The Story on WUNC

Chris Dancy keeps metrics on himself for every moment of every day.

He knows the number of steps he travels in a day, his average heart rate, and the amount of food he’s eaten. The “Quantified Man,” says keeping statistics makes him a better employee and it’s in the future of everyone’s work.

Host Dick Gordon of The Story speaks with David Cooper, the part-sleuth, part-mechanic who restored a rare 1937 Delage Aerosport Coupe.

There were only 12 ever built in the 1930’s in France.They were made by hand, and the interior was handpicked by the few customers.

Cooper says that finding the oversize chrome fenders and original chassis meant researching the story of Millicent Rogers, the American heiress who owned the car and outlined her specifications with her lipstick.

When philanthropist Melinda Gates travels the world, she looks for opportunities to have personal conversations with women. And she listens: about children’s health, about parenting, and about infectious diseases.

On April 16, 2007, Sue Gardner was following the news of the Virginia Tech shooting on every major web site she could find. The one where she learned the most was not a news site – it was the free encyclopedia Wikipedia. The content, she says, was more comprehensive.

It was a Sunday night early last January, and Benji Smith and Emily Lau were celebrating their honeymoon aboard the Costa Concordia cruise ship.

They were traveling near Tuscany when it happened: The ship scraped a rock that tore through its hull, flooding its engine room, and sending the ship tilting onto its side. More than 4,000 people were on board.

In the weeks after the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School this past December, President Obama began talking about tightening gun control – and firearm sales boomed. Larry Hyatt runs Hyatt Guns in Charlotte, N.C., and he says that he’s seeing a growing demand for "high capacity" guns and that he’s selling as much as he would over Christmas. He stocks 7,000 guns in his store, making it one of the biggest in the country. He tells host Dick Gordon about the one thing he’d like to see changed in Washington.

Andrew Chin, a.k.a. Brushy One-String, had a vision as a child where he was playing a guitar with just one string. Since then, he’s crafted a unique style playing on one string, blending in his percussive style and utterly original voice.

As the details about three rescued women in Cleveland, Ohio unfolds, we offer a story from contributor Scott Carrier. He lived in Salt Lake City when 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart was abducted and then lived basically in plain sight for months. He says that we can be blind to what is right in front of us.

Alan Smith spent 14 years teaching philosophy and literature to violent criminals in a prison in England until he realized he was changing, slowly "becoming more of the prison than I wanted to be," and had to walk away.