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When Maggie Jones's marriage collapsed after 23 years, she was devastated and overwhelmed. She was in her 50s, with two jobs, two teenage daughters and one dog. She didn't consider dating. She had no time, no emotional energy. But then a year passed. One daughter was off at college, the other increasingly independent. After several more months went by, she started to feel a sliver of curiosity about what kind of men were out there and how it would feel to date again. The last time she dated was 25 years ago, and even then, she fell into relationships mostly with guys from high school, college, parties, work. Now every man she knew was either married, too young, too old or otherwise not a good fit.That meant online dating — the default mode not just for the young but also for people Ms. Jones's age. Her only exposure had been watching her oldest daughter, home from college one summer, as she sat on her bed rapidly swiping through guy after guy — spending no more than a second or two on each.Ms. Jones tells her story of online dating in later adulthood, and what she learned.

On Nov. 12, 1974, Taffy Brodesser-Akner's father's childhood friend Jack Teich was kidnapped out of his driveway in the nicest part of the nicest part of Long Island. He was arriving home from work when two men forced him into their car at gunpoint and took him to a house where they chained and interrogated him.On the second day of his kidnapping, Jack's wife, Janet, received a call from someone demanding a ransom of $750,000, and a few days later, Janet and Jack's brother Buddy dropped the money off at Penn Station under F.B.I. surveillance. The F.B.I. did not catch the kidnapper, but afterward, he decided to let Jack go.Jack was home safe. He had survived his kidnapping. But the actual kidnapping is not what this story is about, if you can believe it. It's about surviving what you survived, which is also known as the rest of your life.

Cindy Elgan glanced into the lobby of her office and saw a sheriff's deputy waiting at the front counter. “Let's start a video recording, just in case this goes sideways,” Elgan, 65, told one of her employees in the Esmeralda County clerk's office. She had come to expect skepticism, conspiracy theories and even threats related to her job as an election administrator. She grabbed her annotated booklet of Nevada state laws, said a prayer for patience and walked into the lobby to confront the latest challenge to America's electoral process.The deputy was standing alongside a woman that Elgan recognized as Mary Jane Zakas, 77, a longtime elementary schoolteacher and a leader in the local Republican Party. She often asked for a sheriff's deputy to accompany her to the election's office, in case her meetings became contentious.“I hope you're having a blessed morning,” Zakas said. “Unfortunately, a lot of people are still very concerned about the security of their votes. They've lost all trust in the system.”After the 2020 election, former President Donald J. Trump's denials and accusations of voter fraud spread outward from the White House to even the country's most remote places, like Esmeralda County. Elgan knew most of the 620 voters in the town. Still, they accused her of being paid off and skimming votes away from Trump. And even though their allegations came with no evidence, they wanted her recalled from office before the next presidential election in November.

Have you heard the song “Brett Martin, You a Nice Man, Yes”?Probably not. On Spotify, “Brett Martin, You a Nice Man, Yes” has not yet accumulated enough streams to even register a tally. Even Brett Martin, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and the titular Nice Man, didn't hear the 1 minute 14 second song until last summer, a full 11 years after it was uploaded by an artist credited as Papa Razzi and the Photogs.When Martin stumbled on “Brett Martin, You a Nice Man, Yes,” he naturally assumed it was about a different, more famous Brett Martin: perhaps Brett Martin, the left-handed reliever who until recently played for the Texas Rangers; or Brett Martin, the legendary Australian squash player; or even Clara Brett Martin, the Canadian who in 1897 became the British Empire's first female lawyer. Only when the singer began referencing details of stories that he made for public radio's “This American Life” almost 20 years ago did he realize the song was actually about him. The song ended, “I really like you/Will you be my friend?/Will you call me on the phone?” Then it gave a phone number, with a New Hampshire area code.So, he called.

At the center of the criminal case against former President Donald Trump in Manhattan is the accusation that Trump took part in a scheme to turn The National Enquirer and its sister publications into an arm of his 2016 presidential campaign. The documents detailed three “hush money” payments made to a series of individuals to guarantee their silence about potentially damaging stories in the months before the election. Because this was done with the goal of helping his election chances, the case implied, these payments amounted to a form of illegal, undisclosed campaign spending. And because Trump created paperwork to make the payments seem like regular legal expenses, that amounted to a criminal effort at a coverup, argued Alvin Bragg, the district attorney of Manhattan. Trump has denied the charges against him.For Lachlan Cartwright, reading the indictment was like stepping through the looking glass, because it described a three-year period in his own professional life, one that he has come to deeply regret. Now, as a former president faces a criminal trial for the first time in American history, Cartwright is forced to grapple with what really happened at The Enquirer in those years — and whether and how he can ever set things right.

Chris Kerr was 12 when he first observed a deathbed vision. His memory of that summer in 1974 is blurred, but not the sense of mystery he felt at the bedside of his dying father. Throughout Kerr's childhood in Toronto, his father, a surgeon, was too busy to spend much time with his son, except for an annual fishing trip they took, just the two of them, to the Canadian wilderness. Gaunt and weakened by cancer at 42, his father reached for the buttons on Kerr's shirt, fiddled with them and said something about getting ready to catch the plane to their cabin in the woods. “I knew intuitively, I knew wherever he was, must be a good place because we were going fishing,” Kerr told me.Kerr now calls what he witnessed an end-of-life vision. His father wasn't delusional, he believes. His mind was taking him to a time and place where he and his son could be together, in the wilds of northern Canada.Kerr followed his father into medicine, and in the last 10 years he has hired a permanent research team that expanded studies on deathbed visions to include interviews with patients receiving hospice care at home and with their families, deepening researchers' understanding of the variety and profundity of these visions.

