The 45-year-old songwriter from Alabama performed at last month’s Democratic National Convention and is performing with the 400 Unit tonight at Chartway Arena in Norfolk. The show will have a guest performer, Alejandro Escovedo. A few hours before taking the stage at the DNC in Chicago, Isbell chatted with The New York Times about politics, music and the intersection of the two.

The interview has been edited and condensed.

Nick Corasaniti: This has been a campaign that’s been marked by a lot of agita on the left, until maybe a few weeks ago. How do you feel right now, about the country and Democratic chances in November?

Jason Isbell: I think the Democratic chances in November are good right now — and I think it’s because Kamala is prepared and because Biden did something selfless for the country, which was sort of shocking. I wouldn’t say unexpected, considering the kind of person that he seems to have always been, but it feels shocking when somebody does something patriotic now in a leadership role. To set aside his ego and pride and even just his work ethic and do what he did, it was a huge, huge moment. And it reinvigorated the party and the voting base but also made me sort of realize that we have an opportunity here to aim for something that’s not just mitigation.

Corasaniti: You’re kind of like a Democratic campaign’s dream voter: A Southern white man with a working-class upbringing, but there’s not a ton of people like you that are voting for Democrats. Why do you think that is?

Isbell: I think it’s a cultural thing. After Carter, in the Reagan era, I think a lot of issues got conflated. And I think the goals and the intentions of the party were sort of obfuscated by the fact that there was this big PR campaign that sort of made religious morals tie in with a conservative political ideology. And I think that’s kind of where we went wrong and where a lot of people in the South just started voting against their interests. And a lot of people like me went along with what their family did, and what their churches did, and became the kind of people who would vote for conservatives no matter what.

Corasaniti: What do you think Democrats could do to appeal to more Southern white working-class men?

Isbell: If the door is open, I mean, people care about the economy. If you can’t afford the things you need, it’s difficult to go outside of your house and off your property and think about what’s going on with your neighbors. If the Democratic Party can keep their foot in the door long enough to show evidence that these plans will work best for everybody, then you get the opportunity to educate people on what the party’s all about. But first, you know,  you gotta feed them. I mean, that’s, that’s rule No. 1, because you don’t get a lot of time to teach a hungry man something.

Corasaniti: Why do you think the right has been able to latch onto country music and Americana?

Isbell: The right has this idea of a sort of mythologized American past — you know, Make America Great Again kind of thing, which is extremely exclusive, because the further back you go, the fewer people America was great for. Because here’s the thing, there’s something about country music, old-time music and even folk music, to a certain extent, that I feel is supposed to come with a dose of self-awareness.

And I think the right misses that or ignores that and then they use these images and these pictures of times gone by that you hear from country music and Appalachian music and they use that to sort of forward that agenda of America used to be wonderful. And we can get back to that again,’ If we can just make all these folks shut up that don’t look like us.’

Nick Corasaniti: I was thinking about music as a form of protest, able to speak truth to power and inspire protest movements. Like from Woody Guthrie to the Clash. So I’m wondering, as music becomes more siloed, with streaming and siloed experiences, do you still think music can have that truth-to-power moment?

Jason Isbell: Oh yeah.

For me, the goal is to take the stigma of politics, the word politics out and just try to show people this is actually how you’re living day to day. That’s what politics are. And if you’re able to ignore that or write about things that aren’t political, that just means that you’re privileged enough to not have to worry about things like clean water, where to send your kid to school, how to get back and forth to work, how to afford your groceries. So I think the more that line blurs between your personal life and your politics, the better off we are. And I think access to musical technology and the means of distribution are going to make that a much better thing.

Corasaniti: It’s also about reach though, right? I think of your song “White Man’s World.” Do you think that reaches the people who need to hear it?

Isbell: I think everybody needs to hear it. Because even if you’re preaching to the choir, sometimes the choir is not singing loud enough.

Corasaniti: You mentioned your audience earlier. I grew up with Springsteen and going to Bruce shows, and there are, I think, maybe more people in the audience who disagree with him politically than there are people who agree with his Democratic-leaning public positions. Do you ever worry your public Democratic positions could change that in your audiences?

Isbell: No, I don’t worry about that. I don’t think mine is split down the middle. … But the people that we pick up along the way — usually the majority of those people — are at the very least open to whatever I have to say politically. But at the same time, the ultimate goal for me is not to get as many fans as possible. I have enough fans, and I have enough money, I have enough gear.

Corasaniti: You can always have more gear.

Isbell: That’s true. But at a certain point, you have to think: What’s the ultimate goal of this? And how am I serving that? And for me, the ultimate goal is to communicate my inner life and test the connection that I have with everybody else, with strangers. And to do that, you gotta tell the truth, and you gotta be honest about how you feel. And if it runs some people off — I’m going to tell you, this might not sound like the truth here, but it is — if it runs people off, I would like them to go. I don’t want people out there who are going to make it uncomfortable for the rest of my audience. And if you’re not open to hearing what I have to say, then you’re probably not going to be open to somebody standing by you who is different from you. And that’s not the kind of room I want to be in.

Corasaniti: But do you think that also leads to division?

Isbell: Oh, there’s, there’s always been division. I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the idea that we’re a divided nation now more than we’ve been. Because I think people forget, less than 100 years into this experiment, we were killing each other. And there were bleachers. You talk about, ‘Oh, I can’t believe we’re watching all this stuff go down on our phone.’ We had bleachers in the 1860s, and the rich people dressed up and sat in the bleachers and watched the poor people kill each other. So no, I don’t think we’re more polarized now than we’ve ever been.

Corasaniti: Years ago, someone asked you on Twitter, would you ever run for office? Do you ever think about that?

Isbell: I think about it sometimes. But, you know, just getting to know some politicians over the last few years, you got to have a lot of patience. And I may have that kind of patience at some point, but I don’t yet have it. I’m still working on that. I feel like I would, a few months in, I would just sort of lose my mind and start screaming into a microphone because that’s a tough job. And when somebody commits their life to it, and risks all the different kinds of security that they might have with their family, and they do it for something other than just power, I think it’s a pretty beautiful move.

___

IF YOU GO
When: 7:30 p.m.
Where: Chartway Arena, 4320 Hampton Blvd. Norfolk
Tickets: $36 and up
Details: chartwayarena.com

The office of his agent, Barry McPherson, confirmed the death in a statement.

