Well Said transcripts

Well Said: WXYC and the first internet simulcast

Host:That’s a radio station in Basel, Switzerland, talking in 1994 about the first radio station in the world to rebroadcast its signal online. They’re talking about WXYC, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s student radio station.

Today, we stream nearly everything online —  TV shows, movies, music. But something that seems so normal now was once just an idea in the head of a WXYC student DJ.

Michael Shoffner:I just went by Mike S. I’m not really super creative. Somebody started calling me that, so I just stayed with that.

Host:Welcome to Well Said, Carolina’s official storytelling podcast. Mike S is Michael Shoffner. Today, he’s a software architect at RENCI, the Renaissance Computing Institute at Carolina. He’s also an adjunct professor in the UNC School of Information and Library Science. Twenty-five years ago, he was a DJ at WXYC, and was working with Paul Jones in the School of Information and Library Science on an early-internet project. On this episode, Michael and Paul tell the story of how they made history a quarter-century ago.

Clinical professor Paul Jones has been at Carolina for 42 years. In 1994, he was doing what he does now — leading ibilio.org. It was known as Sunsite.UNC.edu back then. Paul calls that project a “collection of collections” on the internet. The site’s an online public library with freely available software and information, but in 1994, ibiblio and the internet looked very different.

Paul Jones:The coming of the World Wide Web set a different expectation about how the Internet would be used. Internet was mostly about file sharing whether those files were email whether they were software or whether they were audio. The earliest attempt to do some kind of radio was done by Carl Malamud in something called Internet Talk Radio. Carl would interview people in a show called Geek of the Week. Every week he would call up someone who was making the Internet happen.

Host:Those interviews were really low-quality audio files, and they were sent in a link by email with instructions on how to access them online only. The second attempt at online radio was the Mbone, short for multicast backbone, but it required complicated networking tunnels to be set-up, so it was really only for special purposes, not for everyday use. Then came the idea of video conferencing.

Jones:Conferencing was mostly done with some heavy lifting on the network side, but there was a lightweight kind of client-based program that could run on a PC or a Mac from Cornell called CU-SeeMe, CU standing for Cornell University, and you could have eight or ten people with little boxes of video if they didn’t move a lot. If they moved a lot, they looked like they were cubic, or they looked like they were slow-motion underwater. We called them jello vision and Picasso vision. It’s the two ways that video could break.

Host: But audio was much easier to compress than video, meaning it could be streamed without impacting the network so much that it became distorted, so they started using CU-SeeMe for audio instead. In comes Michael, the WXYC DJ who worked on ibiblio.

Jones:And we were kind of playing around with it and Michael Shoffner came in and said, “Why don’t we just like, play the radio,” because we were conferencing with somebody and the radio was in the background. He went, “If you got rid of that person, this would really sound good. We could broadcast radio everywhere.”

Host:With one simple question, ibiblio and WXYC stepped into uncharted territory. Michael, Paul and ibiblio’s director of multimedia research David McConville envisioned something called simulcasting: to stream the same thing in two different places. This wasn’t uncommon for radio stations to pull off in the ‘90s. Only this was an internet simulcast, something no one had done before. But there were two barriers — one technical, one legal. So, while David was adjusting CU-SeeMe’s code, someone else was trying to figure out if the whole thing was even legal.

Shoffner:Meanwhile I’m sitting there going, “If we thought of this somebody else is working on it.” In my mind, the clock is ticking, and I’m just pacing around like this, ‘Come on, guys,’ like the countdown timer in some movie or something. Tick tick tick. Those threads went along for a bit. The SunSITE folks got CU-SeeMe to work. A little after that, we got a f green light from the legal side. Well, you never know for sure, but we were really pretty certain that we were not going to run afoul of the FCC or any other rights agencies.

Host:So, after Paul and the ibiblio team recoded CU-SeeMe, it was time to make the dream a reality. Remember, though. This was in 1994, so the set-up wasn’t glamorous.

Shoffner:From the control room at the radio station to CU-SeeMe was not through ethernet or some network because there was no network here like that. What we did was I borrowed my younger sister’s little boombox that was, you know, just kind of a junker boombox she had. So, I took that thing and we set that up down at SunSite. I bought an adapter to put into David’s Mac, his workstation he worked at every day, so he plugged that adapter in there and then the boombox went to the adapter, and that was where the signal came from. Now, of course years later they replaced that feed with a real feed off the control room board and whatnot, but it was really a shoestring operation.

Host:A shoestring operation, but it made history. Nov. 7, 1994, the first radio broadcast ever streamed to the internet in the world .

Shoffner:It couldn’t have been much of a smaller I don’t want to say splash exactly, but it was just …

Host:He says this event went under the radar. If something this revolutionary were to happen today, the splash would be much bigger. But people didn’t really understand the internet back then the way they do now, so even when he did explain it to people, they didn’t really get it. Twenty-five years later, he’s not surprised that their once crazy idea is the new normal.

