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 Sarah Baird
If you listen to local radio stations in much of rural America, you may hear a host bantering with a caller in search of help installing an oil pump in a Chevy engine. Another caller may be trying to trade a few bales of hay for a wheelchair lift. Perhaps even a burial plot for a cat.
These are “tradio” programs (a portmanteau of “trade” and “radio”), where people buy, sell and swap items or services — and, through such offers and transactions, give small glimpses of their lives.
In the age of sites like Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist, tradio — also called “swap shops,” “auction barns” and “super-trading posts” — adds a personal touch to the give-and-take of goods and services that’s both a throwback to the days of bartering and a cementing of community ties.
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Written and narrated by David Segal
In 1973, a young man named Uri Geller appeared on one of the BBC’s most popular television shows, “The Dimbleby Talk-In,” and announced that the laws of Newtonian physics did not apply to him. Or that, at least, was the implication. A handsome 26-year-old Israeli, dressed casually and flanked by a pair of academics, Mr. Geller performed a series of bewildering feats using nothing more, he said, than his mind.
He restarted a stopped watch. He duplicated a drawing that had been sealed in an envelope. Then he appeared to bend a fork simply by staring at it.
Mr. Geller became not just a global celebrity — a media darling who toured the world and filled auditoriums for dramatic demonstrations of cutlery abuse, with the humble spoon becoming his victim of choice — but also the living embodiment of the hope that there was something more, something science couldn’t explain. Because at the core of his performance was a claim of boggling audacity: that these were not tricks.
They were displays of raw psychic powers.
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Written and narrated by Andy Kifer
Martin Sherwin was hardly your classic blocked writer. Outgoing, funny and athletic, he is described by those who knew him as the opposite of neurotic.
But by the late 1990s, he had to admit he was stuck. Sherwin, a history professor and the author of one previous book, had agreed to write a full-scale biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer two decades earlier. Now he wondered if he would ever finish it. He’d done plenty of research — an extraordinary amount, actually, amassing some 50,000 pages of interviews, transcripts, letters, diaries, declassified documents and F.B.I. dossiers, stored in seemingly endless boxes in his basement, attic and office. But he’d barely written a word.
In the end, the book took 25 years to write — and Sherwin didn’t do it alone.
When Christopher Nolan’s film “Oppenheimer” is released on July 21, it will be the first time many younger Americans encounter the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer. But that film stands on the shoulders of the exhaustive and exhilarating 721-page Pulitzer Prize-winning biography called “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” co-written by Sherwin and Kai Bird.
Last month, Emma, Duchess of Rutland, sat in her drawing room and weighed the pros and cons of living over the shop. Specifically, Belvoir Castle, a stately and splendid pile perched on a wooded hilltop in the English countryside with more than 356 rooms and soaring neo-Gothic towers and turrets. It has been the site of the family seat since the 16th century.
Recently, despite tabloid scrutiny for her unconventional living arrangements and the fact that Britain’s historic houses are increasingly part of a brewing culture war over how the country should reckon with its colonial past, the duchess has displayed a growing taste for the limelight, albeit on her terms.
In 2020, she started a podcast, “Duchess,” in which she interviews other duchesses. A Duchess Gallery shop on the estate sells branded clothing, home wares, gins, wines and cider. And last year the duchess published “The Accidental Duchess,” an autobiography that includes candid accounts of her husband’s serial affairs and her string of miscarriages while raising five children.
Now 59, she is emerging as one of the more amiable public faces of Britain’s aristocracy at a time when many prefer to remain below the radar.
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Written by Abbie VanSickle and Steve Eder | Narrated by Abbie VanSickle
On Oct. 15, 1991, Clarence Thomas secured his seat on the Supreme Court, a narrow victory after a bruising confirmation fight that left him isolated and disillusioned.
Within months, the new justice enjoyed a far-warmer acceptance to a second exclusive club: the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, named for the Gilded Age author whose rags-to-riches novels represented an aspirational version of Justice Thomas’s own bootstraps origin story.
If Justice Thomas’s life had unfolded as he had envisioned, his Horatio Alger induction might have been a celebration of his triumphs as a prosperous lawyer instead of a judge. But as he tells it, after graduating from Yale Law School, he was turned down by a series of top law firms, rejections he attributes to a perception that he was a token beneficiary of affirmative action. So began his grudging path to a judicial career that brought him great prestige but only modest material wealth after decades of financial struggle.
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Written by Ernesto Londoño and Azeen Ghorayshi | Narrated by Ernesto Londoño
David and Wendy Batchelder hate the thought of putting their spacious house in West Des Moines, Iowa, on the market, disrupting the routines of their six children or giving up the Lutheran church that they have attended for roughly a decade.
But two new laws have left them debating whether to leave Iowa.
A ban on a medication that pauses puberty taken by their transgender son, Brecker, was signed into law by the state’s governor in March. The same month, teachers informed Brecker, 12, that he could no longer use the male restrooms and locker room at his middle school after another law was approved in the Republican-led Statehouse.
In 20 states, bans or restrictions on transition-related medical care for transgender youths are upending the lives of families and medical providers.
In places where the care is outlawed, doctors have hastily shut down practices in recent months, leaving patients in the lurch. Clinics in states where it is still permitted are newly contending with a crush of out-of-state patients seeking treatments that include puberty blockers and hormone therapy. Wait lists for initial appointments can exceed a year.
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.