From destitute days working in a diner and living in a $19-a-month cold-water flat, Jones climbed to Broadway and Hollywood stardom with talent, drive and remarkable vocal cords. He was abandoned as a child by his parents, raised by a racist grandmother and mute for years in his stutterer’s shame, but he learned to speak again with a herculean will. All had much to do with his success.

So did plays by Howard Sackler and August Wilson that let a young actor explore racial hatred in the national experience; television soap operas that boldly cast a Black man as a doctor in the 1960s; and a decision by George Lucas, the creator of “Star Wars,” to put an anonymous, rumbling African American voice behind the grotesque mask of the galactic villain Vader.

The rest was accomplished by Jones himself: a prodigious body of work that encompassed scores of plays, nearly 90 television network dramas and episodic series, and some 120 movies. They included his voice work, much of it uncredited, in the original “Star Wars” trilogy, in the credited voice-over of Mufasa in “The Lion King,” Disney’s 1994 animated musical film, and in his reprise of the role in Jon Favreau’s computer-animated remake in 2019.

Jones was no matinee idol, like Cary Grant or Denzel Washington. But his bulky Everyman suited many characters, and his range of forcefulness and subtlety was often compared to Morgan Freeman’s. Nor was he a singer; yet his voice, though not nearly as powerful, was sometimes likened to that of the great Paul Robeson. Jones collected Tonys, Golden Globes, Emmys, Kennedy Center honors and an honorary Academy Award.

James Earl Jones was born in Arkabutla, Mississippi, on Jan. 17, 1931, to Robert Earl and Ruth (Connolly) Jones. About the time of his birth, his father left the family to chase prizefighting and acting dreams. His mother eventually obtained a divorce. But when James was 5 or 6, his frequently absent mother remarried, moved away and left him to be raised by her parents, John and Maggie Connolly, on a farm near Dublin, Michigan.

Abandonment by his parents left the boy with raw wounds and psychic scars. He referred to his mother as Ruth — he said he thought of her as an aunt — and he called his grandparents Papa and Mama, although even the refuge of his surrogate home with them was a troubled place to grow up.

“I was raised by a very racist grandmother, who was part Cherokee, part Choctaw and Black,” Jones told the BBC in a 2011 interview. “She was the most racist person, bigoted person I have ever known.” She blamed all white people for slavery, and Native American and Black people “for allowing it to happen,” he said, and her ranting compounded his emotional turmoil.

Jones enrolled at the University of Michigan on a scholarship, taking premed courses, and joined a drama group. With a growing interest in acting, he switched majors and focused on drama in the university’s School of Music, Theater and Dance. In a memoir, he said he left college in 1953 without a degree but resumed studies later to finish his required course work. He received a degree in drama in 1955.

In college, he had also joined the Army under an ROTC commitment. He was commissioned a second lieutenant in mid-1953, after the end of the Korean War, and was subsequently promoted to first lieutenant.

In 1955, however, he resigned his commission and moved to New York, determined to be an actor. He lived briefly with his father, whom he had met a few years earlier. Robert Jones had a modest acting career and offered encouragement. James found cheap rooms on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, took odd jobs and studied at the American Theater Wing and Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio.

After minor roles in small productions, including three plays in which he performed with his father, he joined Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival in 1960; over several years he appeared in “Henry V,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “Richard III” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” During a long run as Othello in 1964, he fell in love with Julienne Marie, his Desdemona.

They were married in 1968, but they divorced in 1972. In 1982, he married actress Cecilia Hart, who had also played Desdemona to one of his Othellos. She died in 2016. They had a son, Flynn Earl Jones, who survives him, along with a brother, Matthew.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Morera died on Monday in Olot, Spain, according to an employee at her nursing home, Residencia Santa Maria del Tura. Her family wrote in a post on her X social media account that she had died peacefully, in her sleep.

“A few days ago she told us: ‘One day I will leave here. I will not try coffee again, nor eat yogurt, nor pet my dog’” her family wrote in Spanish in the post. “‘I will also leave my memories, my reflections and I will cease to exist in this body. One day I don’t know, but it’s very close, this long journey will be over.’”

Born March 4, 1907, in San Francisco, Morera grew up in several American cities, including New Orleans, where her father, a journalist, started a Spanish-language magazine that went bankrupt, according to several news stories written about her life. Facing dire straits, the family returned to Spain when Morera was a child.

There, she lived through the country’s civil war and the brutal regime of Francisco Franco. She had clear memories of the D-Day invasion at Normandy, she told Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia.

“I haven’t done anything special to get to this age,” she said in an interview with Spanish newspaper El País earlier this year.

Morera went on to marry a doctor, with whom she lived in Girona, Spain, for 40 years. The couple had three children, and Morera stayed home to raise them.

“She had a quiet life, without work stress,” her daughter, Rose, told El País.

In later years, Morera enjoyed more than a dozen grandchildren. She survived a bout with COVID, as well as the general anxiety and isolation of the pandemic — a feat she found easier, she said at the time, because she remembered a world without the modern-day comforts to which most people had become accustomed.

“We lost an endearing woman, who has taught us the value of life and the wisdom of the years,” Salvador Illa, president of the Catalan regional government, said in a post on X.

Morera became the oldest living person in January 2023, after the death of Lucile Randon, a French nun known as Sister André. According to the Gerontology Research Group, which tracks the world’s supercentenarians, the next-oldest living person after Morera is Tomiko Itooka of Japan, who is 116 years old.

Information about Morera’s survivors was not immediately available.

Reaching 117 comes with a toll. Morera suffered hearing and vision loss, and struggled to move freely in recent years. Still, she had no indication of cancer, heart disease or other mortal illnesses. Having been born before the emergence of the telephone, Morera came to embrace the digital revolution, fashioning herself on social media as “Super Àvia Catalana,” or “Super Catalan Grandma.” From there, she posted bite-size pieces of life advice, observations and jokes to thousands of followers.

In her biography on X, she wrote: “I’m old, very old, but not an idiot.”

Since becoming the oldest living person, she had to manage a torrent of media interest, playfully stymying the reporters who lined up outside her nursing home for interviews. The attention eventually became too much, and her family stopped allowing visitors.

Like many supercentenarians, Morera became the subject of scientific fascination. Her habits and lifestyle — and genetic makeup — have been studied in the hopes of understanding her longevity.

