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 Katherine Rosman
Millions of Americans embarked on home-improvement projects during the pandemic. Many of those projects annoyed their neighbors.
But in SoHo, on the top floor of a co-op building filled with multimillion-dollar lofts, an apartment addition is the centerpiece of an only-in-New-York dispute, pitting a wealthy financier named Federico Pignatelli della Leonessa against Ray Dalio, the billionaire founder of Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund in the world.
The Dalio family’s pandemic project was a penthouse rising 13 feet over the midpoint of the roof with a 2,000-square-foot landscaped deck and a pergola that reaches about 15 feet high, atop a sixth-floor apartment that some of Mr. Dalio’s children had been living in for years. Mr. Pignatelli, who lives in the loft next door, maintains that the weight of the structure is crushing his apartment — and perhaps endangering the rest of the building too.
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Written and narrated by A.O. Scott
On May 6, at the age of 74, Charles III was crowned king of England. A few weeks later, at 73, Martin Amis died at his home in Florida. One event seemed almost comically belated, the other tragically premature. Charles took over the family business well past normal retirement age, while Amis was denied the illustrious dotage that great writers deserve.
It’s hard to accept either one of them as old. The point of princes is that they’re young; Amis, much like the former Prince of Wales, had enjoyed (or endured) a decades-long career as a dauphin. These near-contemporaries, who once argued at a dinner party about the persecution of Salman Rushdie, shared a curious generational destiny. They were forever sons, defined and sometimes overshadowed by famous parents, dynastic heirs trying to figure out how to be self-made men.
Amis, whose father, Kingsley (1922-95), was a very famous novelist, once described himself as “the only hereditary novelist in the Anglophone literary corpus.” We all know about Charles’s family. He and Martin were the leading nepo babies of the British baby boom.
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Written and narrated by Kalia Richardson
Emotions wash over Halle Bailey in waves. When a little girl embraced her at Disney World in March, Bailey, who has the plum role of Ariel in the live-action film of “The Little Mermaid,” fought hard to keep her composure. But when a box of sequined Little Mermaid dolls with auburn locks and cinnamon skin arrived on her doorstep, she couldn’t hold it in.
As one half of the R&B sibling duo Chloe x Halle, Bailey has serenaded YouTube audiences with renditions of Beyoncé classics and captivated Super Bowl crowds with patriotic anthems. But the 23-year-old Atlanta native grew up idolizing the Disney princess Ariel, never imagining she’d play her.
The plot of the live-action “The Little Mermaid” stays largely faithful to the original: Ariel loses her voice to experience the surface world and must receive true love’s kiss from Prince Eric. But in this rendition, Ariel and Prince Eric share an eagerness for adventure and thirst for knowledge that outweigh their desire for romance. Through it all, Bailey’s powerhouse vocals, youthful laugh and contagious charisma make her seem like a real princess.
At a school board meeting this month in Uvalde, Texas, parents and administrators found themselves locked in what had become a familiar argument: Nearly a year had passed since a gunman breached Robb Elementary School and killed 19 children and two teachers. The community was still waiting for officials to fully disclose how it had happened.
Despite the passage of time, there is still strong disagreement over who should be fired for the slow police response to one of the worst school shootings in American history, and what position the town should take on the repeated calls from families of the victims to restrict guns. Neighbors who have known each other for years now find themselves unable to agree and more distant than ever before.
“We used to be a close community,” Mr. Rizo said after the meeting on May 15. “Now it’s like we don’t know each other anymore.”
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Written and narrated by Sharon Otterman
In the last few years, managers at Nvidia, the global computer graphics company, began hearing a new kind of complaint: Some of their female employees were struggling with hot flashes, fatigue and brain fog — common symptoms of the menopause transition — and their regular doctors weren’t offering guidance or relief.
Some women’s health concerns, like fertility struggles and postpartum depression, have already been acknowledged as issues that employers can address. But until recently, discussing the symptoms of menopause and perimenopause, the yearslong stretch that precedes the end of a woman’s reproductive years, was largely taboo.
That is beginning to change. A new movement to create “menopause-friendly workplaces” is catching on, beginning in Britain, where menopausal women are believed to be the fastest growing work-force demographic.
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.