The State of Things

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.

Many photographers in this day and age seek to capture as many worlds as they can in their lifetime. Paul Kwilecki did all of this while staying in Decatur County, Georgia for over four decades.

To Ashley Christensen, a restaurant is not just a place where you sit down to eat.  It’s an entire concept.  She carefully plots an immersive experience for her diners. 

As the media covered the tragic Boston Marathon bombing, they also made mistakes. News outlets, with reputations built on truth and accuracy, spent air-time speculating rather than reporting.  Some of the early, incorrect reports posed threats to innocent people who were wrongly-implicated in the bombing.

Diali Cissokho, a Senegalese musician, moved to the United States several years ago hoping to meet like-minded musicians. He formed the band Kaira Ba with four North Carolina natives.

A group of student journalists is getting a course in professional radio reporting at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  The class has opened a world of experience to them. One of the students, Mark Haywood, had the opportunity to report on an incident of human trafficking right in his hometown of Randolph County, North Carolina. 

A bastard film is a film that does not fit into any particular category. Bastard films are offensive, disturbing or just plain nonsensical.

The natural gas extraction process called hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking, has been a source of debate and contention in the state for quite some time now. It involves drilling horizontally through thousands of feet of shale and blasting the shale with water, sand and chemicals to release natural gas. Several states allow the process, some are in the process of figuring out how to regulate it, and some, like New York, have placed a moratorium on the process due to environmental concerns.