The State of Things

In the late '90s the Internet was king and everybody wanted a piece of it. Jud Bowman was a student at the North Carolina School of Science and Math when he had an idea for an Internet start up. It was called Motricity, and he managed to get investors onboard before things went south in the Internet market.

The previous State Elections Board's term expired just as they were beginning to investigate $235,000 of allegedly illegal political donations.  The donations implicate Gov. Pat McCrory and legislators from both parties.  Governor McCrory made the unusual decision of replacing all of the board members. 

  The North Carolina Renewables Program, instated in 2007, requires utility companies to produce a percentage of sales from efficiency efforts or renewable sources. The program has since pushed North Carolina up in solar farm research and also created jobs during a recession. Efforts to repeal the program have recently been introduced to the House and Senate, claiming that the programs will have a negative impact on the economy.

Elizabeth Spencer’s most famous book is called “The Light in the Piazza.”  It’s the story of an American girl who falls in love with a man in Italy.  And it’s been adapted to a movie and a stage musical.  But Elizabeth has created a large body of work, though none is quite so famous. There’s a new documentary based on Elizabeth Spencer’s life called “Landscapes of the Heart: The Elizabeth Spencer Story.”

In America, corporations are king. It’s hard to even think about capitalism without the corporate system that keeps it flowing here in the United States. A movie called "Shift Change" wants to transform the way you think about the economy. It highlights worker-owned businesses in North America and Spain that flip the paradigm of corporate control on its head.

When Alex McKeithen was a junior at Davidson College in the late '80s, his life changed. He was visiting Paris and studying art when one day he found himself stripping naked in public and proclaiming himself the seventh angel of the apocalypse. It was the beginning of an undiagnosed episode of bipolar disorder, and that experience is the focus of his memoir, "The Seventh Angel" (Lorimer Press/2012).

Who says bigger is always better? It seems that the smallest things hold our world together. If you unscrewed the back of your watch, you would see a whole world of washers and gears and screws that held together your concept of time. The Carrack recently opened the exhibit "TINY: Attention, Exploded." The exhibit works to explore how we relate to the small.

Last Friday, Gov. Pat McCrory appointed an entirely new staff to the North Carolina State Board of Elections. Earlier that week the board was set to begin an investigation into contributions to McCrory's campaign. A one-hundred percent turnover is unusual and leaves many speculating whether or not it has to do with this investigation.

John Frank is a political reporter for the News and Observer and joined Host Frank Stasio today to talk about the turnover.