“What do you expect from life?” a doctor once asked her while retrieving blood samples for study, according to El País.

Morera, unmoved, answered simply: “death.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

He had made the trip regularly since returning from a nine-month deployment to Iraq this year, his mother, Michelle Ustupski, said. As usual, he texted his girlfriend when he returned to Fort Drum around 8:30 p.m. that Sunday to say he had arrived safely.

It was the last time his family or friends heard from him.

Ashton, 21, was found dead at the base the next day, according to a Fort Drum news release. Two soldiers came to Ustupski’s home in Ohio to deliver the grim news.

On Monday, the Army charged another soldier, Spc. Riley Birbilas, 22, with premeditated murder in Ashton’s death and obstruction of justice. Officials from Fort Drum and the Army’s 10th Mountain Division, citing the continuing investigation, did not offer a motive or the cause of death. The Fort Drum news release included details about Ashton’s Army service but not about how he had died.

Ustupski said the medical examiner told her the cause of death was blunt force trauma and that her son, who trained as a bodybuilder, did not appear to have “put up too much of a fight.”

“He was caught off guard,” she said.

The authorities, she added, also told her that her son had sustained the fatal wound in his room and had then been brought to his car. She said his body had been found in the car in a parking lot near the barracks.

A spokesperson for the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division declined to comment Thursday.

The killing of Ashton was the second killing in recent years involving soldiers connected to Fort Drum, a vast installation near the Canadian border that employs more than 15,000 service members and nearly 4,000 civilian workers.

Last year, Jamaal Mellish, a former soldier once assigned to the base, and another man were sentenced to life in prison after being convicted of murder in state court in New Jersey for the 2020 killing of Cpl. Hayden Harris. Prosecutors said the murder had resulted from a dispute over a vehicle transaction. Mellish and Harris had served together at Fort Drum.

Ashton and Birbilas had been roommates in the Fort Drum barracks since April, when they returned from Iraq, Ustupski said. They were assigned to the headquarters of the 2nd Battalion, 14th Infantry in the 10th Mountain Division’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team.

“We’re in disbelief,” Ustupski said.

She drove to Fort Drum from Ohio on Sunday night for Birbilas’ initial court appearance. While driving, she kept thinking that her son had taken the same route on his last night alive.

He had lived with her in Willowick, Ohio, until around seventh grade, when he went to live with his father in nearby Perry, a village of about 1,600 about a half-hour from Cleveland. He was soft-spoken, had a positive attitude and was always ready to help, his mother said. She and his father never married, but his father was “a good role model,” Ustupski said.

Ashton played baseball and football at Perry High School, and enlisted in the Army after graduating in 2021. He was adventurous and wanted to see the world and also believed that joining the military would “mold him into a better person,” Ustupski said.

“He was just a regular all-American boy,” she added.

His initial enlistment was to end in December. He had earned a Combat Infantryman Badge during the Iraq deployment and an Army Commendation Medal with a “C” device, which recognizes meritorious service or achievement in combat.

Ustupski said her son had talked of continuing in public service, perhaps as a firefighter or police officer. He also planned to enter a bodybuilding competition in Ohio next year.

“You know, you pray all the time,” Ustupski said. “You prayed really hard for him to come home, to be safe. He came home without a scratch. And you thought he was safe.”

At the court hearing Monday, Ustupski listened on speakerphone while the proceedings played out in another room. At one point, she said, she called Birbilas a “coward.”

“I know he heard all that,” she said.

Like Ustupski’s son, Birbilas enlisted in 2021. On Wednesday, he was being held in the Oneida County Jail in Oriskany, New York, awaiting an Article 32 hearing, the military’s version of a grand jury proceeding, where evidence is presented to determine if a prosecution will advance to a court-martial. Under military law, he faces life in prison or the death penalty if convicted of the murder count.

His mother, Amber Frederick-Birbilas, declined to comment Wednesday and referred questions to a lawyer, Robert Capovilla, who said a “thorough investigation into the facts is nowhere near complete.”

“The information we have at this point,” he added, “creates far more questions than answers about what happened.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

In a study published last week, researchers tested 13 sharks off the coast of Rio de Janeiro and found that all had traces of cocaine in their liver and muscle tissues. The levels of cocaine found in these sharks were reported to be as much as 100 times higher than in previously observed marine life.

“We were actually dumbfounded,” said Rachel Ann Hauser Davis, a co-author of the study and a biologist at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Brazil. “We were excited in a bad way, but it’s a novel report. It’s the first time this data has ever been found for any top predator.”

This was the first study to analyze cocaine in sharks, following various studies on smaller species, including mollusks, crustaceans and even eels. All 13 sharks examined were found to have unfiltered cocaine in much higher concentrations than in previous studies on other animals, indicating chronic exposure to the drug.

But the study examined only a small sample, leaving many questions about whether the exposure harms the sharks or the humans who eat them.

The study in Brazil was conceived earlier this year after researchers discovered high levels of cocaine in the rivers that form Rio de Janeiro’s watershed. Other marine experts had looked into whether sharks in the Gulf of Mexico were ingesting cocaine from the numerous packages lost or dumped in the waters in a 2023 documentary titled “Cocaine Sharks,” which served as an inspiration for the title of last week’s study.

The team of biologists from the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation — an organization affiliated with Brazil’s Ministry of Health — were particularly interested in testing top predators inhabiting these watersheds. Having previously conducted tests on sharks for other contaminants, they sent to a lab samples of the Brazilian sharpnose — a relatively small species of shark from Rio de Janeiro’s coastal waters often consumed by locals.

Hauser Davis said there were several hypotheses as to how cocaine found its way to the marine creatures, including illegal labs refining cocaine or cocaine packages lost or dumped by traffickers. But she believes these account for only a small amount of the drug found in the ocean.

“We feel that the major source would be excretion through urine and feces from people using cocaine,” she said. Most wastewater treatment plants worldwide cannot effectively filter these substances, leading to their release into the ocean.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Some eighth graders at her public school had set up TikTok accounts impersonating teachers. Motz, who had never used TikTok, created an account.

She found a fake profile for @patrice.motz, which had posted a real photo of her at the beach with her husband and their young children. “Do you like to touch kids?” a text in Spanish over the family vacation photo asked. “Answer: Sí.”

