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 Eric Kim
Eric Kim has a strategy for how he approaches restaurants: Live life on the edge of the menu. Take a flier on the oatmeal cream pie at a crab shack, the vegan risotto at a steakhouse, the quesadillas at an underground Champagne bar. Just because a restaurant is known for one thing doesn’t mean you can’t order something else. If it looks good to you, get it. Often you’ll be rewarded for your transgression.
Sometimes the oddity on a menu might be the chef’s passion project, which is reason enough to order it. Newcomers to the New Orleans favorite Pêche Seafood Grill might not know that the restaurant goes heavy on the vegetables, but you have to know to order them. When Mr. Kim visited the city for a friend’s wedding in January, his eyes gravitated toward the citrus-glazed turnips. They seemed so unassuming, maybe even out of place, on the otherwise flashy menu of raw-bar staples like oysters varying in plumpness and brininess; a nutty, almost creamy royal red Gulf shrimp dish that stains your fingers with a crab roe sauce; and the beloved steak tartare with smoked-oyster aioli on toast, which landed on nearly every table in the dining room. Who knew that the star of his seafood lunch would be a side dish of turnips?
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Written and narrated by Elisabeth Egan
When Elisabeth Egan arrived at the Crosby Street Hotel for a screening of “Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret?,” she heard the crowd before she saw it.
Alas, this gathering wasn’t going to be the intimate affair she’d imagined, sitting with Judy Blume in an empty theater and bonding over a box of Milk Duds. This was an event, with a photographer, two hashtags — #itsmemargaret and #margaretmoment — and humans of every age, gender, race and manner of ironic eyewear one-upping one another’s devotion to the story they were there to celebrate. Words like “obsessed” and “adore” hovered over the room, heavy with italics.
“You don’t understand,” a stranger said. “I am Margaret.”
Of course Ms. Egan understood. She was Margaret, too. So were all her friends, and maybe yours.
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Written by Jack Healy, Glenn Thrush, Eliza Fawcett and Susan C. Beachy | Narrated by Jack Healy
The issue of “wrong address” shootings stirred protests and widespread outrage after a homeowner in Kansas City, Mo., shot a 16-year-old who rang the wrong doorbell. Days later, a 20-year-old woman in upstate New York was fatally shot after she and her friends turned into the wrong driveway. And then two cheerleaders in Texas were shot after one got into the wrong car in a dark parking lot.
Each of these incidents resulted from unique events. But activists and researchers say they stem from a convergence of bigger factors — increased fear of crime and an attendant surge in gun ownership, increasingly extreme political messaging on firearms, fear-mongering in the media, and marketing campaigns by the gun industry that portray the suburban front door as a fortified barrier against a violent world.
But many similar cases have attracted far less attention.
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Written and narrated by Joe Coscarelli
For Drake and the Weeknd, two of the most popular musicians on the planet, the existence of “Heart on My Sleeve,” a track that claimed to use A.I. versions of their voices to create a passable mimicry, may have qualified as a minor nuisance — a short-lived novelty that was easily stamped out by their powerful record company.
But for others in the industry, the song — which became a viral curio on social media, racking up millions of plays across TikTok, Spotify, YouTube and more before it was removed this week — represented something more serious: a harbinger of the headaches that can occur when a new technology crosses over into the mainstream consciousness of creators and consumers before the necessary rules are in place.
While A.I. Rihanna singing a Beyoncé song or A.I. Kanye West doing “Hey There Delilah” may seem like a harmless lark, the successful (if brief) arrival of “Heart on My Sleeve” on official streaming services, complete with shrewd online marketing from its anonymous creator, intensified alarms that were already ringing in the music business, where corporations have grown concerned about A.I. models learning from, and then diluting, their copyrighted material.
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Written and narrated by Ben Brantley
She was, lest we forget, the original Real Housewife. Possessed of few obvious talents and a bottomless sense of entitlement, this expensively upholstered figure was the archetype for the ordinary middle-class matron who blossomed into improbable, overwhelming, gasp-inducing fame.
Her name was Edna Everage (just one vowel away from “average”), and her advent in the mid-20th century anticipated a brash new age of undeserved celebrity. “Oh, my prophetic soul,” she might have said, contemplating the constellation of self-anointed stars who occupy our attention these days. The line comes from “Hamlet.” But Edna was the kind of gal who could convince you that she had coined it all by herself.
Dame Edna, as she became known from the early 1970s, was the inspired alter-ego of the sui generis performer Barry Humphries, who died on Saturday in Sydney, Australia. Humphries was 89. Dame Edna, of course, is immortal.
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Written and narrated by Troy Closson
For decades, students at an elite New York City public high school have faced an unusual requirement: To graduate with full honors, they must complete a one-semester swim class or pass a swim test.
Some of the girls who take the course have traditionally opted for an all-girls section. Many of them cite religious guidelines that dictate modesty in dress; others simply feel uncomfortable wearing a swimsuit around boys.
But after administrators at the school, Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, eliminated the all-girls classes in favor of coed ones, the swimming requirement became the focus of a debate about how to balance religious accommodations with social integration.
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.