By the time Sam Apple pulled up with his goldendoodle, Steve, to their resting place, he was tired from the long drive and already second-guessing his plan. He felt a little better when they stepped inside the Dogwood Acres Pet Retreat. The lobby, with its elegant tiled entrance, might have passed for the lobby of any small countryside hotel, at least one that strongly favored dog-themed decor. But this illusion was broken when the receptionist reviewed their reservation — which, in addition to their luxury suite, included cuddle time, group play, a nature walk and a “belly rub tuck-in.”Venues like this one, on Kent Island in Maryland's Chesapeake Bay, didn't exist when Apple was growing up in the 1980s. If you needed a place to board your dog back then, you went to a kennel, where your dog spent virtually the entire day in a small — and probably not very clean — cage. There were no tuck-ins, no bedtime stories, no dog-bone-shaped swimming pools. There was certainly nothing like today's most upscale canine resorts, where the dogs sleep on queen-size beds and the spa offerings include mud baths and blueberry facials; one pet-hotel franchise on the West Coast will even pick up your dog in a Lamborghini. Apple knew Dogwood Acres wouldn't be quite as luxurious as that, but the accommodations still sounded pretty nice. So he decided to check his dog in, and to tag along for the journey.

In October 2022, amid a flurry of media appearances promoting their film “Tàr,” the director Todd Field and the star Cate Blanchett made time to visit a cramped closet in Manhattan. This closet, which has become a sacred space for movie buffs, was once a disused bathroom at the headquarters of the Criterion Collection, a 40-year-old company dedicated to “gathering the greatest films from around the world” and making high-quality editions available to the public on DVD and Blu-ray and, more recently, through its streaming service, the Criterion Channel. Today Criterion uses the closet as its stockroom, housing films by some 600 directors from more than 50 countries — a catalog so synonymous with cinematic achievement that it has come to function as a kind of film Hall of Fame. Through a combination of luck, obsession and good taste, this 55-person company has become the arbiter of what makes a great movie, more so than any Hollywood studio or awards ceremony.

That people will travel to Mars, and soon, is a widely accepted conviction within NASA. Rachel McCauley, until recently the acting deputy director of NASA's Mars campaign, had, as of July, a punch list of 800 problems that must be solved before the first human mission launches. Many of these concern the mechanical difficulties of transporting people to a planet that is never closer than 33.9 million miles away; keeping them alive on poisonous soil in unbreathable air, bombarded by solar radiation and galactic cosmic rays, without access to immediate communication; and returning them safely to Earth, more than a year and half later. But McCauley does not doubt that NASA will overcome these challenges. What NASA does not yet know — what nobody can know — is whether humanity can overcome the psychological torment of Martian life.A mission known as CHAPEA, an experiment in which four ordinary people would enact, as closely as possible, the lives of Martian colonists for 378 days, sets out to answer that question.

At the end of a quiet, leafy street in the Valley in Los Angeles, the reality TV star Tom Sandoval has outfitted his home with landscaping lights that rotate in a spectrum of colors, mimicking the dance floor of a nightclub. The property is both his private residence and an occasional TV set for the Bravo reality show “Vanderpump Rules.” After a series of events that came to be known as “Scandoval,” paparazzi had been camped outside, but by the new year it was just one or two guys, and now they have mostly gone, too.“Scandoval” is the nickname for Sandoval's affair with another cast member, which he had behind the backs of the show's producers and his girlfriend of nine years. This wouldn't be interesting or noteworthy except that in 2023, after being on the air for 10 seasons, “Vanderpump” was nominated for an Emmy for outstanding unstructured reality program, an honor that has never been bestowed on any of the network's “Housewives” shows. It also became, by a key metric, the most-watched cable series in the advertiser-beloved demographic of 18- to 49-year-olds and brought in over 12.2 million viewers. This happened last spring, when Hollywood's TV writers went on strike and cable TV was declared dead and our culture had already become so fractured that it was rare for anything — let alone an episode of television — to become a national event. And yet you probably heard about “Scandoval” even if you couldn't care less about who these people are, exactly.As “Vanderpump” airs its 11th season, Tom Sandoval reflects on his new public persona.

The closest thing to a bat signal for stoners is the blue lettering of the Cookies logo. When a new storefront comes to a strip mall or a downtown shopping district, fans flock to grand-opening parties, drawn by a love of the brand — one based on more than its reputation for selling extremely potent weed.People often compare Cookies to the streetwear brand Supreme. That's accurate in one very literal sense — they each sell a lot of hats — and in other, more subjective ones. They share a penchant for collaboration-based marketing; their appeal to mainstream audiences is tied up with their implied connections to illicit subcultures; and they've each been expanding rapidly in recent years.All of it is inextricable from Berner, the stage name of Gilbert Milam, 40, Cookies' co-founder and chief executive, who spent two decades as a rapper with a sideline as a dealer — or as a dealer with a sideline as a rapper. With the company's success, he is estimated to be one of the wealthiest rappers in the world, without having ever released a hit record.

The first death happened before the academic year began. In July 2021, an undergraduate student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute was reported dead. The administration sent a notice out over email, with the familiar, thoroughly vetted phrasing and appended resources. Katherine Foo, an assistant professor in the department of integrative and global studies, felt especially crushed by the news. She taught this student. He was Chinese, and she felt connected to the particular set of pressures he faced. She read through old, anonymous course evaluations, looking for any sign she might have missed. But she was unsure where to put her personal feelings about a loss suffered in this professional context.The week before the academic year began, a second student died. A rising senior in the computer-science department who loved horticulture took his own life. This brought an intimation of disaster. One student suicide is a tragedy; two might be the beginning of a cluster. Some faculty members began to feel a tinge of dread when they stepped onto campus.Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts is a tidy New England college campus with the high-saturation landscaping typical of well-funded institutions. The hedges are beautifully trimmed, the pathways are swept clean. Red-brick buildings from the 19th century fraternize with high glass facades and renovated interiors. But over a six-month period, the school was turned upside down by a spate of suicides.