In the days that followed, some 20 educators — about one-quarter of the school’s faculty — discovered they were victims of fake teacher accounts rife with pedophilia innuendo, racist memes, homophobia and made-up sexual hookups among teachers. Hundreds of students soon viewed, followed or commented on the fraudulent accounts.

In the aftermath, the school district briefly suspended several students, teachers said. The principal during one lunch period chastised the eighth grade class for its behavior.

The biggest fallout has been for teachers like Motz, who said she felt “kicked in the stomach” that students would so casually savage teachers’ families. The online harassment has left some teachers worried that social media platforms are helping to stunt the growth of empathy in students. Some teachers are now hesitant to call out pupils who act up in class. Others said it had been challenging to keep teaching.

“It was so deflating,” said Motz, who has taught at the school, in a wealthy Philadelphia suburb, for 14 years. “I can’t believe I still get up and do this every day.”

The Great Valley incident is the first known group TikTok attack of its kind by middle schoolers on their teachers in the United States. It’s a significant escalation in how middle and high school students impersonate, troll and harass educators on social media. Before this year, students largely impersonated one teacher or principal at a time.

The middle schoolers’ attack also reflects broader concerns in schools about how students’ use, and abuse, of popular online tools is intruding on the classroom. Some states and districts have recently restricted or banned student cellphone use in schools, in part to limit peer harassment and cyberbullying on Instagram, Snap, TikTok and other apps.

Now social media has helped normalize anonymous aggressive posts and memes, leading some children to weaponize them against adults.

“We didn’t have to deal with teacher-targeting at this scale before,” said Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, the largest U.S. teachers union. “It’s not only demoralizing. It could push educators to question, ‘Why would I continue in this profession if students are doing this?’”

In a statement, the Great Valley School District said it had taken steps to address “22 fictitious TikTok accounts” impersonating teachers at the middle school. It described the incident as “a gross misuse of social media that profoundly impacted our staff.”

Last month, two female students at the school publicly posted an “apology” video on a TikTok account using the name of a seventh grade teacher as a handle. The pair, who did not disclose their names, described the impostor videos as a joke and said teachers had blown the situation out of proportion.

“We never meant for it to get this far, obviously,” one of the students said in the video. “I never wanted to get suspended.”

“Move on. Learn to joke,” the other student said about a teacher. “I am 13 years old,” she added, using an expletive for emphasis, “and you’re like 40 going on 50.”

In an email to The New York Times, one of the students said that the fake teacher accounts were intended as obvious jokes, but that some students had taken the impersonations too far.

A TikTok spokesperson said the platform’s guidelines prohibit misleading behavior, including accounts that pose as real people without disclosing that they are parodies or fan accounts. TikTok said a U.S.-based security team validated ID information — such as driver’s licenses — in impersonation cases and then deleted the data.

Great Valley Middle School, known locally as a close-knit community, serves about 1,100 students in a modern brick complex surrounded by a sea of bright green sports fields.

The impostor TikToks disrupted the school’s equilibrium, according to interviews with seven Great Valley teachers, four of whom requested anonymity for privacy reasons. Some teachers already used Instagram or Facebook but not TikTok.

The morning after Motz, the Spanish teacher, discovered her impersonator, the disparaging TikToks were already an open secret among students.

“There was this undercurrent conversation throughout the hallway,” said Shawn Whitelock, a longtime social studies teacher. “I noticed a group of students holding a cellphone up in front of a teacher and saying, ‘TikTok.’”

Students took images from the school’s website, copied family photos that teachers had posted in their classrooms and found others online. They made memes by cropping, cutting and pasting photos, then superimposing text.

The low-tech “cheapfake” images differ from recent incidents in schools where students used artificial intelligence apps to generate real-looking, digitally altered images known as “deepfakes.”

While some of the Great Valley teacher impostor posts seemed jokey and benign — like “Memorize your states, students!” — other posts were sexualized. One fake teacher account posted a collaged photo with the heads of two male teachers pasted onto a man and woman partially naked in bed.

Fake teacher accounts also followed and hit on other fake teachers.

“It very much became a distraction,” Bettina Scibilia, an eighth grade English teacher who has worked at the school for 19 years, said of the TikToks.

Students also targeted Whitelock, who was the faculty adviser for the school’s student council for years.

A fake @shawn.whitelock account posted a photo of Whitelock standing in a church during his wedding, with his wife mostly cropped out. The caption named a member of the school’s student council, implying the teacher had wed him instead. “I’m gonna touch you,” the impostor later commented.

“I spent 27 years building a reputation as a teacher who is dedicated to the profession of teaching,” Whitelock said in an interview. “An impersonator assassinated my character — and slandered me and my family in the process.”

Scibilia said a student had already posted a graphic death threat against her on TikTok earlier in the school year, which she reported to police. The teacher impersonations increased her concern.

“Many of my students spend hours and hours and hours on TikTok, and I think it’s just desensitized them to the fact that we’re real people,” she said. “They didn’t feel what a violation this was to create these accounts and impersonate us and mock our children and mock what we love.”

A few days after learning of the videos, Edward Souders, the principal of Great Valley Middle School, emailed the parents of eighth graders, describing the impostor accounts as portraying “our teachers in a disrespectful manner.”

The school also held an eighth grade assembly on responsible technology use.

But the school district said it had limited options to respond. Courts generally protect students’ rights to off-campus free speech, including parodying or disparaging educators online — unless the students’ posts threaten others or disrupt school.

“While we wish we could do more to hold students accountable, we are legally limited in what action we can take when students communicate off campus during nonschool hours on personal devices,” Daniel Goffredo, the district’s superintendent, said in a statement.

The district said it couldn’t comment on any disciplinary actions, to protect student privacy.

In mid-March, Nikki Salvatico, president of the Great Valley Education Association, a teachers union, warned the school board that the TikToks were disrupting the school’s “safe educational environment.”

“We need the message that this type of behavior is unacceptable,” Salvatico said at a school board meeting March 18.

The next day, Souders sent another email to parents. Some posts contained “offensive content,” he wrote, adding: “I am optimistic that by addressing it together, we can prevent it from happening again.”

While a few accounts disappeared — including those using the names of Motz, Whitelock and Scibilia — others popped up. In May, a second TikTok account impersonating Scibilia posted several new videos mocking her.

She and other Great Valley educators said they had reported the impostor accounts to TikTok, but had not heard back. But several teachers, who felt the videos had violated their privacy, said they did not provide TikTok with a personal ID to verify their identities.

