This weekend, listen to a collection of narrated articles from around The New York Times, read aloud by the reporters who wrote the stories.
Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness. It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield. And it might be the dominant emotion of 2021.
Psychologists think about mental health on a spectrum from depression to flourishing. Languishing is the neglected middle child of mental health. It’s the void between depression and flourishing — the absence of well-being.
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Written and narrated by Jane Hu
The Filet-O-Fish was invented in 1962 as an answer to the problem of McDonald’s falling sales on Fridays, when observant Catholics abstained from eating meat.
Born from an attempt to market fast food to as many people as possible, the tasty little unit has since been further claimed by everyone from fish-loving Chinese-Americans to practicing Muslims.
Growing up Chinese-Canadian, Jane Hu felt as if the sandwich was made just for her.
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Written and narrated by Apoorva Mandavilli
Even before the coronavirus pandemic, many female scientists felt unsupported in their fields. Now, some are hitting a breaking point. Several studies have found that women have published fewer papers, led fewer clinical trials and received less recognition for their expertise during the pandemic.
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Written and narrated by Kevin Roose
Something strange is happening to the exhausted, type-A millennial workers of America. After a year spent hunched over their MacBooks, enduring back-to-back Zooms in between sourdough loaves and Peloton rides, they are flipping the carefully arranged chessboards of their lives and deciding to risk it all.
Some are abandoning cushy and stable jobs to start a new business, turn a side hustle into a full-time gig or finally work on that screenplay.
If this movement has a rallying cry, it’s YOLO — “you only live once,” an acronym popularized by the rapper Drake a decade ago and deployed by cheerful risk-takers ever since.
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Written and narrated by Emma G. Fitzsimmons
It took only seven years and change, but it appears that Bill de Blasio is finally having fun as mayor.
His spirits have been buoyed by a confluence of events: a feeling of hope as millions of New Yorkers get vaccinated after a devastating year; an influx of federal funding to shore up the city’s finances.
But the biggest factor may well be the diminution of influence and interference from the mayor’s longtime nemesis, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who has largely been sidelined by a series of scandals.
Want to hear more narrated articles from publishers like The New York Times? Download Audm for iPhone and Android.
The Times’s narrated articles are made by Parin Behrooz, Carson Leigh Brown, Anna Diamond, Aaron Esposito, Elena Hecht, Emma Kehlbeck, Marion Lozano, Anna Martin, Tracy Mumford, Tanya Perez, Margaret Willison, Kate Winslett and John Woo. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Ryan Wegner, Julia Simon and Desiree Ibekwe.