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 Hannah Beech
Before he led the world’s fourth most populous country, the president of Indonesia, Joko Widodo, was consumed by an even more challenging mission: saving Jakarta.
For two years, Mr. Joko served as the governor of a capital city that seemed to teeter on the brink of ruin. Since Indonesia’s independence in 1945, Jakarta had expanded from fewer than a million people to roughly 30 million. It had grown tall with skyscrapers built with fortunes made from timber, palm oil, natural gas, gold, copper, tin. But the capital had run out of space. It grew thick with traffic and pollution. Most of all, Jakarta was sinking, as thirsty residents drained its marshy aquifers and rising sea waters lapped its shores. Forty percent of the Indonesian capital now lies below sea level.
So Mr. Joko rolled up his sleeves, put on his sneakers and set about trying to fix the city. He raised sea walls and improved public transport. He later talked up the construction of a constellation of artificial islands to break the waters hitting Jakarta. His entire career, first as a carpenter and a furniture exporter and then as mayor of his hometown Solo, has been built on building.
In Jakarta, however, his passion for construction could only get him so far. All the Sisyphean dredging, the endless concrete inches slathered on sea walls, the duct tape solutions could not raise Jakarta above the sea’s reach. And so Mr. Joko has turned to a different solution: If Jakarta cannot be saved, he will need to start over.
Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Stand-up comedy.
Are these the new five stages of grief? It can seem that way to those following the comedy scene. The past year has brought us specials and solo theatrical shows with jokes sandwiched between deeply felt thoughts on the death of a father, mother, girlfriend, boyfriend and sister.
Dead baby jokes were once a juvenile niche. Now comedy about the death of a child has become its own heartbreaking genre. Just this month, the comic Liz Glazer released her debut stand-up album, “A Very Particular Experience,” about the stillbirth of her daughter (“a comedy show meets shiva”) and Michael Cruz Kayne premiered his wrenching solo about the death of his son, “Sorry for Your Loss.” Early on, he warns us that we might cry. “If you don’t,” he adds, pausing, “that’s rude.”
There are so many grief-stricken comedians these days that it invites the question: For an art form traditionally associated with punchlines about dating and airplane food, why is it mourning again (and again) in America?
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Written and narrated by Jennifer Miller
Woodward is a 153-year-old aerospace company that required its male employees to wear bow ties into the 1990s.
So Paul Benson, the company’s chief human resources officer, knew that creating a companywide diversity, equity and inclusion program would require a seismic shift. Last summer, Mr. Benson started searching for a diversity consultant who was up to the task. He hoped to find a relatable former executive “who had seen the light.”
Instead, a Google search led him to a Black comedian and former media personality named Karith Foster. She is the chief executive of Inversity Solutions, a consultancy that rethinks traditional diversity programming.
Ms. Foster said companies must address racism, sexism, homophobia and antisemitism in the workplace. But she believes that an overemphasis on identity groups and a tendency to reduce people to “victim or villain” can strip agency from and alienate everyone — including employees of color. She says her approach allows everyone “to make mistakes, say the wrong thing sometimes and be able to correct it.”
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Written by David A. Fahrenthold and Tiff Fehr | Narrated by David A. Fahrenthold
The phone rings. The caller knows your name, and opens with a dad joke.
He is asking for donations, for a group that helps the police called the American Police Officers Alliance.
This is not a policeman. This is not even a human. This is a computer, making thousands of robocalls with the same folksy voice.
And like the caller, “Frank Wallace,” the American Police Officers Alliance is not what it seems.
A group of conservative operatives using sophisticated robocalls raised millions of dollars from donors using pro-police and pro-veteran messages. But instead of using the money to promote issues and candidates, an analysis by The New York Times shows, nearly all the money went to pay the firms making the calls and the operatives themselves, highlighting a flaw in the regulation of political nonprofits.
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Written and narrated by Oliver Whang
When Joshua Knobe was younger, he knew an indie rock musician who sang sorrowful, “heart-rending things that made people feel terrible,” he recalled recently. At one point he came across a YouTube video, set to her music, that had a suicidal motif. “That was the theme of her music,” he said, adding, “So I had this sense of puzzlement by it, because I also felt like it had this tremendous value.”
This is the paradox of sad music: We generally don’t enjoy being sad in real life, but we do enjoy art that makes us feel that way. Countless scholars since Aristotle have tried to account for it. Maybe we experience a catharsis of negative emotions through music. Maybe there’s an evolutionary advantage in it, or maybe we’re socially conditioned to appreciate our own suffering. Maybe our bodies produce hormones in response to the fragmentary malaise of the music, creating a feeling of consolation.
Dr. Knobe is now an experimental philosopher and psychologist at Yale University — and is married to that indie rock musician who sang those heart-wrenching songs. In a new study, published in the Journal of Aesthetic Education, he and some colleagues sought to tackle this paradox by asking what sad music is all about.
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.