On Wednesday, TikTok removed the account impersonating Scibilia and three other fake Great Valley teacher accounts flagged by a reporter.

Scibilia and other teachers are still processing the incident. Some teachers have stopped posing for and posting photographs, lest students misuse the images. Experts said this type of abuse could harm teachers’ mental health and reputations.

“That would be traumatizing to anyone,” said Susan D. McMahon, a psychology professor at DePaul University in Chicago and chair of the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on Violence Against Educators. She added that verbal student aggression against teachers was increasing.

Now teachers like Scibilia and Motz are pushing schools to educate students on how to use tech responsibly — and bolster policies to better protect teachers.

In the Great Valley students’ “apology” on TikTok last month, the two girls said they planned to post new videos. This time, they said, they would make the posts private so teachers couldn’t find them.

“We’re back, and we’ll be posting again,” one said. “And we are going to private all the videos at the beginning of next school year,” she added, “’cause then they can’t do anything.”

On Friday, after a Times reporter asked the school district to notify parents about this article, the students deleted the “apology” video and removed the teacher’s handle from their account. They also added a disclaimer: “Guys, we’re not acting as our teachers anymore that’s in the past !!”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

The soldiers’ families spent decades fighting to show that the men had been betrayed by the military. In November, they won a measure of justice when the Army secretary, Christine E. Wormuth, overturned the convictions and acknowledged that the soldiers “were wrongly treated because of their race and were not given fair trials.”

On Thursday, several descendants of the soldiers gathered at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery as the Department of Veterans Affairs dedicated new headstones for 17 of the executed servicemen.

The new headstones acknowledge each soldier’s rank, unit and home state — a simple honor accorded to every other veteran buried in the cemetery. They replaced the previous headstones that noted only their name and date of death.

The headstones were unveiled after an honor guard fired a three-volley rifle salute, a bugler played taps and officials presented the descendants with folded American flags and certificates declaring that the executed soldiers had been honorably discharged.

“Can you balance the scales by what we’re doing?” Jason Holt, whose uncle, Pfc. Thomas C. Hawkins, was among the first 13 soldiers hanged in 1917, said at the ceremony. “I don’t know. But it’s an attempt. It’s an attempt to make things right.”

The soldiers were members of the 3rd Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment, an all-Black unit. They had been assigned to guard the construction of a training camp for white soldiers in Houston.

White residents called them racist slurs and physically harassed them. After two Black soldiers were beaten and violently arrested, a group of more than 100 Black soldiers, hearing rumors of additional threats, seized rifles and marched into Houston, where violent clashes broke out Aug. 23, 1917.

Nineteen people were killed — among them white police officers, soldiers and civilians and four Black soldiers.

At their trials, the members of the 24th Infantry Regiment were represented by a single officer who had some legal training but was not a lawyer. The court deliberated for only two days before convicting the first 58 soldiers.

Less than 24 hours later, with no chance for appeal, the first 13 soldiers were hanged on a hastily constructed gallows on the banks of Salado Creek, which runs through San Antonio. By September 1918, 52 additional soldiers had been convicted and six more had been hanged.

Angela Holder, whose great-uncle, Cpl. Jesse Moore, was among the 13 soldiers hanged Dec. 11, 1917, said stories of his service told by her great-aunt prompted her to research his military career. She learned, she said, that he had served in the Philippines.

“He served proudly, and to now have the headstone redressed is an acknowledgment of who he was,” Holder said. “He was a very proud soldier.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

A $38 million investment by Bloomberg Philanthropies — the largest gift in the history of the city’s public schools — will transform a small existing high school into an 800-student feeder for the sprawling Mass General system, which is plagued by some 2,000 job vacancies.

Boston is one of 10 cities or regions where Bloomberg has pledged to spend a total of $250 million over five years pairing hospitals with high schools. Students will earn college credits as they train for careers in nursing, emergency medicine, lab science, medical imaging and surgery.

But in a nod to evolving views on higher education, and to surging demand for vocational training, the program will prepare thousands of students to start full-time jobs upon graduation instead of college if they choose.

“There’s a growing sense that the value of college has diminished, relative to cost,” Howard Wolfson, education program lead at Bloomberg Philanthropies, said in an interview Tuesday. “This should not be construed as anti-college — every kid who wants to go should have the opportunity. But at the same time, we have to acknowledge the reality that, for a lot of kids, college is not an option, or they want to get on with their careers.”

The foundation started by Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York who grew up in a Boston suburb, will establish similar partnerships between schools and hospitals in New York; Philadelphia; Houston; Dallas; Nashville, Tennessee; and Charlotte and Durham, North Carolina, as well as in rural areas in Tennessee and Alabama.

In Boston, the money will allow the Edward M. Kennedy Academy for Health Careers to gradually double its enrollment to 800 students from 400 and offer five health care career tracks instead of the current two. The new curriculum will be developed by Mass General Brigham.

Students will choose a specialty by the end of 10th grade, then spend time as juniors and seniors training in hospital labs, emergency departments and other such settings, the school said.

Founded in 1995, the Kennedy Academy has a waiting list of 400 students, its leaders said. That mirrors interest in vocational training seen around the state and country. A 2019 state report on vocational education in Massachusetts found that student demand had increased 33% in five years, with vocational school enrollments falling far short of projected job needs in health care and other fields.

Supporters of vocational schools have pushed the state to fund more of them, and to adopt a lottery admissions system for existing programs, arguing that students of color have been unfairly excluded.

Mayor Michelle Wu of Boston said the project will be a “game changer,” helping to build a stronger, more stable middle class in a city that ranks among the most expensive in the country.

“For our community members to be able to step into well-paying jobs where they’re desperately needed,” she said, “that builds on-ramps to higher-paying careers that allow you to stay in the city and serve your community.”

Median starting salaries for some of the jobs that students will train for range from $56,000 for surgical technologists to $71,000 for respiratory therapists, according to Bloomberg.

More than 90% of students at the Kennedy Academy are Black or Hispanic; 85% are classified as “high needs,” meaning that they are from low-income households, are multilingual English learners, or have disabilities. To ensure that students succeed, the gift from Bloomberg includes money for supports such as school social workers and mental health clinicians.

