This weekend, listen to a collection of narrated articles from around The New York Times, read aloud by the reporters who wrote them.
When Michael Gandolfini was filming his role in “The Many Saints of Newark,” a period crime drama that casts him as a precocious teenage troublemaker named Tony Soprano, he was having trouble sleeping and would stay up late at night, working on his scenes for the next day.
Sometimes he would reflect on the motivations of his character, whose loyalty is torn between two paternal figures: his frequently absent father, a New Jersey gangster named Johnny Boy; and the film’s protagonist, a charismatic mobster named Dickie Moltisanti.
In his efforts to get inside his character, Gandolfini would try to identify with Tony’s desire to please both men. He would find himself drawn back to Johnny Boy and repeat the wish to himself like a mantra.
As Gandolfini recalled recently, “I was always like, ‘I want to make my dad proud. I want to make my dad proud.’”
It didn’t take a psychiatrist to decipher what it all meant. Gandolfini is the son of the actor James Gandolfini, who played the menacing but undeniably engrossing Mafia boss Tony Soprano for six seasons on the revered HBO series “The Sopranos,” and who died suddenly of a heart attack at age 51 in 2013.
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The Marines Reluctantly Let a Sikh Officer Wear a Turban. He Says It’s Not Enough.
Almost every morning for five years, First Lt. Sukhbir Toor has pulled on the uniform of the United States Marine Corps. Last week, he also got to put on the turban of a faithful Sikh.
It was a first for the Marine Corps, which almost never allows deviations from its hallowed image, and it was a long-awaited chance for the officer to combine two of the things he holds most dear.
His case is the latest in a long-running conflict between two fundamental values in the United States military: the tradition of discipline and uniformity, and the constitutional liberties the armed forces were created to defend.
“We’ve come a long way, but there is still more to go,” Lieutenant Toor, 26, said. “The Marine Corps needs to show it really means what it has been saying about strength in diversity — that it doesn’t matter what you look like, it just matters that you can do your job.”
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She Bought Her Dream Home. Then a ‘Sovereign Citizen’ Changed the Locks.
The official-looking letters started arriving soon after Shanetta Little bought the cute Tudor house on Ivy Street in Newark. Bearing a golden seal, in aureate legalistic language, the documents claimed that an obscure 18th-century treaty gave the sender rights to claim her new house as his own. She dismissed the letters as a hoax.
So it was with surprise that Ms. Little found herself in her yard on a June afternoon as a police SWAT team negotiated with a man who had broken in, changed her locks and hung a red and green flag in its window.
Ms. Little was a victim of a ploy known as paper terrorism, a favorite tactic of an extremist group that is one of the fastest growing, according to government experts and watchdog organizations. Known as the Moorish sovereign citizen movement, and loosely based around a theory that Black people are foreign citizens bound only by arcane legal systems, it encourages followers to violate existent laws in the name of empowerment.
It doesn’t take long after entering the St. Regis Mohawk reservation to see a glimpse of the future of marijuana sales in the state of New York.
The reservation — a sovereign tribal land in the eyes of the government — currently holds the distinction of hosting New York’s only overt outlets for recreational sales of the drug: nearly a dozen dispensaries offering an array of joints, gummies, edibles and tinctures, which imbue this far-flung, northern-border territory with a shaggy, entrepreneurial energy.
The dispensaries on the reservation are seemingly getting a jump-start on what is projected to be a $4 billion industry in New York, as well as continuing a long tradition of using products like tobacco and gasoline — steady moneymakers for the tribe — to create jobs and income.
On a dock in Queens, David Byrne’s musical bike gang was gearing up to go.
“Are we ready?” Byrne called.
It was a Saturday in late August, and the gang — three percussionists, a guitarist, a bassist and me, along with a daredevil photographer and lighting assistant — were sitting astride bicycles as Byrne, our fearless two-wheeled leader, outlined the plan.
He wore a brimmed, pith-style helmet and a tour guide’s relaxed confidence: He’d done this route before, from Astoria to Flushing. The destination was the Queens Night Market, a paradise of global food stalls at the site of the 1964 World’s Fair.
The market, in its diversity, “is really extraordinary,” he said — the kind of endeavor that seems like an antidote to our current social divisiveness. “In that context, you really go, ‘OK, this is not impossible, we can do this.’” It’s a message of community-as-uplift that Byrne, the former Talking Heads frontman, has been big on recently, with his hit theatrical concert “American Utopia,” a mostly joyous pilgrimage through his music.
Want to hear more narrated articles from publications like The New York Times? Download Audm for iPhone and Android.
The Times’s narrated articles are made by Parin Behrooz, Claudine Ebeid, Carson Leigh Brown, Anna Diamond, Aaron Esposito, Elena Hecht, Elisheba Ittoop, 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.
Title: The Riddle of Tony Soprano and Selling Marijuana on Tribal Lands: The Week in Narrated Articles
Sourced From: www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/podcasts/tony-soprano-marijuana-sales-david-byrne-narrated-articles.html
Published Date: Fri, 01 Oct 2021 09:30:02 +0000
