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 James Poniewozik
Last year, the New York Times critic James Poniewozik described Season 1 of “The Bear” as “a war story that happens to take place in a kitchen.” Every cooking scene in its Chicago restaurant was a chaotic D-Day of screams, confusion, clanging metal and gouts of flame.
In Season 2, some things remain the same: the kitchen language (“Corner!” “Hands!” “Yes, Chef!”), the toothsome shots of food, the dad-rock soundtrack. (R.E.M.’s “Strange Currencies” is deployed aggressively.) But “The Bear” is no longer a war story that takes place in a kitchen. It is now a sports story that takes place in a kitchen.
Poniewozik says that not just because the book “Leading With the Heart” by the basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski has a surprisingly totemic role. Where the first season focused on Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), an elite chef struggling to save and remake a family business after the suicide of his brother, Michael (Jon Bernthal), Season 2 is, to its great betterment, about a team.
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Written and narrated by Elisabeth Egan
“Oh, why am I so unattractive? Why?”
“I feel ashamed and repulsive. I can actually feel the fat splurging out from my body.”
“Reduce circumference of thighs by 3 inches (i.e. 1½ inches each), using anti-cellulite diet.”
These aren’t notes from a therapist’s files or excerpts from a workbook for people battling insecurity. They’re lines from the opening chapter of “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” Helen Fielding’s best-selling novel, which celebrated its 25th anniversary on U.S. shelves this month. The book follows a year in the life of a single, 30-something London woman navigating personal and professional turmoil while attempting to lose weight and quit smoking. Each entry begins with Bridget’s meticulous tally of pounds shed or gained, alcohol units imbibed, calories consumed, cigarettes smoked and lottery tickets purchased.
In her essay, Elisabeth Egan looks back at “Bridget Jones’s Diary” in today’s post-Roe, #MeToo, politically polarized world.
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Written and narrated by David W. Chen
For decades, the Pregnancy Control Clinic, tucked inside a squat, beige building around the corner from a bowling alley, handled most of the abortions on Guam, a tiny U.S. territory 1,600 miles south of Japan.
But the doctor who ran it retired seven years ago, and the clinic now appears abandoned. An old medical exam table stands near a vanity with a dislodged faucet, and a letter from Dr. Edmund A. Griley is taped to the front door: “My last day of seeing patients is November 18, 2016,” he wrote. “I recommend that you begin looking for a new physician as soon as possible.”
Dr. Griley has since died, and his deserted clinic is a dusty snapshot of Guam’s past — and some say, its future.
For the past 11 years, Bucky has put time and effort into stewarding and guiding dozens of communities on Reddit, the sprawling internet message board.
As a “moderator” of roughly 80 different topic-based forums, Bucky — who goes by “BuckRowdy” on Reddit and who asked that his full name not be used to prevent online harassment — and others like him are essential to growing and maintaining the social media site, which is one of the internet’s biggest destinations for online discussion.
Until two weeks ago, when Bucky revolted.
Reddit had just introduced changes that sharply increased its fees for independent developers who build apps using the company’s data. But the changes made it so expensive for some third-party developers that a handful who build tools for Reddit’s moderators had to shut down or significantly alter their apps. In protest, Bucky and other moderators closed down hundreds of forums on the site, effectively making Reddit unusable for many of its 57 million daily visitors. At one point, the site went offline entirely.
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Written and narrated by Eli Saslow
Josh Askins woke up in the crawl space of an abandoned house with nausea, chills and a shooting pain in his legs. It had been seven hours since he last smoked fentanyl, and already he could feel his withdrawal symptoms worsening by the minute. He rolled over in his sleeping bag and stared at the graffiti he’d carved into the rotting floorboards. “Fentanyl is HELL,” he had written a few weeks earlier, but now he got up to start looking for more.
He walked across the street and saw his friend Chris Drake sitting on his grandmother’s front porch in downtown Oklahoma City, watching the sunrise with a Budweiser in one hand and a Bible in the other. Drake, 47, was reading the book for the sixth time, and he and Askins, 42, had bonded during the last weeks over their shared faith and also their shared failings. They had called a rehab facility that took Medicaid and made plans to detox there together with the help of medication, but their check-in date was still days away.
They got into Drake’s car at about 5:30 a.m. and went to search for the drug that had rewired their bodies, their minds and also so much else about the United States, where in 2023 fentanyl and other synthetic opioids lead to an average of 3,400 emergency room visits and 190 fatal overdoses each day. What was once an obscure drug used to treat pain in end-stage cancer patients has become the leading cause of death for Americans under 50, and now the debate in state capitols and courtrooms all across the country is over how to stop the crisis and whom to hold accountable for it.
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.