Dr. Anne Klibanski, president and CEO of Mass General Brigham, said the partnership will diversify the system’s workforce, helping it more closely mirror the increasingly diverse city it serves. Filling vacant jobs will also help cut wait times for patients and ease burnout among overextended employees, she said.

Wolfson said he envisions cities across the country setting up similar pipelines to fill 2 million job openings in health care, a number projected to double by 2031. In Boston, Mary Skipper, the schools superintendent, said she can imagine feeder schools to help address the critical national shortage of teachers in addition to health care workers.

“It’s a very powerful model,” she said. “It sets a blueprint.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

The 37-year-old actress has been checking off all sorts of awards-season firsts thanks to “Killers of the Flower Moon,” the Martin Scorsese-directed period drama in which she plays Mollie Burkhart, an Osage woman whose relatives are systematically murdered by her husband (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) and his uncle (Robert De Niro) in a bid to seize her family’s oil-rich Oklahoma land. If Mollie is the movie’s conscience, Gladstone is its center of gravity: Even when she shares scenes with A-listers such as DiCaprio and De Niro, the film bends to her.

That portrayal has so far earned Gladstone a best actress win from the New York Film Critics Circle and nominations from the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards, and major nods from the Screen Actors Guild and the Academy Awards are likely to come in the weeks ahead. In the run-up to those ceremonies, Gladstone has been a hotly pursued presence for roundtables and events on both coasts, and she has taken to those opportunities with such command — using her platform to amplify other Native voices and concerns — that you’d never know that she wasn’t used to this, or that for a long time, she was hesitant to engage with Hollywood at all.

“There’s a handful of people who love film that have been aware of my career for a while, but this has been like being shot out of a cannon,” Gladstone said, tracing the far-flung route that has led her to all those awards-show ballrooms. “My dad’s a boilermaker, my mom was a teacher. I was raised on a reservation, went to public school. It’s a very normal, sort of working-class upbringing in one way, and in another way, I’m just a rez girl.”

On screen, Gladstone has the profile and indomitable presence of a 1940s film star. In person, when we met last month at a rooftop restaurant in Beverly Hills, California, Gladstone was more approachable but every bit as striking, with vivid brown eyes that her father once warned her were eminently readable. He said this mostly to dissuade her from telling lies, but he was right: When we feel for Mollie, it’s because of the fear and righteous indignation that Gladstone can convey in just a look.

She also has a wry sense of humor, glimpsed in some of the Scorsese film’s lighter moments, and an ability to punctuate her conversation topics and awards-season speeches with an impressive command of history and facts. “Lily is a big nerd wrapped up in this very giving, curious person,” said director Erica Tremblay, whose film “Fancy Dance” starred Gladstone. “If you’re at a dinner party with Lily, you’re going to find yourself talking about physics and bumblebees — and when I say she’ll be talking about physics, she’ll be talking about some very specific theory that Lily will know the mechanics of inside and out.”

At an Elle event in December celebrating women in Hollywood, Gladstone was honored alongside the likes of Jennifer Lopez, America Ferrera and Jodie Foster, but she particularly sparked to meeting the academic Stacy L. Smith, whose University of Southern California think tank, the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, had recently issued a report about Native American representation in Hollywood. After analyzing 1,600 films released from 2007 to 2022, Smith found that the amount of speaking roles for Native American actors was virtually nil, less than one quarter of 1% of all the roles cataloged.

A leading role such as Gladstone’s in a film the size of “Killers of the Flower Moon” isn’t just unusual, it’s unprecedented, so much so that Smith subtitled her report, “The Lily Gladstone Effect.” Gladstone can hardly wrap her head around that recognition. “It’s the kind of paper that if I were a student now taking the same class, I would be citing in my studies,” she said.

For DiCaprio, Gladstone has more than earned the plaudits. “To see her rise to this occasion and be somebody that’s so formidable as far as understanding the depth of her own industry and Native American history, it’s an incredible moment to be a part of,” he said in a phone call. “I’m just glad to be next to her.”

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To tout his co-star, DiCaprio has been a willing participant in the sort of red-carpet photo opportunities and awards-season parties he’d normally eschew. “It’s insane,” Gladstone said. “It’s like I’m trotting this mythical creature around, out and about, and he’s doing so of his own volition.” The ante was upped even further when Gladstone learned that her favorite actress, Cate Blanchett, would conduct a Q&A with her after “Killers of the Flower Moon” screened in London. “I’m hugging myself right now, I know your readers can’t see that,” she told me.

Gladstone acknowledged that sometimes, the intensity of the awards-season spotlight can sometimes feel overwhelming. “I can’t speak from the heart if I’m not connected to what’s real about all this,” she said. In those moments, she endeavors to carry her community forward with her: “I know that all of this attention on me right now means so much more than just me.”

In other words, don’t expect Gladstone to come out of this experience transformed into a demanding Hollywood diva, as so many have before her. She can’t be bowled over, on screen or off.

“I’ve talked to a lot of people who know Lily Gladstone and have been friends with her for a long time and seen this journey, and she is so steadfast and so immovable in terms of her values and her core,” Tremblay said. “I think she’ll be exactly the same, but with fancier clothes.”

As a child growing up on the Blackfeet Reservation in northwestern Montana, there was one week that Gladstone looked forward to all year, when the Missoula Children’s Theater would roll up in a little red truck, construct a set out of PVC pipes and cloth backdrops, and cast local kids in a production that the whole community would come out to see at the end of the week. “I was bullied a lot when I was a kid, partly because I was just goofy,” she said. “But that one week a year is when I was cool.”

In the group’s production of “Cinderella,” the young Gladstone decided to play her ugly stepsister as if she were Roseanne Barr, studying how to walk and talk like the comedian. It was a lightning-strike moment when she realized that a little bit of craft could go a long way.

“Somebody picked up on that in the audience and said, ‘She’s funnier than Roseanne,’” Gladstone said. “And my parents reminded me that somebody there from our community said, ‘We’re going to see her at the Oscars one day,’ just from that.”

Performing has always been Gladstone’s true north, the place to which her inner compass is most attuned. She remembers watching “Return of the Jedi” at age 5 and feeling such a strong desire to be an Ewok that she knew someday, she’d be on the other side of the screen. Similarly obsessed with “The Nutcracker,” Gladstone signed up for ballet, which she assumed would be the big performative outlet in her life until the body shaming became too tough to take: “Not just weight, but things like ‘Your middle toe is too long,’” she said. “I’m like, ‘Hey, my grandma gave me that middle toe!’”

