When Parasite became the first non-English language film to win the Academy Award for best picture this year, the spirit of Chapel Hill’s VisArt Video hovered inside the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles like a house ghost at Hogwarts.
For the first time in the almost two years since she began dating Alex Honnold, the most accomplished free solo climber in the world, she allows herself to think about all the things that could go wrong on El Capitan the next day — when Honnold would attempt to become the first person to climb Yosemite’s monolith with no ropes or safety gear.
When Katie Ziglar believes in the power of an idea or a project, it persists — across the decades, across continents, through the halls of the Smithsonian, in the mansions of maharajas, over the demolition of gender barriers and through her polite-but-persistent, lifelong takedown of the phrase, “That can’t be done.”
As writer Bekah Brunstetter shows throughout her funny and moving play, The Cake, reconciling traditional roots with progressive values in a polarized world is wrenching work. And while no one should expect to abandon the things that sustain her — be it waffle fries, her faith or the person who has captured her heart — what should be expected, the play shows, is conversation, with a generous dash of understanding and more than a pinch of heart.
They elbow one another for space in his mind: young black teenagers and their worried mothers, old white supremacists and their nervous wives, skeptical lawyers, gravelly voiced journalists and a slave who mailed himself to freedom inside a box.
Mike Wiley not only plays them all on stage — often more than two dozen characters in a single performance, with no costume changes and few props — the documentary theater actor and playwright rehearses himself to sleep at night with their dialogue, their humanity and inhumanity, strumming through his head.
Thirty years after he started email at UNC, Paul Jones asks for your forgiveness — and your help in killing it. It’s not the first time he’s chased something impossible.
Mary Pope Osborne’s home in Goshen, Conn., looks like a serene place; its many windows open to a lake breeze in the summer and are…
Continue reading → ‘Dear Mary: Your book almost made me smart’
Even 12- and 13-year-olds, often boys, will sheepishly make their way to Mary Pope Osborne at a signing table, mumbling and apologetic for their presence among young kids. She is swept up by their “sweetness and their sincerity.”
“I love them,” Osborne said in a whisper. “I feel like I’ve been given this extraordinary lesson. Their vulnerability — and their parent’s vulnerability, because they are so excited for their child — is all over their faces. Over and over, it breaks my heart. I have tons of these moments, and they add up, you know? And I go, ‘Mary, you’re pretty lucky, you know that?’ ”
Once just a campus celebrity, now a household name: Anoop Desai may not have won “American Idol,” but his rise to pop-culture fame is far…
Continue reading → The Sixth Most-Watched Person on Television
Published in Carolina Alumni Review, January/February 2005 Tim Duffy '91 (MA) treasures the times he stood with friends in the cheese line, waiting with them…
A conversation with the irreverent—and irrepressible—Dan Neil, Pulitzer Prize-winning car critic for the Los Angeles Times. published December 2004 NC State magazine If you didn’t know…
If you make it on Broadway, do you have an obligation to care about the dying farming town where your father grew up? William Ivey…
Can a new doctor’s office breathe life back into a dying town? A visiting professor in the College of Design and a group of NC…
You really want a guy like Billy Crudup to be a star the way a Tom Cruise or a Brad Pitt is. You want the juiciest piece of Crudup trivia on a fan Web site dedicated to him to be more than just the fact that he once played Schroeder in a Lab! Theatre production of "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown." You want lunchboxes with his face on them. More segments about him on "Entertainment Tonight."
Carl Kasell November-December 2001 After 51 years of playing the straight newsman, National Public Radio's Carl Kasell '56 is tuning in his inner ham. The…
You may have been wondering what to do after medical school--or perhaps you haven’t had the time to even think about it. In any case,…
She kept the framed posters, the wedding album, the CDs, the videotaped performances, hidden in her closet for two-and-a-half years. Now it all lies tumbling…
Beth McNichol 