This weekend, listen to a collection of narrated articles from around The New York Times, read aloud by the reporters who wrote them.
Written and narrated by Maggie Jones
In February last year, Maggie Jones began leaving voice mail messages for her mother, who had recently died. Her mom’s voice was still on the outgoing message of her cellphone, so one afternoon, Maggie decided to call.
“And when the phone beeped, I began talking, and then sobbing for the first time since her funeral,” Maggie wrote. “I filled the two-minute voice mail, talking until it cut me off about how much I missed her, how much I needed her.”
After that first message, she started calling every few weeks or so. “As I spoke, I imagined her looking out her bedroom’s sliding glass doors, as I looked out my window, 380 miles apart,” Maggie wrote.
For Cynthia Philips, it was the sound of bees, willows, crickets and the hum of a metallic Tibetan bowl that helped her overcome some of her anxieties.
Over Memorial Day weekend, Ms. Philips, a 64-year-old entrepreneur, drove out to a Black-owned ranch in Crawfordville, Ga., where she joined dozens of other women for a camping trip. Tents were set up under large, majestic trees and hammocks were strung about. Over two days, the women did yoga, hiked, meditated, wrote in their journals and shared their life stories with one another.
Amid pandemic stress and racial violence, many communities of color have turned to wilderness areas for healing.
It was 4 a.m., the sun had yet to rise over the Itaquaí River deep in the Amazon, but a team of Indigenous men was already busy preparing a breakfast of coffee, fried meat and fish. They were up early this Sunday because a few planned to escort their two guests 50 miles back to town.
The guests, Bruno Pereira, an activist training the Indigenous patrols, and Dom Phillips, a British journalist, had to get back to meet with the federal police. Mr. Pereira was to turn over the patrol’s evidence of illegal fishing and hunting in this remote patch of the forest.
But at breakfast, Mr. Pereira announced that he and Mr. Phillips would not need escorts. Instead, they would move fast and travel alone. They packed their small metal boat and headed off.
Then, they vanished.
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Written and narrated by Elizabeth Dias
Three weeks before he won the Republican nomination for Pennsylvania governor, Doug Mastriano stood beside a three-foot-tall painted eagle statue and declared the power of God.
“Any free people in the house here? Did Jesus set you free?” he asked, revving up the dozens before him on a Saturday afternoon at a Gettysburg roadside hotel.
Mr. Mastriano, a state senator, retired Army colonel and prominent figure in former President Donald J. Trump’s futile efforts to overturn the state’s 2020 election results, was addressing a far-right conference that mixed Christian beliefs with conspiracy theories, called Patriots Arise. Mr. Mastriano’s ascension in Pennsylvania is perhaps the most prominent example of right-wing candidates for public office who explicitly aim to promote Christian power in America.
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Written by Lydia DePillis, Jeanna Smialek and Ben Casselman | Narrated by Lydia DePillis
A dearth of child care and elder care choices is causing many women to reorganize their working lives and prompting some to forgo jobs altogether, hurting the economy at a moment when companies are desperate to hire, and forcing trade-offs that could impair careers.
Care workers have left the industry in large numbers amid the pandemic, shrinking the number of nursery and nursing home employees by hundreds of thousands. At the same time, coronavirus outbreaks have led to intermittent school shutdowns, which, in turn, have made care demands less predictable and increased the need for reliable backup options.
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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, Elisheba Ittoop, Emma Kehlbeck, Marion Lozano, Tanya Pérez, Krish Seenivasan, Margaret H. Willison, Kate Winslett, John Woo and Tiana Young. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Ryan Wegner, Julia Simon and Desiree Ibekwe.