Of all the dozens of suspected thieves questioned by the detectives of the Train Burglary Task Force at the Los Angeles Police Department during the months they spent investigating the rise in theft from the city's freight trains, one man stood out. What made him memorable wasn't his criminality so much as his giddy enthusiasm for trespassing. That man, Victor Llamas, was a self-taught expert of the supply chain, a connoisseur of shipping containers. Even in custody, as the detectives interrogated him numerous times, after multiple arrests, in a windowless room in a police station in spring 2022, a kind of nostalgia would sweep over the man. “He said that was the best feeling he'd ever had, jumping on the train while it was moving,” Joe Chavez, who supervised the task force's detectives, said. “It was euphoric for him.”Some 20 million containers move through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach every year, including about 35 percent of all the imports into the United States from Asia. Once these steel boxes leave the relative security of a ship at port, they are loaded onto trains and trucks — and then things start disappearing. The Los Angeles basin is the country's undisputed capital of cargo theft, the region with the most reported incidents of stuff stolen from trains and trucks and those interstitial spaces in the supply chain, like rail yards, warehouses, truck stops and parking lots.In the era of e-commerce, freight train robberies are going through a strange revival.This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

On April 26, 2019, a beluga whale appeared near Tufjord, a village in northern Norway, immediately alarming fishermen in the area. Belugas in that part of the world typically inhabit the remote Arctic and are rarely spotted as far south as the Norwegian mainland. Although they occasionally travel solo, they tend to live and move in groups. This particular whale was entirely alone and unusually comfortable around humans, trailing boats and opening his mouth as though expecting to be fed.News of the friendly white whale spread quickly. In early May, a video of the beluga went viral, eventually earning a spot on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.” By midsummer, he had become an international celebrity, drawing large groups of tourists. All the while, marine experts had been speculating about the whale's origin. Clearly this animal had spent time in captivity — but where?In the years since the whale, publicly named Hvaldimir, first entered the global spotlight, the very qualities that make him so endearing — his intelligence, curiosity and charisma — have put him in perpetual danger. Hvaldimir is now at the center of a dispute over his welfare. Even as he swims freely through the ocean, he is caught in a tangle of conflicting human ambitions, some noble, others misguided, nearly all distorted by inadequate understanding. Whether to intervene, and how to do so, remain contentious subjects among scientists, activists and government officials.This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

Liz Flatt drove to Austin, Texas, mostly out of desperation. She had tried talking with the police. She had tried working with a former F.B.I. profiler who ran a nonprofit dedicated to solving unsolved murders. She had been interviewed by journalists and at least one podcaster. She had been featured on a Netflix documentary series about a man who falsely confessed to hundreds of killings.Although she didn't know it at the time, Flatt was at a crossroads in what she had taken to calling her journey, a path embarked on after a prayer-born decision five years earlier to try to find who killed her sister, Deborah Sue Williamson, or Debbie, in 1975. It was now 2021.She had come to Austin for a conference, CrimeCon, which formed around the same time that Flatt began her quest, at a moment now seen as an inflection point in the long history of true crime, a genre as old as storytelling but one that adapts quickly to new technologies, from the printing press to social media. Flatt met a woman who would later put her in touch with two investigators who presented at the conference that year: George Jared and Jennifer Bucholtz. They were podcasters, but Jared was also a journalist and Bucholtz an adjunct professor of forensics and criminal justice at the for-profit American Military University. Their presentation was on another cold case, the murder of Rebekah Gould in 2004, whose killer they claimed to have helped find using a technique that has quickly become a signature of the changing landscape of true crime: crowdsourcing.This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

Arrowhead Stadium, the home of the Kansas City Chiefs, the N.F.L.'s defending champions, is a very loud place. During a 2014 game, a sound meter captured a decibel reading equivalent to a jet's taking off, earning a Guinness World Record for “Loudest crowd roar at a sports stadium.”Around 11 a.m. on Thursday, Sept. 7, Brian Melillo, an audio engineer for NBC Sports' flagship N.F.L. telecast, “Sunday Night Football,” arrived at Arrowhead to prepare for that evening's game against the Detroit Lions. It was a big occasion: the annual season opener, the N.F.L. Kickoff game, traditionally hosted by the winner of last season's Super Bowl. There would be speeches, fireworks, a military flyover, the unfurling of a championship banner. A crowd of more than 73,000 was expected. “Arrowhead is a pretty rowdy setting,” Melillo said. “It can present some problems.”Broadcasting a football game on live television is one of the most complex technical and logistical challenges in entertainment. Jody Rosen went behind the scenes of the mammoth broadcast production.This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

Fifty years ago, eight Americans set off for South America to climb Aconcagua, one of the world's mightiest mountains. Things quickly went wrong. Two climbers died. Their bodies were left behind.Here is what was certain: A woman from Denver, maybe the most accomplished climber in the group, had last been seen alive on the glacier. A man from Texas, part of the recent Apollo missions to the moon, lay frozen nearby.There were contradictory statements from survivors and a hasty departure. There was a judge who demanded an investigation into possible foul play. There were three years of summit-scratching searches to find and retrieve the bodies.Now, decades later, a camera belonging to one of the deceased climbers has emerged from a receding glacier near the summit and one of mountaineering's most enduring mysteries has been given air and light.This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

Last fall, Alexandra Duarte, who is now 16, went to see her endocrinologist at Texas Children's Hospital, outside Houston. From age 10, she had been living with polycystic ovary syndrome and, more recently, prediabetes. After Alexandra described her recent quinceañera, the doctor brought up an operation that might benefit her, one that might help her lose weight and, as a result, improve these obesity-related problems.Alexandra, who smiles shyly and speaks softly but confidently, says she was “a little skeptical at first because, like, it's a surgery.” But her mother, Gabriela Velez, suggested that her daughter consider it. “Ever since I was a toddler, my mom knew that I was struggling with obesity,” Alexandra says.The teasing started in fifth grade. Alexandra couldn't eat without her classmates staring at and judging her. Though she sought counseling for her sadness and anxiety, these troubles still caused her to leave school for a month. The bullying finally stopped after she switched schools in 10th grade, but Alexandra's parents knew how deeply she continued to suffer. How much more could their daughter endure? After the doctor suggested bariatric surgery, an operation on the gastrointestinal tract that helps patients lose weight, they spoke to friends who had successfully been through the procedure as adults. They decided it was a smart option for her. Alexandra wasn't sure.This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

