The State of Things

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.

In 2010, when Republicans won control of the state House and Senate, they radically redrew voting districts in favor of their own party.  In previous elections, Democrats have done the same.  Now, there's a bipartisan effort in the state House of Representatives to reform the redistricting process.

North Carolina Central University became the first university in the state to offer a jazz degree in 1977. The university has since been a force on a state and national level in keeping the jazz scene alive.

The university is now throwing its 23rd annual Jazz Festival this week. Ira Wiggins, director of their jazz department, founded the festival in 1990 with hopes of creating a space for students to meet and learn from seasoned jazz musicians. This year the festival features jazz artists Carl Allen and Benny Golson. Benny Golson is a world-renowned saxophonist, composer, and producers.  Ira Wiggins and Benny Golson join Host Frank Stasio to talk about the state of jazz education today, and give us a sneak peek of the festival.