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. Host Frank Stasio talks about the legal challenges to having an amicable split with Weiler and Menkens; Kristin Colello, an assistant professor of history at City University of New York/Queens College and author of the book “Making Marriage Work: A History of Marriage and Divorce in the Twentieth-Century United States"(UNC Press/2009); Alice Stubbs, a family law lawyer at Tharrington Smith LLP in Raleigh; writer Heather Havrilesky, a contributor to the New York Times Magazine and author of "Disaster Preparedness" (Riverhead/2010); and Alyssa Rosenberg, a culture reporter for ThinkProgress.org. Listener call-in.
Alex Granados joined The State of Things in July 2010. He got his start in radio as an intern for the show in 2005 and loved it so much that after trying his hand as a government reporter, reader liaison, features, copy and editorial page editor at a small newspaper in Manassas, Virginia, he returned to WUNC. Born in Baltimore but raised in Morgantown, West Virginia, Alex moved to Raleigh in time to do third grade twice and adjust to public school after having spent years in the sheltered confines of a Christian elementary education. Alex received a degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He also has a minor in philosophy, which basically means that he used to think he was really smart but realized he wasn’t in time to switch majors. Fishing, reading science fiction, watching crazy movies, writing bad short stories, and shooting pool are some of his favorite things to do. Alex still doesn’t know what he wants to be when he grows up, but he is holding out for astronaut.
Amber Nimocks came to The State of Things in January 2009. She is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a survivor of 15 years in the newspaper business. As a reporter and editor, her posts have included such exotic locales as her hometown of Fayetteville, Robeson County, Wilmington, Raleigh and Fort Worth, Texas.
Longtime NPR correspondent Frank Stasio was named permanent host of The State of Things in June 2006. A native of Buffalo, Frank has been in radio since the age of 19. He began his public radio career at WOI in Ames, Iowa, where he was a magazine show anchor and the station's News Director.