As an incubator of life, Earth has a lot going for it, something we often fail to appreciate fully from within its nurturing bounds. Merely sending probes and rovers to the moon and Mars won't do. For various reasons — adventure! apocalypse! commerce! — we insist upon taking our corporeal selves off-world too. Multiple private companies have announced plans to put hotels in space soon. NASA is aiming to 3-D-print lunar neighborhoods within a couple of decades. And while it will probably take longer than that to build and populate an outpost on Mars, preparations are being made: This summer, four NASA crew members began a 378-day stay in simulated Martian housing at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Here's some of what we know about how Earthlings fare beyond the safety of our home world.This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

The Space Force, the sixth and newest branch of the U.S. military, was authorized by Congress and signed into law by President Donald Trump in December 2019. The initiative had been shaped within the armed forces and Congress over the previous 25 years, based on the premise that as satellite and space technologies evolved, America's military organizations had to change as well.From the start, the Space Force had detractors. Air Force officials wondered if it was necessary, while some political observers believed that it signified the start of a dangerous (and expensive) militarization of another realm. What seemed harder to argue against was how nearly every aspect of modern warfare and defense — intelligence, surveillance, communications, operations, missile detection — has come to rely on links to orbiting satellites.The recent battles in Eastern Europe, in which Russia has tried to disrupt Ukraine's space-borne communication systems, are a case in point. And yet the strategic exploitation of space now extends well beyond military concerns. Satellite phone systems have become widespread. Positioning and timing satellites, such as GPS (now overseen by the Space Force), allow for digital mapping, navigation, banking and agricultural management. A world without orbital weather surveys seems unthinkable. Modern life is reliant on space technologies to an extent that an interruption would create profound economic and social distress.For the moment, the force has taken up a problem not often contemplated outside science fiction: How do you fight a war in space, or a war on Earth that expands into space? And even if you're ready to fight, how do you make sure you don't have a space war in the first place?This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

The beginning of the story was strangely familiar, like the opening scene in a shopworn police procedural: A woman runs screaming down a street in Oak Beach, a secluded gated community on Long Island's South Shore, only to vanish, it seems, into thin air. It was almost dawn on May 1, 2010. Hours earlier, Shannan Gilbert traveled from New Jersey to see a man who had hired her as an escort from a Craigslist ad. By the time the police arrived, she was gone. They talked to the neighbors, the john and her driver and came up with nothing. A few days later, they ordered a flyover of the area and, again, saw no sign of her. Then they essentially threw up their hands. She went into the ocean, they decided, either hysterical or on drugs.None of this made the news, not at first. A missing sex worker rarely does. Not even when another woman advertising on Craigslist, Megan Waterman, was reported missing a month later.This was, quite obviously, a serial-killer case. The only person not saying as much was the Suffolk County police commissioner, Richard Dormer. “I don't want anyone to think we have a Jack the Ripper running around Suffolk County with blood dripping from a knife,” he said in a frenzied news conference. In fact, they had something almost exactly like that. All eyes were on the Suffolk Police now — wondering who killed these women, if they would ever find Gilbert and what it would take to solve the mystery.This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

On Oct. 19, 2021, Armando Linares López was writing up notes from an interview when his cellphone buzzed with an unknown number. Linares, 49 and stocky with black hair that was just starting to show gray streaks, ran an online news site in a small Mexican city called Zitácuaro. He knew his beat so intimately that calls from unfamiliar phone numbers were rare.But the man on the other end spoke in a way that was instantly familiar. Linares had come to know that pitched, menacing tone from years of run-ins with every kind of Mexican gangster.“This is Commander Eagle,” the voice said. “I'm from the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.”Zitácuaro, in the hills of the state of Michoacán, had for years mostly been known for its fertile avocado orchards and the pine-oak forest where tourists came to see the annual arrival of the monarch butterflies. But its central location had made it increasingly attractive to the drug trade. Farmers grew marijuana and opium poppy, the source of heroin, in nearby mountains, and in recent years international drug cartels had been using Michoacán as a way station for methamphetamine and fentanyl shipments. Linares's rise as a journalist coincided with the drug boom, and he watched its devastating effects on Zitácuaro: severed heads dumped in front of a car dealership, business owners kidnapped for ransom and a government that seemed unwilling or unable to do anything about it.This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

Kihekah Avenue cuts through the town of Pawhuska, Okla., roughly north to south, forming the only corridor you might call a “business district” in the town of 2,900. Standing in the middle is a small TV-and-appliance store called Hometown, which occupies a two-story brick building and hasn't changed much in decades. Boards cover its second-story windows, and part of the sign above its awning is broken, leaving half the lettering intact, spelling “Home.”One winter day in February 2021, Jack Fisk stood before Hometown with Martin Scorsese, explaining how beautiful it could be. For much of the last week, he and Scorsese had been walking around Pawhuska, scouting set locations for the director's 28th feature film, “Killers of the Flower Moon.” The film, which is based on David Grann's best-selling book, chronicles the so-called 1920s Reign of Terror, when the Osage Nation's discovery of oil made them some of the richest people in the world but also the target of a conspiracy among white people seeking to kill them for their shares of the mineral rights.To render the events as accurately as possible, Scorsese had decided to film the movie in Osage County. It would be a sprawling, technically complicated shoot, with much of the undertaking falling to Fisk. Unlike production designers who use soundstages or computer-generated imagery, he prefers to build from scratch or to remodel period buildings, and even more than most of his peers, he aspires to exacting historical detail. His task would be to create a full-scale replica of a 1920s boom town atop what remains of 2020s Pawhuska.This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

