Christmastime at Dollywood, and More: The Week in Reporter Reads

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/23/podcasts/dollywood-micro-news-jrotc.html

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This weekend, listen to a collection of articles from around The New York Times, read aloud by the reporters who wrote them.

Written and narrated by Melena Ryzik

Generations of families have made it an annual Christmas tradition to visit Dollywood, Dolly Parton’s namesake theme park. The 160-acre entertainment complex, 35 miles from Knoxville, Tenn., has transformed, over three decades, into a holiday attraction that rivals Radio City’s Rockettes — with fewer kicklines, but far more fingerpicking.

“Christmas in the Smokies,” its signature show, has been running since 1990, with a live orchestra and Appalachian storytelling, a flatfoot dancer and a fiddler. The park serves as the setting for “Dolly Parton’s Mountain Magic Christmas,” the star’s latest NBC special, now streaming on Peacock, which gives a glimpse of several Dollywood musicians, like Addie Levy, a 20-year-old mandolin, guitar, fiddle and upright bass player.

“There is something for everybody during all the four seasons,” Dolly Parton said in a video interview. “And of course, Christmas is the highlight of it all.”

Written by the Styles Desk | Narrated by Madison Malone Kircher

Plenty of big news happened in 2022. Frightening, fascinating, devastating and inspiring news with global implications. You can almost certainly, off the top of your head, name something that fits these descriptions. (And if you can’t, just remember that Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars ceremony happened, in fact, this calendar year.)

But what may not come so easily to mind are the smaller things. What happened this year in popular culture and far-flung corners of social media may not have broken through your self-curated internet experience.

This is the year in micronews, an attempt to chronicle the little things that happened across the internet that immediately left our minds, if they even registered at all.

Written and narrated by Vanessa Friedman

As Lionel Messi and the Argentine men’s national soccer team stood on the podium in Qatar in front of their World Cup trophy, a few online viewers noticed a detail that had them raising their eyebrows: Why had the gold statuette arrived on the field in a steel-toned, logo-bedecked Louis Vuitton trunk?

When it comes to cultural influence, fashion and sports have increasingly teamed up to be the power forwards of the game. Both offer a shared language spoken across the world, communicated in an instant. And in 2022, the relationship reached a new level, one driven by the tangles of social media, the growth of influencer and sneaker culture and a pandemic-spurred shift in cultural consumption.

Written and narrated by Ron Lieber

For months, America has been engaged in a nationwide debate over whether to cancel up to $20,000 in student loan debt for tens of millions of people. Next year, the Supreme Court will weigh in on the hundreds of billions of dollars at stake — and talking heads, yet again, will debate who is deserving of help in America.

The student debt cancellation program excludes people with especially high incomes. But hiding in plain sight is another federal program — 529 college savings plans — that offers the biggest benefits to wealthy families.

For a cleareyed view of who is receiving what from the federal government in the realm of higher education, it helps to look at how things work at this moment.

Written by Mike Baker, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Ilana Marcus | Narrated by Mike Baker

Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, or J.R.O.T.C., programs, taught by military veterans at some 3,500 high schools in the United States, are supposed to be elective, and the Pentagon has said that requiring students to take them goes against its guidelines. But The New York Times found that thousands of public school students were being funneled into the classes without ever having chosen them, either as an explicit requirement or by being automatically enrolled.

The role of J.R.O.T.C. in high schools across the country has been a point of debate since the program was founded more than a century ago. During the antiwar battles of the 1970s, protests over what was seen as an attempt to recruit high schoolers to serve in Vietnam prompted some school districts to restrict the program. Most schools gradually phased out any enrollment requirements. But 50 years later, new conflicts are emerging.

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, Emma Kehlbeck, Tanya Pérez, Krish Seenivasan, Kate Winslett, John Woo and Tiana Young. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Ryan Wegner, Julia Simon and Desiree Ibekwe.