Shoffner:I think that it was a milestone for internet culture and just sort of media and radio and whatnot combined. It at least showed that we could do this sort of thing, that it was possible to do it. And I think that that opened up a lot of possibilities for people for media distribution especially. Now of course all music’s distributed via big services, streaming services or digitally in some way. It was a harbinger of this thing in a good way. I think it was I just think it was kind of a milestone for that.

Host:And Paul says it was a big milestone, but he didn’t really expect the idea to impact the music business the way it has.

Jones:One of the things that new technologies do sometimes is they knock the middle out, so it enabled a lot of amateurs to do a lot of work, which is kind of cool. More regional bands can be found on Spotify or Reverbnation than they ever could have hoped to have been found earlier. And very sophisticated people can also make a lot of money, so people can kind of eke by or just get some little bit, but the middle is a really hard space to play. The internet has helped somehow like if you are a zydeco band, for example, in Wisconsin, you can create an audience in Montana through this which you never would have been able to do in the radio days, or even in record distribution days.

Host:Today, you stream lots of things. Movies, TV shows, music. You’re probably streaming this podcast right now. You can thank Paul and Michael and WXYC and ibiblio for helping make that possible.

Want to learn more about ibiblio, the public’s library and digital archive? You can do that at its website, ibiblio.org. You can also learn more about the Renaissance Computing Institute where Michael works now at its website, RENCI.org.

Do you have an idea for an upcoming episode of Well Said? Please tell us. Tweet us at UNC or email us at WellSaid@UNC.edu. You can find Well Said wherever you get podcasts, so we hope you’ll subscribe and leave us a review. Thank you for listening to this episode of Well Said. See you next week.

Well Said: Learning and teaching investigative reporting

Nikole Hannah-Jones:I feel like my whole career and, in some ways, my whole life has been geared toward this moment. I’ve been obsessed with the year 1619 since I was in high school.

Host:That’s Nikole Hannah-Jones. She’s a 2003 master’s graduate of the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media. Today, she’s a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine where she launched the 1619 Project, which examines the 400^th anniversary of the first African slaves who arrived in an English-speaking colony in the Americas.

Hannah-Jones:Now, I found myself as the anniversary was approaching being at the New York Times and really understanding the power of that form to assess the legacy of slavery. I decided probably in December that I was going to pitch the project. I pitched it, and immediately Jake Silverstein, the editor and chief at the magazine, felt the passion and believed in it and said yes.

Host:Welcome to Well Said, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s official storytelling podcast. On today’s episode, Nikole will explain how Carolina helped prepare her for a career in investigative journalism and why she’s returning to Carolina to train more journalists of color.

Nikole’s 1619 Project debuted on August 14. It’s an interactive publication featuring essays, poems, short fiction, a photo essay and a multi-episode audio series aimed at re-examining the legacy of slavery in the United States.

Hannah-Jones:What the project is trying to argue is that the institution of slavery and the legacy of that slavery is one of the foundational elements of modern America. It’s a history and a legacy that’s been largely marginalized, and because of that we can’t really understand who we are. We can’t understand why things are like they are in the country until we actually grapple with the fact that slavery is at our foundations. Slavery and the anti-black racism that developed to support slavery is in almost every American institution. It’s in our culture. It’s in our politics. We really hoped that this would be an opportunity to really grapple with that legacy and hopefully give us a road map to do something different. I believe strongly in the power of truth. I don’t think that you can fix anything if you’re not honest about what the causes are. Having a project that tries to really tell — as we say in the words of John Hope Franklin — the unvarnished truth about our country means that that’s what can allow you to finally move forward, but as long as you’re in denial about what has actually caused the problems, how can you possibly fix them? So, we hope that the impact is really allowing us to confront who we are and then in that confrontation make a different decision. In that confrontation with history, it allows us to have the types of conversations that we should be having, but more importantly, I hope that it will allow us to move past conversations to actually allow us to do something to address the harm.

Host:Nikole led a tremendous amount of research, investigation and fact-checking for this project. Many of those skills she learned at Carolina, where she earned her master’s degree in journalism.

Hannah-Jones:I was a history and African American studies major, who wanted to be a journalist but didn’t know a lot of the basic tenets of journalism. I didn’t know AP style, interviewing and all of these types of skills. We sometimes forget that journalism is actually a trade, and you have to learn the skills of your trade. This place gave me the foundation in a short period of time that I needed to actually transition from a way of writing about history and not being a professional journalist into being able to graduate and becoming a professional journalist. I don’t think I would’ve gotten as far in my career without that really strong foundation, but it also was giving you the more analytical aspects of journalism, teaching you about media law, teaching you about beautiful writing, and that was really important to me as well because, ultimately, I’m an investigative reporter, but I’m also a narrative writer. We all know that you can do the most amazing investigation, but if it’s boring, nobody’s going to read it, so I think this was a place that was really able to wed those two things together. I think you see what I learned here in my work every day.

Host:To help train other journalists like her, Nikole teamed up with other journalists in 2016 to found the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting. The organization trains and mentors journalists of color to learn how to be investigative reporters.

