Shawn Wen

Writer Rosecrans Baldwin landed a job at a Parisian ad agency, and so for 18 months he and his wife lived in the City of Lights. What they confronted was a globalized and modernized city, which differed radically from the Paris of Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

Diana Darby left her life as a television writer in Los Angeles to become a musician in Nashville. Now she is on her fourth album, titled "IV (intravenous).” It was written after a series of misfortunate incidents caused her to take a break from writing and recording. Darby joins host Frank Stasio to play live and speak about her first CD in six years.

The experimental pop band Xiu Xiu has been a fixture on the indie music scene for the past ten years. While they are not famous in the conventional sense, they have a strong cult following. Xiu Xiu has toured the world over and produced eight critically acclaimed albums, including their newest "Always.”

The Independent Weekly recently launched a new series of crossword puzzles called Solve Locally. These are puzzles using local themes and constructed by people who live in the Triangle.

There are many lists of the best movies of all time. But there are also a few titles that come up again and again as the best worst movies.  Critics argue between “The Room,” “Troll 2,” and “Plan 9 from Outer Space,” but that doesn’t mean these so-called bad films don’t have huge fan followings.

In 2002, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act to avoid the Florida controversy during the 2000 election. North Carolina had some $4 million in federal funds coming to it from the HAVA, but the state needed to provide an extra $600,000 in its own voting budget to release those funds. Last week, the House and Senate chose to hold back the $600,000.

North Carolina lawmakers are considering a bill that would use historical record rather than scientific methodology to predict rising sea levels. It’s in response to a report released by the North Carolina Coastal Resource Commission, predicting that the sea level will rise 39 inches by 2100.

Logan Mehl-Laituri joined the military before September 11th. After the towers fell, he served in Afghanistan and Iraq doing dangerous work as a forward observer in the Army. He then joined the Air Force, and there he had a powerful religious epiphany that led him to stop serving as he had before. Mehl-Laituri is now a student at Duke Divinity School and the author of a new book “Reborn on the 4th of July” (Intervarsity Press/2012), which details his experience in the military and his ideas about spiritual faith. He joins host Frank Stasio to talk about the book.

When Deborah Aronin decided to stop shaving her armpits, she was surprised by the range of reactions she saw in the people around her. Strangers would come up to her, either expressing support or showing their disgust.

What can fish teach us about ourselves? Nico Katsanis thinks there might be quite a bit. He’s planting human genes in zebrafish to see what he can learn about brain development.