A Rhodes Scholar’s Starbucks Ambition and More: The Week in Narrated Articles
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Version 0 of 1. 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 Noam Scheiber As a University of Mississippi senior in 2018, Jaz Brisack was one of 32 Americans who won Rhodes scholarships, which fund study in Oxford, England. Many students seek the scholarship because it can pave the way to a career in the top ranks of law, academia, government or business. They are motivated by a mix of ambition and idealism. Ms. Brisack became a barista for similar reasons: She believed it was simply the most urgent claim on her time and her many talents. When she joined Starbucks in late 2020, not a single one of the company’s 9,000 U.S. locations had a union. Ms. Brisack hoped to change that by helping to unionize its stores in Buffalo. Improbably, she and her co-workers have far exceeded their goal. Written and narrated by Mitch Smith When Vincent Chin, a Chinese American man who lived near Detroit, was beaten to death with a baseball bat after being pursued by two white autoworkers in 1982, it horrified and mobilized Asian Americans across ethnic and linguistic lines. Mr. Chin was killed at a time when the rise of Japanese carmakers and the collapse of Detroit’s auto industry had contributed to a rise in anti-Asian racism. But over time, his death began to fade from collective memory. Now, with the 40th anniversary of the killing approaching this month, at a time of an alarming surge in anti-Asian violence, a younger group of Asian Americans has sought to bring attention to the case, combining forces with some of those who led the initial fight to seek justice for Mr. Chin. Written and narrated by Erica L. Green SeKai Parker looked on last spring as her prep school classmates tearfully embraced and belted out in unison every word of a Kelly Clarkson song. It was the senior farewell at Holton-Arms in Bethesda, Md., and many of the teens were making college plans that would have them trading one elite, mostly white setting for another. Ms. Parker intended to accept an offer from Yale, which she had fallen in love with on a recent visit. But as she scanned her school auditorium, a familiar sinking feeling washed over her. After school that day, she rushed out to meet her mother and made a life-changing declaration: I’m going to Spelman. Choosing the historically Black women’s college in Atlanta was surprising for a student who had been determined to reach the Ivy League. Her decision reflects a renaissance in recent years among the nation’s historically Black colleges and universities, where their nurturing mission, increased funding and growing visibility have been drawing a new wave of students. Written and narrated by Vanessa Friedman After half a century there is no escaping the fact that, if Goldman Sachs was once described as the “vampire squid” on the face of humanity, Nike has become part of the root system that underlies the culture. And not just sneaker culture. Nike, named for the Greek goddess of victory, has become not just the most valuable apparel brand in the world (worth more than twice as much as Adidas, its closest sportswear rival, and ahead of Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Chanel). It is part of the movies we watch, the songs we hear, the museums we frequent, the business we do; it’s part of how we think about who we are and how we got to here. Written and narrated by Simon Romero It started small, with a team of federal employees using drip torches to ignite a prescribed burn in the Santa Fe National Forest, aimed at thinning out dense pine woodlands. But as April winds howled across the mountains of brittle-dry northern New Mexico, driving the fire over its boundaries and soon into the path of another out-of-control prescribed burn, the blaze grew to become one of the U.S. Forest Service’s most destructive mistakes in decades and New Mexico’s largest recorded wildfire. But despite the backlash, experts say it’s necessary to thin forests in a region primed for destruction. 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. |