Alex Granados

William Michael Dillon spent nearly 27 years in prison for a murder he didn't commit. In 2008, DNA testing proved that he was innocent and he was set free. Dillon, also a musician, sings about his trials and tribulations in his first album, “Black Robes and Lawyers,” released this month.

How many lawyers does it take to make good music? Well, if you’re talking about the North Carolina band Instruments of Justice, the answer is a lot. They’re the house band for the law firm Poyner Spruill LLP, and they’re up to 13 members – enough to make up their own jury with an alternate. Host Frank Stasio gets treated to an in-studio performance and talks to the band about life as music-making attorneys.

As early as the late 1800s, the United States already had the highest rate of divorce in the world. It has pretty much maintained its status as a world leader of broken marriages ever since. The advent of no-fault divorces in the late '60s and early '70s only made things worse. Now a generation of people raised by split parents is struggling to forge their way through the uncertain bonds of matrimony. Jonathan Weiler and Anne Menkens are one couple who say they found a way to have a “good divorce.” They wrote about their efforts in a series of articles on the Huffington Post.

Charlie Brown and the Peanuts crew have delighted fans for more than half a century. But what happens when those innocent kids become teenagers? In the play “Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead,” Linus is a pothead, Snoopy is dead, Lucy is imprisoned and Pigpen is a germaphobe. Good grief! Raleigh Ensemble Players will be performing “Dogs Sees God,” which follows the Peanuts gang in high school as they deal with the drama and turbulence of the teen years.

After going it alone for years, the members of Holy Ghost Tent Revival are considering changing their unsigned status and seeking representation from a record label. They’ve been having a blast on the road, but balancing a hectic tour schedule with the responsibility of promoting their music and financing the needs of the seven-member band is overwhelming.

Camille and Caleb Fang love to put people in uncomfortable situations. They're performance artists who think nothing of making a scene by stealing candy at a mall or heckling a pair of young street performers. But the Fang’s greatest works are their damaged children who they traumatize in the name of art. For example, they dress their son as a girl and enter him in a beauty pageant. In The Family Fang" (Ecco/2011), first time novelist Kevin Wilson explores the dependent and often twisted relationship between parents and children.

Gambling is big business in Western North Carolina. A new report by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill shows that Harrah's Cherokee Casino pours more than $380 million into the local economy there. That has led to improvements in life expectancy, poverty rates and even education in the area.

A new exhibit at Duke University explores the footprint of Simón Bolívar in the United States. Bolívar was the liberator of Venezuela, Bolivia, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and Panama from Spanish rule in the 19th century. He was heavily influenced by the principles of the American Revolution and spent time in the United States learning about the new democracy. Numerous towns, cities and memorials in the U.S. have been named or erected in Bolívar’s honor.

North Carolina entrepreneur Josh Whiton had his first business at the age of five when he sold tadpoles to his neighborhood friends. Now, he is the CEO of TransLoc Inc., a company that tracks city buses in real time.

More than 190 million people in the United States are overweight. That’s two-thirds of the American population and almost half of that number are obese. Research into the causes of obesity is showing that much more than willpower is needed to tackle it. Obesity has ties to addiction and depression and a person's environment may play a bigger role than once thought.