But even in ballet class, instructors told her she was a natural-born actress, less concerned with nailing movements than with communicating a character. In her teenage years, when Gladstone’s family moved from Montana to the sometimes alienating suburbs of Seattle, she plunged fully into performance, acting in off-campus plays and auditioning for independent films.

During her senior year, fellow students voted her “Most Likely to Win an Oscar.” They could already tell that acting was something she lived and breathed.

“It gave me an identity when my identity was forming and reforming,” she said. “Being known as an actress felt good even when I wasn’t working, even before I got my SAG card, when people asked what I did: ‘Yeah, I’m working at Staples right now, but I’m an actress.’”

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In her 20s, many of Gladstone’s actor friends moved to New York or Los Angeles, but she was reluctant to follow suit. “I knew if I came to LA and was doing audition after audition, it would be really difficult for me,” she said. “And I knew how easily my love of ballet had been shot down by these boxes that I couldn’t fit in, so I was like, ‘I’m going to protect this a little bit.’”

The boxes in Hollywood can be pernicious, and Gladstone is still wary of them. “I know myself and I know I’m difficult to cast,” she said. “I’m kind of ‘mid’ in a lot of ways.” Gladstone hastened to add that she didn’t mean “mid” like meh, dismissively as Generation Z uses it. Instead, she meant the word quite literally. She is in-between, hard to place, neither this nor that. Part of it is that she’s mixed-race: Her father is Blackfeet and Nez Perce, and her mother is white. But there is another part, too.

“It’s kind of being middle-gendered, I guess,” said Gladstone, who uses she and they pronouns. “I’ve always known I’m comfortable claiming being a woman, but I never feel more than when I’m in a group of all women that I’m not fully this either.”

She recalled a heartfelt moment at Elle’s Women in Hollywood event when Jodie Foster told nonbinary “The Last of Us” actor Bella Ramsey that the room was full of supportive sisters. “That’s wonderful and that’s true,” Gladstone said, but afterward, she went up to Ramsey to “introduce myself and let them know, ‘You also have siblings here, too.’”

Instead of moving to Hollywood, where she might have been prodded into walking a narrower path, Gladstone spent her postgraduate years in Montana, doing theater and renting out basements with like-minded performers just to make something. Working in independent films and Native-centric productions allowed her to qualify for the Screen Actors Guild without ever having to move her home base, and a breakthrough role in Kelly Reichardt’s 2016 indie “Certain Women” raised her profile considerably. Still, the megabudgeted “Killers of the Flower Moon” represents a comparative quantum leap: Though Gladstone was unsure about coming to Hollywood, in the end, Hollywood came to her.

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It’s a heady thing to go from semi-known to perceived on a major scale, as Gladstone found out during the film’s mammoth Cannes Film Festival premiere in May, when photos of her walking the red carpet with DiCaprio were beamed all over the world. But the actual premiere of “Killers of the Flower Moon” in October provided an unexpected respite, since the actors strike at the time prevented Gladstone from promoting it.

A silver lining was the number of Osage people who instead spoke at the movie’s premiere, enjoying the sort of red-carpet moments that would have typically gone to the film’s striking actors. Watching them discuss and debate “Killers of the Flower Moon” reminded Gladstone that she was raised to listen to her elders, and the strike-imposed silence provided the perfect opportunity to collect her thoughts and reflect.

“There’s a level of ego that is wrapped up with being a public person speaking for other people, and a level of ego it takes being an actor, too,” she said. “So, I think it was a real gift to be able to sit there and have another reminder that this is way bigger than me.”

She spent the film’s opening day on a picket line in Times Square, marching back and forth in the rain near the New York headquarters of Paramount Pictures, the studio that distributed “Killers of the Flower Moon” with Apple. “It was a little bit of my contrarian nature to choose Paramount that day,” Gladstone admitted with a grin. Later, while dining at an Italian restaurant in the city, a couple sitting next to her asked if she was Lily Gladstone from “Killers of the Flower Moon.” It was the first time she felt permission to own it.

“I was like, ‘Yes, I am. Today, I am Lily Gladstone.’” Months later, recounting the story, she was still beaming.

If she is nominated for a best actress Academy Award on Jan. 23, she’ll be the first Native American contender in that category. With a win, she’d be the first Native performer to earn a competitive acting Oscar.

Still, it’s one thing for Hollywood to celebrate underrepresented actors, and a whole other thing to actually provide for them afterward. Academy members were moved to vote for recent winners such as Troy Kotsur (“CODA”) and Ke Huy Quan (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”) in part because of their inspiring personal narratives, but follow-up projects on par with their winning films can be hard to come by. DiCaprio hopes that Gladstone’s breakthrough year will finally change things. “I think she realizes that this really is a historical moment,” he said. “I know she has a plethora of other stories that she wants to tell, and I want her to be given those opportunities.”

Whatever this season has in store, Gladstone is ready to make the most of it. At a recent Academy Museum gala, Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Connelly asked to meet Gladstone and wondered whether the demands of campaigning had already run her ragged. Gladstone was surprised to find herself replying that so far, she was doing just fine: “Maybe it says something about me that I’m kind of enjoying all of this right now.”

The wider world appears invested in her success, too. After “Killers of the Flower Moon” received a standing ovation at Cannes, a clip of Gladstone’s moved reaction to the applause earned millions of views. Why does she think that video went viral, with so many excited commenters predicting the Oscar glory that now appears within reach?

“I think people root for folks that come up from the grassroots having this global-stage moment, this dream coming true,” she said. “That’s something that I wish on everybody at some point in their lives, in whatever form that takes, and also for Native people.”

Gladstone confessed that she had watched the Cannes clip “about a thousand times” since the premiere: “It’s a moment of transcendence that was wonderful to have captured.”

But the moment was about more than just her own time in the spotlight: She recalled the way her Native co-star William Belleau let out a whooping war cry during the ovation and how the applause for the women playing her sisters — Cara Jade Myers, JaNae Collins and Jillian Dion — prompted Gladstone to let out a trilling lele. It wasn’t just a celebration. It was a release.

