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

Jordan Belfort, 59, is best known for The Wolf of Wall Street, a tell-all memoir about his debauched 1990s career in high finance, which the director Martin Scorsese adapted into a 2013 movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio as the hard-partying protagonist. These days, the real-life Mr. Belfort is a consultant and sales coach, charging tens of thousands of dollars for private sessions.

In 2018, he filmed a YouTube video about the dangers of Bitcoin, which he called frickin insanity and mass delusion. Over the years, he said, he gradually changed his mind, as he learned more about cryptocurrencies and prices skyrocketed.

Now, Mr. Belfort is an investor in a handful of start-ups, including a new NFT platform and an animal-themed crypto project that he said was trying to take the dog-and-pet ecosystem and put it onto the blockchain.

Statue removal has become a lucrative line of work amid the ongoing national reckoning over traumas past and present. But in Richmond, Va., where a 21-foot figure of Robert E. Lee towered over the city for more than a century, officials say no amount of government pleading produced a volunteer interested in dismantling the citys many Confederate monuments during the tense and sometimes violent days of summer 2020.

Except Devon Henry. He and his general contracting company, Team Henry Enterprises, have hauled away 15 pieces of Confederate statuary in Richmond and a total of 23 monuments across the Southeast in less than two years.

But the work has come with considerable personal risk: Mr. Henry, 45, has been repeatedly threatened, carries a firearm and often wears a bulletproof vest on job sites.

You start thinking, Damn, was it worth it? Mr. Henry said. But then there are moments; my daughter, in her interview for college, said I was her hero.

Written and narrated by Emily Anthes

Since Russian forces invaded Ukraine in February, the worlds attention has been focused on the nations heavily shelled cities. But Ukraine, in an ecological transition zone, is also home to vibrant wetlands and forests and a large part of virgin steppe. Russian troops have already entered or conducted military operations in more than one-third of the nations protected natural areas, Oleksandr Krasnolutskyi, a deputy minister of environmental protection and natural resources in Ukraine, said: Their ecosystems and species have become vulnerable.

Reports from the ground, and research on previous armed conflicts, suggest that the ecological impact of the conflict could be profound. Wars destroy habitats, kill wildlife, generate pollution and remake ecosystems entirely, with consequences that ripple through the decades.

Written and narrated by Michael Corkery

Mary Gundel loved her job managing the Dollar General store in Tampa, Fla. It was fast-paced, unpredictable and even exciting.

But the job had its challenges: Delivery trucks that would show up unannounced, leaving boxes piled up in the aisles because there werent enough workers to unpack them. Days spent running the store for long stretches by herself because the company allotted only so many hours for other employees to work. Cranky customers complaining about out of stock items.

So one morning, in between running the register and putting tags on clothing, Ms. Gundel, 33, propped up her iPhone and hit record. The result was a six-part critique, Retail Store Manager Life, in which Ms. Gundel laid bare the working conditions inside the fast-growing retail chain.

Her videos, which she posted on TikTok, went viral.

Written and narrated by Thomas Fuller

Their bodies were found on public benches, lying next to bike paths, crumpled under freeway overpasses and stranded on the sun-drenched beach. Across Los Angeles County last year, unsheltered people died in record numbers, an average of five homeless deaths a day, most in plain view of the world around them.

Two hundred eighty-seven homeless people took their last breath on the sidewalk, 24 died in alleys and 72 were found on the pavement, according to data from the county coroner. They were a small fraction of the thousands of homeless people across the country who die each year.

Its like a wartime death toll in places where there is no war, said Maria Raven, an emergency room doctor in San Francisco who co-wrote a study about homeless deaths.

More than ever it has become deadly to be homeless in America.

The Timess narrated articles are made by Tally Abecassis, Parin Behrooz, Anna Diamond, Sarah Diamond, Jack DIsidoro, Aaron Esposito, Dan Farrell, Elena Hecht, Adrienne Hurst, Elisheba Ittoop, Emma Kehlbeck, Marion Lozano, Tanya Prez, Krish Seenivasan, Margaret H. Willison, Kate Winslett, John Woo and Tiana Young. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Ryan Wegner, Julia Simon and Desiree Ibekwe.

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The Wolf of Crypto and the Confederate Statue Remover: The Week in Narrated Articles - The New York Times