A Rhodes scholar’s Starbucks ambition and more: The week in narrated articles

Listen this weekend to a collection of well-known articles from across The New York Times, read aloud by the reporters who wrote them.

As a senior University of Mississippi in 2018, Jaz Brisack was one of 32 Americans to win Rhodes Scholarships, funding study in Oxford, England.

Many students seek the scholarship because it can pave the way for a career in the top ranks of law, academia, government or business. They are motivated by a mixture of ambition and idealism.

Ms Brisack became a barista for similar reasons: She believed it was simply the most urgent demand of her time and her many talents. When she joined Starbucks at the end of 2020, not a single one of the company’s 9,000 U.S. locations had a union. Ms Brisack was hoping to change that by helping unite its stores in Buffalo.

Unlikely, she and her co-workers 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 chased by two white car workers in 1982, he was horrified and mobilized Asian Americans across ethnic and language boundaries.

Mr. Chin was assassinated at a time when the rise of Japanese carmakers and the collapse of Detroit’s auto industry contributed to an increase in anti-Asian racism. But over time, his death began to fade from the collective memory.

Now, with the 40th anniversary of the assassination approaching this month, at a time of alarming rise in anti-Asian violence, a younger group of Asian Americans are trying to draw attention to the issue by joining forces with some of those who saw the initial fight for justice for Mr. Chin to seek.

Last spring, SeKai Parker watched as her preparatory schoolmates embraced every word of a Kelly Clarkson song in tears and unanimously stretched out. It was the senior farewell at Holton-Arms in Bethesda, Md., And many of the teens were making college plans that would allow them to swap one elite, mostly white environment for another.

Ms Parker was planning to accept an offer from Yale, which she fell in love with during a recent visit. But as she scans her school auditorium, a familiar sinking feeling washes over her. After school that day, she rushed out to meet her mother and made a life-changing statement: I’m going to Spelman.

The choice of the historically Black Women’s College in Atlanta was surprising to a student determined to reach the Ivy League. Her decision reflects a renaissance in recent years among the country’s historically Black colleges and universities, where their nurturing mission, increased funding, and growing visibility drew a new wave of students.

Written and narrated by vanessa friedman

After half a century, there is no escaping the fact that, once Goldman Sachs was once described as the “vampire squid” on the face of humanity, Nike became part of the root system that underlies the culture. And not just sneaker culture.

Named after the Greek goddess of victory, Nike has not only become the most valuable clothing brand in the world (worth more than twice as much as Adidas, its closest sportswear competitor, and ahead of Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Chanel). It’s part of the movies we watch, the songs we hear, the museums we visit, the business we do; it’s part of how we think about who we are and how we got 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 forest lands.

But while April winds howled over the mountains of brittle-dry northern New Mexico, drove the fire across its borders and soon drifted in the path of another out-of-control prescribed burn, the fire grew into one of the U.S. Forest Service’s most devastating mistakes in decades and New Mexico’s largest recorded wildfire.

But despite the setback, experts say it is necessary to thin out forests in a region ready for destruction.

The Times’ storytelling 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.