The triumphant return to Rome of Måneskin — arguably the only rock stars of their generation, and almost certainly the biggest Italian rock band of all time — coincided with a heat wave across Southern Europe. On a Thursday morning in July, the band's vast management team was officially concerned that the night's sold-out performance at the Stadio Olimpico would be delayed. When Måneskin finally took the stage around 9:30 p.m., it was still well into the 90s — which was too bad, because there would be pyro.The need to feel the rock may explain the documented problem of fans' taste becoming frozen in whatever era was happening when they were between the ages of 15 and 25. Anyone who adolesced after Spotify, however, did not grow up with rock as an organically developing form and is likely to have experienced the whole catalog simultaneously, listening to Led Zeppelin at the same time they listened to Pixies and Franz Ferdinand — i.e. as a genre rather than as particular artists, the way the writer Dan Brook's generation experienced jazz.The members of Måneskin belong to this post-Spotify cohort. As the youngest and most prominent custodians of the rock tradition, their job is to sell new, guitar-driven songs of 100 to 150 beats per minute to a larger and larger audience, many of whom are young people who primarily think of such music as a historical artifact. Starting in September, Måneskin brought this business to the United States — a market where they are considerably less known — on a multivenue tour, with their first stop at Madison Square Garden.This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

The first time Tony Ford played Dungeons & Dragons, he was a wiry Black kid who had never seen the inside of a prison. His mother, a police officer in Detroit, had quit the force and moved the family to West Texas. To Ford, it seemed like a different world. Strangers talked funny, and El Paso was half desert. But he could skateboard in all that open space, and he eventually befriended a nerdy white kid with a passion for Dungeons & Dragons. Ford fell in love with the role-playing game right away; it was complex and cerebral, a saga you could lose yourself in. And in the 1980s, everyone seemed to be playing it.The game has since become one of the most popular in the world, celebrated in nostalgic television shows and dramatized in movies. It is played in homes, at large conventions and even in prisons.When Ford, who is now on death row, first overheard the other men playing D.&D., they were engaged in a fast, high-octane version. The gamers were members of the Mexican Mafia, an insular crew that let Ford into their circle after they realized he could draw. The gang's leader, Spider, pulled some strings, Ford recalls, and got him moved to a neighboring cell to serve as his personal artist. Ford earned some money drawing intricate Aztec designs in ink. He also began to join their D.&D. sessions, eventually becoming a Dungeon Master and running games all over the row.This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

As China strove for a larger role on the international stage at the turn of the century, the arrival of the internet and a relatively relaxed political environment spurred a boom in self-expression. Many writers tested the boundaries of Chinese literary culture, experimenting with subjects that were quotidian but taboo on the page: corruption, sexual desire and evolving gender roles.In today's China, though, the pursuit of free expression requires writers to operate under the ever-watchful eye of a complex state surveillance system. This can resemble a high-stakes game of Whac-a-Mole in which writers, editors and online publishers try to outmaneuver the Chinese Communist Party's apparatus, using any opportunity and resource at their disposal to chronicle life as they see it.This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

“The weird thing about growing up kidnapped,” Shane McCrae, the 47-year-old American poet, told me in his melodious, reedy voice one rainy afternoon in May, “is if it happens early enough, there's a way in which you kind of don't know.”There was no reason for McCrae to have known. What unfolded in McCrae's childhood — between a day in June 1979 when his white grandmother took him from his Black father and disappeared, and another day, 13 years later, when McCrae opened a phone book in Salem, Ore., found a name he hoped was his father's and placed a call — is both an unambiguous story of abduction and a convoluted story of complicity. It loops through the American landscape, from Oregon to Texas to California to Oregon again, and, even now, wends through the vaster emotional country of a child and his parents. And because so much of what happened to McCrae happened in homes where he was beaten and lied to and threatened, where he was made to understand that Black people were inferior to whites, where he was taught to hail Hitler, where he was told that his dark skin meant he tanned easily but, no, not that he was Black, it's a story that's been hard for McCrae to piece together.McCrae's new book, the memoir “Pulling the Chariot of the Sun,” is his attempt to construct, at a remove of four decades, an understanding of what happened and what it has come to mean. The memoir takes the reader through McCrae's childhood, from his earliest memories after being taken from his father to when, at 16, he found him again.his story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

Twenty years ago, a glamorous platinum-blond widow arrived at the Paris law office of Claude Dumont Beghi in tears. Someone was trying to take her horses — her “babies” — away, and she needed a lawyer to stop them.She explained that her late husband had been a breeder of champion thoroughbreds. The couple was a familiar sight at the racetracks in Chantilly and Paris: Daniel Wildenstein, gray-suited with a cane in the stands, and Sylvia Roth Wildenstein, a former model with a cigarette dangling from her lips. They first met in 1964, while she was walking couture shows in Paris and he was languishing in a marriage of convenience to a woman from another wealthy Jewish family of art collectors. Daniel, 16 years Sylvia's senior, already had two grown sons when they met, and he didn't want more children. So over the next 40 years they spent together, Sylvia cared for the horses as if they were the children she never had. When Daniel died of cancer in 2001, he left her a small stable.Then, one morning about a year later, Sylvia's phone rang. It was her horse trainer calling to say that he had spotted something odd in the local racing paper, Paris Turf: The results of Sylvia's stable were no longer listed under her name. The French journalist Magali Serre's 2013 book “Les Wildenstein” recounts the scene in great detail: Sylvia ran to fetch her copy and flipped to the page. Sure enough, the stable of “Madame Wildenstein” had been replaced by “Dayton Limited,” an Irish company owned by her stepsons.This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

