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 Melena Ryzik
There is a moment that has happened millions of times for eons, and yet has rarely been captured on film: a 12-year-old girl wondering what to do when she gets her period.
Judy Blume described it in print, in her seminal 1970 novel, “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.” More than a half-century later, the movie adaptation, due April 28, is putting that awkward puzzling-through onscreen. Menstruation, burgeoning sexuality and fraught gender dynamics, religion, the barefoot-in-the-sprinkler joys and gossip-twisted tribulations of girlhood: “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” tracks it all, and has been both banned and beloved for it.
This 53-year-old story is landing in theaters squarely in the middle of today’s culture wars. The weightier issues it reflects, which had seemingly receded, are back at the forefront: overt antisemitism, the widespread curtailing of women’s reproductive rights, and a resurgence of book banning and censorship. “It’s worse than the ’80s,” Ms. Blume said, when the author’s work was first targeted, “because of the way it’s coming from government.”
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Written and narrated by Mattie Kahn
At her first full-time job since leaving influencing, the erstwhile smoothie-bowl virtuoso Lee Tilghman stunned a new co-worker with her enthusiasm for the 9-to-5 grind.
She had once had what he wanted: flexible hours, no boss, a devoted audience so rabid for her recommendations that she could command as much as $20,000 for a single branded Instagram post advertising alternative nut flours or frozen sweet potato fries on her 400,000 follower account, @LeeFromAmerica. She had earned north of $300,000 a year — and then dropped more than 150,000 followers, her entire management team, and most of her savings to become an I.R.L. person.
The corporate gig, as a social media director for a tech platform, was a revelation. “I could just show up to work and do work,” Ms. Tilghman said. After she was done, she could leave. She didn’t have to be a brand. There’s no comments section at an office job.
Ms. Tilghman, 33, recalled the encounter late last month during a 90-minute, $40 Zoom workshop she held to guide other creators through the process of leaving influencing. The existence of the workshop — a small counterweight to the classes, seminars and boot camps that promise to teach civilians how to become influencers — indicates a new disillusionment on the part of even the most prominent content creators.
A revolt over how children are taught to read, steadily building for years, is now sweeping school board meetings and statehouses around the country.
In suburban Houston, parents rose up against a top-rated school district, demanding an entirely new reading curriculum. And Ohio may become the latest state to overhaul reading instruction, under a plan by Gov. Mike DeWine.
The movement, under the banner of “the science of reading,” is targeting the education establishment: school districts, literacy gurus, publishers and colleges of education, which critics say have failed to embrace the cognitive science of how children learn to read.
Research shows that most children need systematic, sound-it-out instruction — known as phonics — as well as other direct support, like building vocabulary and expanding students’ knowledge of the world.
The movement has drawn support across economic, racial and political lines. Its champions include parents of children with dyslexia, civil rights activists with the N.A.A.C.P., lawmakers from both sides of the aisle, and everyday teachers and principals.
Together, they are getting results.
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Written and narrated by Jacey Fortin
Within minutes of riding into Mexico in a rented white minivan last month, Latavia McGee knew that she was lost.
She and three of her closest friends — close enough that she called them brothers — had driven from South Carolina to Matamoros in the state of Tamaulipas so that she could get a tummy tuck procedure. It was a journey she had made once before, as part of a wave of American women seeking cosmetic surgery across the border.
But this time, she was running late, had no phone service and had veered off course, Ms. McGee recalled in a recent interview. She was struggling to remember where the clinic was supposed to be. Also in the wayward van were Zindell Brown, Shaeed Woodard and Eric Williams, old companions with whom she had grown up in South Carolina. That morning in Mexico, they had been enjoying one another’s company, Ms. McGee said, as Mr. Brown, the best Spanish speaker of the four, asked strangers for directions.
Then gunshots rang out, and the friends found themselves caught in the crossfire of a Mexican cartel. Mr. Brown 28, and Mr. Woodard, 33, would be killed, and Ms. McGee, 34, and Mr. Williams, 38, would spend four days in captivity, with the dead bodies of their friends beside them.
“Bless your heart!” Lucinda Williams delivered the Southern benediction in her distinctive drawl.
It has been 25 years since Ms. Williams’s breakthrough, “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.” That collection of anthems to love, loss and yearning made her an overnight success, as she said wryly, at age 45. Despite the stroke she suffered in 2020, she still looks vibrant and tough, with her smoky blue eyes and roughed up, rock ’n’ roll hair. Walking is a challenge and she can’t yet play guitar, but her voice is thrillingly unaffected.
Ms. Williams, who has a memoir coming out soon, was nonetheless not too sure about this particular literary endeavor. So when a visitor complimented the book, “Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You,” she beamed. Like many a writer, she said she had a hard time letting go. “I thought, ‘I’m going to write this book and turn it in when I’m done,’” she said. “Much to my dismay it doesn’t work that way.”
Some professional musicians spend their days on the tour bus staring out the window, sleeping or pursuing various routes to oblivion. For Bob Crawford, the bassist for the folk-rock band the Avett Brothers, history has been his distraction of choice.
One day, he picked up Sean Wilentz’s mammoth study “The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln.” From there, he moved on to “several books about Martin Van Buren,” as well as studies of Andrew Jackson, the rise of the two-party system and the knockdown congressional debates over slavery in the 1830s.
Now, he’s put it all together in “Founding Son: John Quincy’s America,” a six-episode podcast about John Quincy Adams, America’s sixth president and a man, Crawford argues, for our own fractured times.
Adams, the only president to serve in Congress after leaving office, is a vehicle for tracing the arc of the period, which saw the United States transform from a nation dominated by its founding elites (like the Adamses) into an expansionist, populist democracy where every white male had the vote, regardless of property or station.
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.