A Sandwich Shop in the Middle of an American Crisis: The Week in Reporter Reads

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Written and narrated by Eli Saslow

Joe Faillace, 69, has been running the sandwich shop Old Station Subs alongside his wife, Debbie, for the last four decades. But as an epidemic of unsheltered homelessness began to overwhelm Phoenix and many other major American downtowns, the Faillaces were met with hundreds of people sleeping within a few blocks of Old Station. Many of them were suffering from mental illness or substance abuse, resulting in incidents such as pilfered goods and public masturbation.

As the number of people living on the streets in Phoenix more than tripled after 2016, the housing crisis landed on the doorsteps of small businesses. They began hiring private security firms to guard their property and lawyers to file a lawsuit against the city for failing to manage "a great humanitarian crisis."

Written and narrated by Alissa J. Rubin

A couple of streets away from the new buildings and the noisy main road of the desert city of Falluja, there was once a sports stadium. The goal posts are long gone, the stands rotted years ago. Now, every inch is covered with gravestones. "I stopped counting how many people are buried here, but there are hundreds, thousands of martyrs," said Kamil Jassim Mohammed, 70, the cemetery's custodian, who has looked after it since 2004, when graves were first dug for those killed as U.S. troops battled Iraqi militias.

As Iraq marks the 20th anniversary on Monday of the American-led invasion that toppled the dictator Saddam Hussein, an army of ghosts haunts the living. The dead and the maimed shadow everyone in this country — even those who want to leave the past behind. Today, Iraq is a very different place, and there are many lenses through which to see it. It is a far freer society than it was under Mr. Hussein and one of the more open countries in the Middle East, with multiple political parties and a largely free press.

Still, conversations with more than 50 Iraqis about the war's anniversary offered an often troubling portrait of an oil-rich nation that should be doing well but where most people neither feel secure nor see their government as anything but a corruption machine.

Written and narrated by Jon Mooallem

One Sunday last month, in a northern Italian town called Ivrea, the facades of historic buildings were covered with plastic sheeting and nets. And in several different piazzas, hundreds of wooden crates had appeared. Inside them were oranges. Oranges, the fruit.

Over the next three days, 8,000 people in Ivrea would throw 900 tons of oranges at one another, one orange at a time, while tens of thousands of other people watched. They would throw the oranges very hard, very viciously, often while screaming profanities at their targets or yowling like Braveheart. But they would also keep smiling as they threw the oranges, embracing and joking and cheering one another on, exhibiting with their total beings a deranged-seeming but euphoric sense of abandon and belonging — a freedom that was easy to envy but difficult to understand.

The Battle of the Oranges is an annual tradition in Ivrea and part of a larger celebration described by its organizers as "the most ancient historical Carnival in Italy." Several people in Ivrea told Jon Mooallem that as three pandemic years had passed in which no oranges were thrown, they grew concerned that something bad would happen in the community — that without this catharsis, a certain pent-up, sinister energy would explode. And now, three years of constrained energy was due to explode all at once.

Written and narrated by Jim Windolf

Jeannette Walls could have had a life of leisure after the big success of her 2005 memoir, "The Glass Castle," but she has too much energy for that. After nearly three decades as a journalist in New York, and more than 15 years in rural Virginia as a novelist who can send drafts to her editor more or less on her own schedule, she still seems like a reporter on deadline.

Since "The Glass Castle" came out, Ms. Walls, 62, has published two novels, "Half-Broke Horses" and "The Silver Star." Both were based on her own experiences or those of her family members. With "Hang the Moon," which will be published on March 28, she is moving deeper into fictional territory. This one is an action-packed tale centered on a powerful family of moonshiners in 1920s Virginia, and it's filled with enough dead bodies, doomed romances and sudden betrayals to make you wonder if George R.R. Martin had decided to ditch fantasy for Southern Gothic. It took her seven years to write the novel.

These days, when Ms. Walls is not at her desk, she is focused on her land. She and her husband have been working with a biologist to encourage the return of native grasses, wildflowers and trees.

Written and narrated by Caity Weaver

Of all Caity Weaver's bad habits, her ruthless desire to befriend exerts the strongest pull on her behavior. And so, in January, she booked a package vacation to Morocco through a company whose stated aim — beyond offering package vacations — is to help people in their 30s and 40s make new friends.

The travel company Flash Pack's mission is "to create one million meaningful friendships." The general uneasiness of millennials around extending themselves in friendships is particularly irrational, given that they report feeling lonely "often" or "always" at much higher rates than members of previous generations.

Ms. Weaver charts her time on the eight-day Morocco Highlights trip, the cost of which starts at $2,395, and tries to answer whether millennials are drawn to a pricey international vacation for the purpose of befriending strangers.

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, Desiree Ibekwe and Isabella Anderson.

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