Pee-wee Herman’s Commitment to Silliness and More: The Week in Reporter Reads

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 Jason Zinoman

Of all the great flesh-and-blood cartoons of 1980s popular culture — Hulk Hogan, Madonna, Mr. T — the one easiest for small children to relate to was Pee-wee Herman. He made the same kind of obnoxious jokes we did, in a similar, if more overtly nasal, squeak while capturing an un-self-conscious exuberance that felt deeply familiar.

That’s how it felt. In reality, Pee-wee Herman was nothing like us at all, a dreamy man-child in a red bow tie whose sugary smile could curl into a punky scowl. A singular piece of comic performance art for a mass audience, Pee-wee Herman stood out in every form he appeared in, whether improv theaters, late-night talk shows, the movies or Saturday morning television.

That this character could be so easy to identify with and so singularly, slyly alien at the same time is the stupendous magic trick of his creator, Paul Reubens, a true original who died on Sunday at 70.

The world of Pee-wee is full of this loopy surrealism that could veer into innuendo but never got dark. It was always welcoming, wildly diverse, profoundly silly.

Come to Portland, his sister said. It’s green and beautiful, people are friendly and there are plenty of jobs.

In 2018, Anthony Saldana took his sister’s advice. He left Las Vegas, where he was working in a casino, and moved to a Portland suburb.

He rented an apartment and got a job at Home Depot. Mr. Saldana, though, never quite found his footing. By early 2021, he was living in a tent, under a tree on the edge of a highway in Portland.

He wouldn’t let his sister, Kaythryn Richardson, visit him and shared only a few details with her about his life on the streets. He told her about the “bad people” terrorizing him and about the Disney movies he had watched to drown out the chaos that was slowly pulling him under.

“Hello sister,” he texted last October. “I’m hurting.”

All of Portland, it seems, has been trying to figure out what has been happening to people like Mr. Saldana, and to Portland itself.

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Written and narrated by Mike Baker

Manuel and Patricia Oliver had already been on the road for more than a week when they pulled their school bus bearing an American flag into a city park in Uvalde, Texas. They were unsure of just how many people would greet them on that sweltering day.

Then the families started arriving. Parents, grandparents, siblings and other kin of some of the 22 people killed last year at Robb Elementary streamed into the park, embracing the Olivers and one another. So, too, did a woman who lost her daughter at a school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas, where 10 people were killed in 2018. The Olivers had driven halfway across the country to Uvalde with their own story: The couple’s son, Joaquin, was one of the 17 people killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., five years ago.

The Olivers came to Texas one day last month to find others who also understand what their lives had become and to work with them to prevent such tragedies from happening again.

“I’m looking to help and also to receive help,” Mr. Oliver said. “We all know that we exist. What if we start planning together? What if we can support each other?”

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Written and narrated by Jack Healy

Patients with heat stroke and burns from the asphalt are swamping hospitals. Air-conditioners are breaking down at homeless shelters. The medical examiner’s office is deploying trailer-size coolers to store bodies, for the first time since the early days of Covid.

For 31 straight days — from the last day of June through Sunday — Phoenix has hit at least 110 degrees Fahrenheit, not merely breaking its 18-day record in 1974, but setting a significant new one. On Monday, the last day of July, the heat spell finally broke, if only by a few degrees: The temperature reached a high of 108 degrees. Storms offered a slight, temporary respite. The forecast called for 110-plus degree days to return later in the week.

The city had already smashed through another record last week, racking up the most 115-degree days ever in a calendar year, part of a global heat wave that made July Earth’s hottest month on record.

This has been Phoenix’s July in hell — an entire month of merciless heat that has ground down people’s health and patience in the city of 1.6 million, while also straining a regionwide campaign to protect homeless people and older residents who are most vulnerable.

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Written and narrated by Catherine Porter

At the eight-minute mark of the final of the CAN 18 soccer tournament, the players on the Mauritania team scored three times in rapid succession.

The balls hitting the goalkeeper’s small net sounded like the blasts of a cannon. Boom. Boom. Boom. The last two happened so quickly that many in the crowd missed them.

“Did they score?” the Ivory Coast fan squished next to me asked, looking stunned. “Yes, twice,” a Mauritanian fan on my other side responded gleefully.

It doesn’t take long to understand that the annual soccer tournament of Paris’s 18th arrondissement is different: The stadium is a small, caged turf court in the middle of the Goutte d’Or — the dense, working-class landing spot for each new wave of immigrants to the city, a place where African wax stores and tailors for boubous compete with boulangeries and bistros among the crowded streets.

The tournament was one of many around Paris inspired by the 2019 edition of the Africa Cup of Nations, or Coupe d’Afrique des nations in French, the continental competition typically held every two years. The events have become so popular that the finals of one in Créteil, a southeastern suburb of Paris, were broadcast on Amazon Prime last summer.

Our Reporter Reads are produced by Tally Abecassis, Parin Behrooz, Sarah Diamond, Jack D’Isidoro, Adrienne Hurst and Kate Winslett.

Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Ryan Wegner, Julia Simon and Isabella Anderson.