In early 2021, a Wikipedia editor peered into the future and saw what looked like a funnel cloud on the horizon: the rise of GPT-3, a precursor to the new chatbots from OpenAI. When this editor — a prolific Wikipedian who goes by the handle Barkeep49 on the site — gave the new technology a try, he could see that it was untrustworthy. The bot would readily mix fictional elements (a false name, a false academic citation) into otherwise factual and coherent answers. But he had no doubts about its potential. “I think A.I.'s day of writing a high-quality encyclopedia is coming sooner rather than later,” he wrote in “Death of Wikipedia,” an essay that he posted under his handle on Wikipedia itself. He speculated that a computerized model could, in time, displace his beloved website and its human editors, just as Wikipedia had supplanted the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which in 2012 announced it was discontinuing its print publication.Recently, when I asked this editor if he still worried about his encyclopedia's fate, he told me that the newer versions made him more convinced that ChatGPT was a threat. “It wouldn't surprise me if things are fine for the next three years,” he said of Wikipedia, “and then, all of a sudden, in Year 4 or 5, things drop off a cliff.”This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

Where did it come from? More than three years into the pandemic with untold millions of people dead, that question about the origin of Covid-19 remains widely disputed and fraught, with facts sparkling amid a tangle of analyses and hypotheticals like Christmas lights strung on a dark, thorny tree. One school of thought holds that the virus, known to science as SARS-CoV-2, spread to humans from a nonhuman animal, probably in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, an emporium brimming with fish, meats and wildlife on sale as food in Wuhan, China.Another school argues that the virus was laboratory-engineered as a bioweapon to infect humans and cause them harm, and was possibly devised in a “shadow project” sponsored by the People's Liberation Army of China. A third school, more moderate than the second but also implicating laboratory work, suggests that the virus got into its first human victim by accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a research complex on the eastern side of the city, maybe after undergoing well-meaning but reckless genetic manipulation that made it more dangerous to people.If you feel confused by these possibilities, undecided, suspicious of overconfident assertions — or just tired of the whole subject of the pandemic and whatever little bug has caused it — be assured that you aren't the only one.This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

When Barb's father all but left, her mother turned inward, sitting quietly in front of the television, always smoking, often with a cocktail. Something had overtaken her, though it wasn't clear what.Six years later, Barb was 20 and in college when someone else in the family needed help. Her sister Christy was the second-born, 24 years older than Barb and the star of the family in many ways. But where once Christy was capable and professionally ambitious and socially conscious, now, at 44, she was alone, her clothes unkempt and ripped, her hair unwashed, her marriage over.Depression was the first suspected diagnosis, then schizophrenia, though neither seemed quite right. Christy wasn't sad or delusional; she wasn't even upset. It was more as if she were reverting to a childlike state, losing her knack for self-regulation. Her personality was diluting — on its way out, with seemingly nothing to replace it.What was left of Christy was chaotic and unpredictable. She refused to bathe and stopped bothering to make meals. She crashed a neighbor's party and made odd conversation with strangers. She clogged a toilet with tampons and flooded the house. She was gleefully impulsive, spending thousands of dollars a year on magazine subscriptions. That strange, reckless profligacy made Barb think of their mother, who in her final years sat at home, saying yes to every sales phone call. How heartbreaking but also interesting, Barb thought, that Christy shared the same peculiar tendencies — a family trait of sorts.This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

On the morning of Feb. 7, 2017, two electricians were working on a warning siren near the spillway of Oroville Dam, 60 miles north of Sacramento, when they heard an explosion. As they watched, a giant plume of water rose over their heads, and chunks of concrete began flying down the hillside toward the Feather River. The dam's spillway, a concrete channel capable of moving millions of gallons of water out of the reservoir in seconds, was disintegrating in front of them. If it had to be taken out of service, a serious rainstorm, like the one that had been falling on Northern California for days, could cause the dam — the tallest in the United States — to fail.Kory Honea, the sheriff of Butte County, which includes the dam and the town it is named for, first heard that something was wrong from Dino Corbin, a local radio personality, who called him at his office: “Are you aware there's a hole in the spillway?” Around the same time, one of the sheriff's dispatchers received a confusing message from California's Department of Water Resources, which owns the dam, saying it was conducting a “routine inspection” after reports of an incident.At the dam, department officials closed the gates at the top of the spillway to prevent any more of its concrete slabs from being lost in what an independent forensic report prepared after the incident described as “a sudden, explosive failure.” The flow of water stopped. The rain, however, didn't.In the six years since the near-failure of the Oroville Dam, dam operators across the country have begun to reassess the structures under their control, looking for hidden weaknesses: the cracks in the spillway, the hillside that crumbles at the first sign of water. That work is necessary, but it may not be enough to prevent the next disaster. Bigger storms are on the way.This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

Some years ago, a psychiatrist named Wendy Dean read an article about a physician who died by suicide. Such deaths were distressingly common, she discovered. The suicide rate among doctors appeared to be even higher than the rate among active military members, a notion that startled Dean, who was then working as an administrator at a U.S. Army medical research center in Maryland. Dean started asking the physicians she knew how they felt about their jobs, and many of them confided that they were struggling. Some complained that they didn't have enough time to talk to their patients because they were too busy filling out electronic medical records. Others bemoaned having to fight with insurers about whether a person with a serious illness would be preapproved for medication.The doctors Dean surveyed were deeply committed to the medical profession. But many of them were frustrated and unhappy, she sensed, not because they were burned out from working too hard but because the health care system made it so difficult to care for their patients.By the time the journalist Eyal Press met Dean, the distress among medical professionals had reached alarming levels. Professional organizations like National Nurses United, the largest group of registered nurses in the country, had begun referring to “moral injury” and “moral distress” in pamphlets and news releases. Mona Masood, a psychiatrist who established a support line for doctors shortly after the coronavirus pandemic began, recalls being struck by how clinicians reacted when she mentioned the term. “I remember all these physicians were like, Wow, that is what I was looking for,” she says. “This is it.”This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

