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

Spirited Away to Miyazaki Land

Written and narrated by Sam Anderson

What happens when the surreal imagination of the world’s greatest living animator, Hayao Miyazaki, is turned into a theme park?

As an American, Sam Anderson knows what it feels like to arrive at a theme park. “The totalizing consumerist embrace,” he writes. “The blunt-force, world-warping, escapist delight.”

He has known theme parks with entrances like “international borders” and ticket prices like “mortgage payments.” Mr. Anderson has been to Disney World, which he describes as “an alternate reality that basically occupies its own tax zone.”

When he arrived at Ghibli Park in Japan, a tribute to the legendary animation of Studio Ghibli, his first impression wasn’t awe or majesty or consumerist bliss. It was confusion.

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In Ohio Town Where Train Derailed, Anxiety and Distrust Are Running Deep

Written by Campbell Robertson and Emily Cochrane | Narrated by Emily Cochrane

All around the once-thriving industrial town in the quiet hills of eastern Ohio, there were signs this week of business as usual. Schools were in session, restaurants were serving lunch, and trains were again barreling along the tracks that cross Market Street.

But all around, too, were signs that nothing was normal at all. People sniffed the water coming out of their taps, checked rashes in the mirror and gazed down into creeks at the green-white shoals of fish and frogs floating belly up. The smell lingered, reminding some of a tire fire and others of burning plastic, mixed with model airplane glue or nail polish remover.

Nearly two weeks after a Norfolk Southern freight train derailed in East Palestine, and a controlled burn of toxic chemicals it was carrying forced hundreds of residents to evacuate the area for days, the normal for many here was dread.

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‘They’re Hunting Me.’ Life as a Ukrainian Mayor on the Front Line

Written and narrated by Jeffrey Gettleman

Halyna Luhova, the mayor of Kherson, has been almost killed six times. She sleeps on a cot in a hallway. She makes $375 a month, and her city in southern Ukraine has become one of the war’s most pummeled places, fired on by Russian artillery nearly every hour.

But Ms. Luhova, the only female mayor of a major city in Ukraine, remains determined to project a sense of normality even though Kherson is anything but normal. She holds regular meetings — in underground bunkers. She excoriates department heads — for taking too long to set up bomb shelters. She circulates in neighborhoods and chitchats with residents — whose lives have been torn apart by explosions.

Ms. Luhova sees her job defined by basic verbs: bury, clean, fix and feed.

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How Teens Recovered From the ‘TikTok Tics’

Written and narrated by Azeen Ghorayshi

Aidan’s tics erupted one day after school in early 2021. The 16-year-old convulsed while walking into the house, head snapping and arms swinging, sometimes letting out high-pitched whistles and whoops.

Aidan’s parents had been worried about the teenager’s ratcheting anxiety. They rushed Aidan to the emergency room, but doctors found nothing wrong. After calling a neurologist, the family learned that more than a dozen adolescents in Calgary, Alberta, had recently come down with similar spasms.

Over the next year, doctors across the world treated thousands of young people for sudden, explosive tics. Many of the patients had watched popular TikTok videos of teenagers claiming to have Tourette’s syndrome. A spate of alarming headlines about “TikTok tics” followed.

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Secretive Network Rescues Russia’s Antiwar Dissidents in Nick of Time

Written by Neil MacFarquhar and Alina Lobzina | Narrated by Neil MacFarquhar

In Russia, three young women, participants in an antiwar chat group, were falsely accused last fall by one of its members of plotting with him to firebomb a military enlistment office.

The trio quickly went underground, hiding in a friend’s house in their home city of Vladivostok, in Russia’s Far East, while seeking a way to escape the country and potentially lengthy prison sentences. That brought them to a group called In Transit, part of an extensive underground railroad that is rescuing hundreds of Russians who have been targeted for expressing opposition to the invasion of Ukraine or even sympathy for Ukrainian refugees.

Their flight to freedom would ultimately end in Kazakhstan, after a six-day odyssey in six different cars over more than 4,000 miles.

In Transit, the group that arranged their escape, is one of at least five organizations that help dissenters to get out of Russia, usually just one step ahead of the law. Working from outside the country, they plan escape routes that can include cars, travel money, safe houses, border crossings and visas.

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.