disappointing results for American students.
Everyone loves reading. In principle, anyway. Nobody is against it, right? Surely, in the midst of our many quarrels, we can agree that people should learn to read, should learn to enjoy it and should do a lot of it. But bubbling underneath this bland, upbeat consensus is a simmer of individual anxiety and collective panic. We are in the throes of a reading crisis.
Consider the evidence. Across the country, Republican politicians and conservative activists are removing books from classroom and library shelves, ostensibly to protect children from “indoctrination” in supposedly left-wing ideas about race, gender, sexuality and history. These bans have raised widespread alarm among civil libertarians and provoked a lawsuit against a school board in Florida, brought by PEN America and the largest American publisher, Penguin Random House.
A.O. Scott, a critic at large for The New York Times Book Review, asks himself what role reading is playing in an evolving society.
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.