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 Grace Ashford
Grace Ashford had been trying to get hold of Representative George Santos in one way or another since last November, when she, along with her fellow reporter Michael Gold, was first assigned to look into the incoming Republican congressman from Long Island and Queens. They quickly found themselves down a rabbit hole of secrets and lies.
Six weeks later, The New York Times published their exposé that revealed how Mr. Santos had falsified his background on the campaign trail.
But despite spending the better part of the past year covering every dimension of his campaign and criminal trial, neither Grace nor Michael had ever had an actual conversation with Mr. Santos. This was not for a lack of trying. They made numerous attempts to reach him, calling or texting him directly and leaving messages with his lawyer and staff members. Michael rang the doorbell at his listed address, only to find that he hadn’t lived there for months.
And then his name appeared on Grace’s caller ID.
She recounts the roughly dozen conversations she had with the elusive congressman.
In Atlanta, Jewish parents criticized the school district’s statement on “the violence facing children and families in the Middle East” for never using the word “terrorism.”
In Los Angeles, a Muslim organization condemned public school officials for “not acknowledging the dispossession of the Palestinian people,” after a “We Stand With Israel” message was posted on the district’s official website.
And in New York, public school leaders have released a wide-ranging patchwork of memos that have often prompted the same response from different factions of parents and teachers: outrage.
Over the past two weeks, American public school districts have wrestled with the dilemma of how — and whether — to respond to the Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent Israeli bombardment of Gaza, which together have killed thousands of civilians. A restrained email with a list of counseling resources? A lengthier letter that denounces the attackers or delves into the region’s history? Or, say nothing at all?
Written and narrated by Erik Piepenburg
Could a movie about a girl possessed by the devil really have caused audience members to faint and lose their lunch at theaters? The vehement reaction to “The Exorcist” when it premiered in late 1973 helped create a special place for it in pop culture, as evidenced by the media frenzy at the time.
To celebrate its 50th anniversary, we asked three of our critics for new perspectives on the film: what it accomplished then and what it represents to us now. Erik Piepenburg reads his essay in which he explores the cult horror classic through a queer lens.
“‘The Exorcist’ is about traumas and how they originate, fester and can be overcome,” he wrote. “I also didn’t recognize — and it took leaving Christianity and the closet for this to click — that the film, released four years into a post-Stonewall America, is subversively queer.”
Written and narrated by Ben Sisario
Taylor Swift’s “1989” has been a fixture in the Top 20 of Billboard’s album chart for months. Stuffed with some of the singer’s biggest pop hits, like “Shake It Off” and “Blank Space,” the LP was a gargantuan hit when it was released in 2014, and this year Swift has been performing its songs on her record-breaking Eras Tour.
But “1989” is about to make an all-but-certain plunge down the chart.
That’s because today, Swift released “1989 (Taylor’s Version),” the latest installment in her ambitious and wildly successful project to rerecord her first six studio albums. What began a few years ago as an attempt to reclaim her music — and, perhaps, have a taste of revenge — after the sale of her former record label has become a blockbuster enterprise all its own, with punishing consequences for the original recordings.
Written and narrated by Dwight Garner
The loudest summoning gong in pop culture history, if dozens of rock memoirs can be believed, was struck on Sept. 9, 1956. That is when Elvis performed on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” But time passed. Patti Smith’s revelatory moment came eight years later, when she saw the Rolling Stones on Sullivan. The band made her feel she was “trapped in a field of hot dots.” The music gave her a funny feeling, she wrote, in her pants.
For Thurston Moore, a driving force in the important art-noise band Sonic Youth, the epiphany was “Louie Louie,” the indecipherable-at-any-speed single by the Kingsmen. Moore’s older brother brought a copy home in the summer of 1963, when Moore was 5. They played it all day. “The lead singer’s voice had the air of a boy smoking a cigarette with one hand while banging a tambourine in the other, an insolent distance to his delivery, a vision of being at once boss and bored,” Moore writes in his vivid new memoir, “Sonic Life.”
Dwight Garner, book critic for The New York Times, reviews the new memoir by the iconic guitarist of Sonic Youth.
Our Reporter Reads are produced by Tally Abecassis, Parin Behrooz, Sarah Diamond, Jack D’Isidoro, Adrienne Hurst and Kate Winslett.
Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Julia Simon and Isabella Anderson.