For more information on today's episode visit nytimes.com/thedaily.For more information on today's episode visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

HF0, or Hacker Fellowship Zero, is a start-up accelerator that provides 12-week residencies for batches of fellows from 10 different start-ups. Their experience, which culminates in a demonstration day, is supposed to be the most productive three months of the fellows' lives. Dave Fontenot, one of HF0's founders, was inspired by the two years he spent living in monasteries in his 20s: While monastery life was materially ascetic, he found that it was luxurious in the freedom it gave residents to focus on the things that really mattered. And this year at the Archbishop's Mansion in San Francisco, the home of the fellows, almost everyone has been monastically focused on what has become the city's newest religion: artificial intelligence.The A.I. gospel had not yet spread in 2021, when Fontenot and his two co-founders, Emily Liu and Evan Stites-Clayton, started the accelerator. Even a year ago, when HF0 hosted a batch of fellows at a hotel in Miami, six out of the eight companies represented were cryptocurrency start-ups. But at the mansion in San Francisco, eight of the 10 companies in HF0's first batch this year were working on A.I.-based apps.That generative A.I. has largely supplanted crypto in the eyes of founders and venture capitalists alike is not exactly surprising. When OpenAI released ChatGPT late last year, it set off a new craze at a time when the collapsing crypto and tech markets had left many investors and would-be entrepreneurs adrift, unsure of where to put their capital and time. Suddenly users everywhere were realizing that A.I. could now respond to verbal queries with a startling degree of humanlike fluency. “Large language models have been around for a long time, but their uses were limited,” said Robert Nishihara, a co-founder of Anyscale, a start-up for machine-learning infrastructure. “But there's a threshold where they become dramatically more useful, and I think now it's crossed that.”This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

For more information on today's episode visit nytimes.com/thedaily.For more information on today's episode visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

For more information on today's episode visit nytimes.com/thedaily.For more information on today's episode visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

Lakishia Fell-Davis is aware that at this point, in 2023, most people are treating the coronavirus pandemic as a thing of the past. For her, though, Covid still poses a real threat: Fell-Davis has Type I diabetes, putting her at higher risk of hospitalization and long-term complications from illness. As such, her experience during the pandemic has shaped how she thinks about her daily life, especially at Ninety-Fifth Street Elementary School, where she has worked on and off for more than a decade as a substitute teacher and teaching assistant.She felt much more comfortable when schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District were online during the first year and a half of the pandemic and her kids, Makayla and Kevin, were attending virtually. Sure, they missed their friends, but they were shy and soft-spoken children who had never really strayed far from home. They didn't seem to mind the arrangement. And back then, Fell-Davis's mother, who was paralyzed on her left side after surviving stomach cancer and two strokes, could visit them with relative peace of mind despite her poor health.Fell-Davis cried when she learned that in the fall of 2021, the school district would require students and teachers to return to in-person learning. Her home — a cozy two-bedroom apartment in a calm neighborhood — had become her haven, the place where she had more control over her family's health than she had anywhere else.This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

In January 2022, Randi Schofield was a 34-year-old single mother who, not long before, left her full-time job of eight years as a personal bailiff to a local judge. She pulled $30,000 from her retirement savings and was planning to give herself all of 2022 to expand the small catering business she had always dreamed about. This would be the year she bet on herself. Then, that month, she received the news that medics were pulling her father out of his car.The collision splintered the bone in his left thigh down to his knee; three days later, a metal rod held the broken pieces together. Until his leg recovered from the surgery, he would not be able to walk without assistance. In hindsight, there were warning signs that her father's health could upend Schofield's life. But he was also youthful and spirited, and it was easy to believe that everything was fine, that he was fine and that if she were to take care of him some day, it would be occasional and in a distant future. She didn't see this day coming the way it did, so abruptly and so soon.Increasing numbers of adult children are taking care of their parents, often shouldering the burden with no pay and little outside help — making their meals, helping them shower, bandaging their wounds and holding them up before they can fall. The social-work scholar Dorothy A. Miller once described this as the “peculiar position” in the modern American nuclear family, between the care people give to their aging parents and to their children. Today's “sandwich generation” is younger than the version Miller described four decades ago, but it faces the same “unique set of unshared stresses” that she warned of then: acute financial strain, a lack of reciprocated support and “fatigue from fulfilling the demands of too many roles.”This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

One Sunday in February, in a northern Italian town called Ivrea, the facades of historic buildings were covered with plastic sheeting and nets. And in several different piazzas, hundreds of wooden crates had appeared. Inside them were oranges. Oranges, the fruit.Over the next three days, 8,000 people in Ivrea would throw 900 tons of oranges at one another, one orange at a time, while tens of thousands of other people watched. They would throw the oranges very hard, very viciously, often while screaming profanities at their targets or yowling like Braveheart. But they would also keep smiling as they threw the oranges, embracing and joking and cheering one another on, exhibiting with their total beings a deranged-seeming but euphoric sense of abandon and belonging — a freedom that was easy to envy but difficult to understand.The Battle of the Oranges is an annual tradition in Ivrea and part of a larger celebration described by its organizers as “the most ancient historical Carnival in Italy.” Several people in Ivrea told the writer Jon Mooallem that as three pandemic years had passed in which no oranges were thrown, they grew concerned that something bad would happen in the community — that without this catharsis, a certain pent-up, sinister energy would explode. And on that day in February, three years of constrained energy was due to explode all at once.This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