“Whatever that oppressive system is that sometimes develops with colonial governments, that moment of transcendence for all of us, those are the healing moments,” Gladstone said. “Those are the ones that show people very clearly that we’re still here and we’re excellent. We’ve survived and we’re just soaring now.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

It begins with a flat stone plucked from the earth and placed in a clearing at the base of a mountain. A kind of Genesis, giving way to an Edenic apple farm, followed by 300 years of corruption, sorrow, ambition, deception, isolation, love. Daniel Mason’s “North Woods,” read by a full cast, is a kind of Odyssean epic in which the hero doesn’t leave home —a New England house and its inhabitants, over the three-century history of America.

There’s the story of an apple farmer, a Revolutionary War defector named Charles Osgood, rendered in all his gruff self-importance by the British narrator Simon Vance; the letters from the landscape painter William Henry Teale to a beloved “friend” that escalate in desperation and longing, with Mark Deakins’s placid and dignified reading giving way to a more tortured cadence; Mark Bramhall telling (among others) the heart-wrenching saga of Osgood’s twin daughters, whose inseparable bond after their father’s death is tested by temptation to explore the world beyond their property lines.

Like the unforgettable audiobook production of George Saunders’s “Lincoln in the Bardo,” Mason’s historical fiction advertises a singular strength of the form: alchemizing an ensemble of distinct voices into a harmonious, deeply resonant whole. (Random House Audio. 11 hours, 5 minutes. $22.50.) 

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“How to Say Babylon: A Memoir” by Safiya Sinclair

After her strict Rastafari father threatens to kick her out of the family home for standing up to his verbal abuse, a teenage Safiya Sinclair looks out into the darkness of the Jamaican mountains, “the thick countryside where our first slave rebellion was born,” and sees the specter of a woman dressed in white, her dreadlocked head bowed “under the gaze of a Rastaman.” The woman, she realizes, is herself, a harbinger of “the future that awaited me at my father’s hands.”

While “all the rage had been smothered out of” this recurring apparition in “How to Say Babylon: A Memoir,” the same cannot be said of the author, who seethes and roars with emotion throughout this affecting account of growing up under her father’s violent and controlling hand — and of escaping it to become an award-winning poet.

Hovering above the sadness and anger are Sinclair’s vivid memories: of her mother Esther’s laughter and her soothing touch as they “fold into each other in the living room” before school, of the golden rolling paper Esther carried for the ganja whose aroma “clung to me like I clung to Mom.” She recalls her three younger siblings’ greasy fingers and gleeful screeching, her father’s repeated chant, “Fire bun Babylon!,” which he “turned … on his tongue like prayer.” Sinclair spins her own incantations out of the landscapes of her upbringing — first the fishing village lined with zinc-roofed shanties, hibiscus trees and cinder blocks; then the “towering blue mahoes and primeval ferns” farther inland, the “serried and vigilant” mountain ridge of her later childhood — her voice as sensuous as a siren song. (Simon & Schuster Audio. 16 hours, 46 minutes. $29.99.)

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“The Fraud” by Zadie Smith

Which impostor does the title of Zadie Smith’s sixth novel, “The Fraud,” refer to? Is it a novelist, William Ainsworth, whose fame and social status belie the critical reception of his work? Is it his housekeeper, Eliza Touchet? Or is it the so-called Claimant, the man presenting himself as Sir Roger Tichborne, the heir to a noble fortune who was believed to have died in a shipwreck, inspiring a trial that captures the maniacal attention of the English public?

With the virtuosic agility of an actor in a one-woman play, Smith as narrator fully embodies each of her many distinct characters — using exaggeratedly quaint Edinburgh brogue, Cockney, even Jamaican patois — who expose the ways in which every one of us misrepresents ourselves somehow or other. This is a novel of manners that — thanks to the author’s ear for comic timing and eviscerating social commentary — is vigorously, insistently funny. (Penguin Audio.12 hours, 26 minutes. $25.)

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“Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World” by Naomi Klein

“The uncanniness provoked by doppelgangers is particularly acute because the thing that becomes unfamiliar is you,” Naomi Klein says in “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World,”  an elegant hybrid of memoir and social science that traces the motif of the double throughout history, literature and Klein’s personal life.

Sick of being confused with the ’90s feminist-turned-conspiracist Naomi Wolf, Klein uses her own exasperation as a lens onto the black-and-white bifurcation of almost every aspect of contemporary life: the economic inequality made even more stark by the sacrifices of essential workers to protect the wealthy from COVID-19; the stigma of being on the autism spectrum and the parents who deny their children lifesaving vaccines in hopes of avoiding it; fitness influencers who condemn “less healthy” bodies for their susceptibility to disease.

Rather than alienating the “other side,” as it were, Klein uses the doppelganger rubric to pull the unfamiliar closer, seeking out thoughtful context for how seemingly irreconcilable factions arrived at their extremes. “This is the trouble with the Mirror World,” she says, her tone very the-call-is-coming-from-inside-the-house. “There is always some truth mixed in with the lies.” (Macmillan Audio. 14 hours, 47 minutes. $32.99.)

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“Same Bed Different Dreams” by Ed Park

Intertwining the recorded pasts of Korean colonization and American imperialism with speculative plots involving an underground rebellion and a parasitic tech company, Ed Park’s second novel, “Same Bed Different Dreams,” hits you over the head with the blunt force of its organizing quandary, again and again: “What is history?”

But thanks to the ingenuity of Park’s storytelling and the prowess of the audiobook’s narrators, Daniel K. Isaac, Dominic Hoffman and Shannon Tyo, the listener doesn’t mind the repetition. If anything, we need all the signposts we can get in this intricate maze, which winds through alternate histories, dreamlike impossibilities and books within books.

Park’s novel braids together three narratives that overlap in sometimes rewarding, sometimes confounding, ways. Isaac reads “The Sins,” about a Korean American tech employee who becomes obsessed with the titular unfinished manuscript that falls into his hands; Tyo reads the manuscript itself, a translated work of alleged nonfiction by Echo, the nom de plume of an elusive Korean writer who may or may not be alive; and Hoffman reads “2333,” a science fiction series by a Black veteran of the Korean War. Characters, too, repeat, tempting the listener to draw connections that prove so tenuous they vanish as quickly as they arrive.

That’s OK. The point isn’t to grasp every detail. The fun in this audiobook is the hallucinatory joy of witnessing real life crash head-first into heartfelt, hilarious nonsense. As in art, so in life. (Random House Audio. 18 hours, 36 minutes. $25.)