In March 2017, an engineer at G.E. Aviation in Cincinnati received a request on LinkedIn. The engineer, Hua, is in his 40s, tall and athletic, with a boyish face that makes him look a decade younger. He moved to the United States from China in 2003 for graduate studies in structural engineering.The LinkedIn request came from Chen Feng, a school official at the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, in eastern China. Days later, Chen sent him an email inviting him to the university to give a research presentation. Hua arranged to arrive in May, so he could attend a nephew's wedding and his college reunion at Harbin Institute of Technology. There was one problem, though: Hua knew that G.E. would deny permission to give the talk if he asked, which he was supposed to do. He went to Nanjing, and flew back to the United States after the presentation. He thought that would be the end of the matter.Many scientists and engineers of Chinese origin in the United States are invited to China to give presentations about their fields. Hua couldn't have known that his trip to Nanjing would prove to be the start of a series of events that would end up giving the U.S. government an unprecedented look inside China's widespread and tireless campaign of economic espionage targeting the United States, culminating in the first-ever conviction of a Chinese intelligence official on American soil.This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

For more information on today's episode visit nytimes.com/thedaily.For more information on today's episode visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

Like a lot of people who get into professional wrestling, Donovan Danhausen had a vision of a different version of himself. Ten years ago, at age 21, he was living in Detroit, working as a nursing assistant at a hospital, watching a lot of “Adult Swim” and accumulating a collection of horror- and comedy-themed tattoos.At the suggestion of a friend, he took a 12-week training course at the House of Truth wrestling school in Center Line, Mich., and then entered the indie circuit as a hand: an unknown, unpaid wrestler who shows up at events and does what's asked of him, typically setting up the ring or pretending to be a lawyer or another type of extra. When he ran out of momentum five years later, he developed the character of Danhausen. Originally supposed to be an evil demon, Danhausen found that the more elements of humor he incorporated into his performance, the more audiences responded.“I was just a bearded guy with the tattoos, trying to be a tough guy, and I'm not a tough guy naturally,” he said. “But I can be weird and charismatic, goofy. That's easy. That's also a role that most people don't want to fill.”Over the next couple of years, the Danhausen gimmick became more funny than evil, eventually settling on the character he plays today — one that is bizarre even by the standards of 21st-century wrestling.This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

As an American, Sam Anderson knows what it feels like to arrive at a theme park. “The totalizing consumerist embrace,” he writes. “The blunt-force, world-warping, escapist delight.” He has known theme parks with entrances like “international borders” and ticket prices like “mortgage payments.” Mr. Anderson has been to Disney World, which he describes as “an alternate reality that basically occupies its own tax zone.”In November, when Ghibli Park finally opened, Mr. Anderson made sure to get himself there. The park is a tribute to the legendary Studio Ghibli, first started by the animator Hayao Miyazaki in 1985, out of desperation, when he and his co-founders, Isao Takahata and Toshio Suzuki, couldn't find a studio willing to put out their work.Miyazaki is detail-obsessed. He agonizes over his children's cartoons as if he were Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel, insisting that, although few viewers will be conscious of all this work, every viewer will feel it. And we do. Those tiny touches, adding up across the length of a film, anchor his fantasies in the actual world.And so, after many years, and much traveling — at long last — Mr. Anderson found himself stepping into the wonders of Ghibli Park. His first impression was not awe or majesty or surrender or consumerist bliss. It was confusion.This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

After Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February last year, Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany told Parliament that the attack was a Zeitenwende — a historic “turning point” for Europe and Germany. The risk of a large land war in Europe had previously been considered far-fetched, but recent years of Russian aggression have inspired fear in Germany and a 100-billion-euro fund to bolster its military.In Germany, skepticism of the merits of military strength has enabled a long post-Cold War process of disarmament. As a result, it is a historic anomaly in the heart of Europe — an economic leviathan but a military minnow. Now German leaders are vowing to transform the country into a military power capable of taking responsibility for Europe's security.In Nienburg, a medieval town in Lower Saxony, civilians come to train for “homeland protection” units in the country's reserves. The question is whether a hesitant German society can follow through on this paradigm shift.“I would say, many of them lean in the direction of being pacifists,” said Anne Katrin Meister, who is training at the base in Nienburg. “But you can only be a pacifist if you have this safe, ideal world. And we don't have such a world.”This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

In February, the first lawsuit against Tesla for a crash involving its driver-assistance system, Autopilot, will go to trial. The slew of trials set to follow will be a costly fight that the company's chief executive, Elon Musk, has vowed to take on in court. When Tesla released its Autopilot feature in October 2015, Musk touted the feature as “probably better” than a human driver. The reality, however, has proved different: On average, there is at least one Autopilot-related crash in the United States every day.While several of these accidents will feature in the upcoming trials, another camp of Tesla users who have fallen victim to Autopilot crashes are unwilling to take a negative stance because of their love for the brand. Or because they believe that accidents are a necessary evil in the process of perfecting the Autopilot software.Dave Key, whose 2015 Tesla Model S drifted out of its lane and slammed into the back of a parked police S.U.V., is of the latter camp.“As a society,” Key argued, “we choose the path to save the most lives.”This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

Menopausal hormone therapy was once the most commonly prescribed treatment in the United States. In the late 1990s, some 15 million women a year were receiving a prescription for it. But in 2002, a single study, its design imperfect, found links between hormone therapy and elevated health risks for women of all ages. Panic set in; in one year, the number of prescriptions plummeted.Hormone therapy carries risks, to be sure, as do many medications that people take to relieve serious discomfort, but dozens of studies since 2002 have provided reassurance that for healthy women under 60 whose hot flashes are troubling them, the benefits of taking hormones outweigh the risks. The treatment's reputation, however, has never fully recovered, and the consequences have been wide-reaching.About 85 percent of women experience menopausal symptoms. Rebecca Thurston, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh who studies menopause, believes that, in general, menopausal women have been underserved — an oversight that she considers one of the great blind spots of medicine.“It suggests that we have a high cultural tolerance for women's suffering,” Thurston said. “It's not regarded as important.”To hear more stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.