Hannah-Jones:It’s important because newsrooms represent the same racial hierarchies that we see in society, so the more important the work, the more prominent the positions, the less diverse they are, and myself and the other founders strongly believed that you are missing a lot of stories that should be told if you don’t have investigative reporting that represents the way that our population looks. For years, we’ve heard the same excuses as to why we can’t diversify investigative reporting. People always say there’s not enough qualified journalists of color, and we just got tired of waiting for other organizations to fix it and decided we would train journalists ourselves. Then you couldn’t use that excuse anymore.

Host:The society offers investigative reporting workshops throughout the country and is developing a yearlong fellowship program in New York City. Workshops cover the use of advanced technology, interviewing techniques as well as data-gathering and fact-checking resources. They also hone story pitching, project management and narrative storytelling skills. In August, the national organization moved its headquarters to Carolina’s Hussman School.

Hannah-Jones:We were so excited to come to Carolina because Carolina’s the best journalism program in the country. It would be a place where we would have students who were in the program but also be able to get the support that we need to run the organization and produce really high-quality training for journalists all across the country, and for me personally, I really, really thought it was important that the organization be in the South. This is the ancestral home for black Americans. This is a place where we really could use the type of investigative reporting that we’re trying to train journalists to do, and it was just kind of the perfect marriage of goals. We know that Dean King’s goals around these issues are very similar to mine, so we knew that we would get the support we needed. We hope that faculty and students will use us as a resource but also that we’ll be able to use them as a resource. We see it really as a collaborative relationship between the two organizations.

Host:That collaborative relationship officially kicks off on Nov. 16. During a panel discussion at the Hussman School, Nikole and the other co-founders will talk about their careers and share tips with young journalists about forging their own paths.

Hannah-Jones:It’s going to be amazing. I think all of us want to believe that we’re can have an impact, but you never know what that impact is going to be. When I was a first-year master’s student at Carolina, I certainly never thought that I would one day go on to create this organization and that the organization would come back home, so I’m really looking forward to it. I hope that we will serve as an inspiration for students. The most important things that the Ida B. Wells Society does is it gives people living examples of journalists of color who are working at the highest levels of their profession and are doing investigative reporting, and that’s so important to see those examples. I didn’t see that myself. I hope that us being here can also be transformative for students and help them see their possibilities in a way they hadn’t seen before. Personally, I love engaging with students, and I’m just very excited for it.

Host:This event also gives Nikole a chance to come back to Chapel Hill.

Hannah-Jones:I had a great time at Carolina. I had amazing professors that some of them I still speak with. I met some of my best friends. My daughter’s godmother I met on the bus ride when we came to interview for the Park Fellows. We became best friends, and she’s my daughter’s godmother. I just found it was an incredibly supportive environment for my learning. It gave me exactly what I came here to get, which were the skills to be a journalist and just being a part of the campus. I have so many fond memories. This is a place that’s very near and dear to my heart.

Host:That event on Nov. 16 is called Making a Mark: The 1619 Project, Investigative Journalism and the Caliber of Reporting Through Diverse Voices. It’s at 10:30 a.m. in Carroll Hall, the home of the Hussman School of Journalism and Media. The event’s free, and you can register on the school’s website, Hussman.UNC.edu.

If you’ve got a story idea, please share it with us on Twitter at UNC, or email us at WellSaid@UNC.edu. You can find Well Said wherever you get podcasts, so we hope you’ll subscribe and leave us a review. Thanks for listening to this episode of Well Said. See you next week.

Well Said: The art of hip-hop

Mark Katz: And when you go in, there are probably two things that you immediately notice. One is that it’s dominated by turntables. But then probably what else would also will catch your eye are two murals on either side of the room. So, it’s a unique room on campus. There aren’t that I can’t think of any other offices or spaces I’ve gone to that have graffiti on them that was commissioned.

Host: Welcome to Well Said, the official podcast from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Today we’re traveling to the Beat Lab with Mark Katz, professor of music. Mark cleared out an old storage room to create a uniquely inspiring space as a place to teach Carolina students about a more modern form of music.

When you walk into the Beat Making Lab in Hill Hall, you’ll find six sets of turntables, recorders, CD players, and controllers ready for students to experiment with. What’s most stunning is the art on the walls, inspiring a different kind of educational environment.

Katz: One is a giant mural of our mascot Rameses as a deejay scratching their record with lightning bolts shooting out of the record. That was created by a local graffiti artist Sean Kernik. And then the other side, there’s a kind of complementary mural that looks like strands of DNA, and I commissioned that from an alum who goes by the name of Saba Tage – a graduate of the art department – and she created this amazing image of DNA, the double helix of DNA, with the letters B-E-A-T strewn about, and then the motto is “The beat is the DNA.” And I asked her to create something with the theme that “the beat is the DNA of all music.”

Host: Mark teaches several classes in the Beat Making Lab, where students learn about hip hop, rap, the art of deejaying, and even dance. But rap hasn’t always been Mark’s interest.

Katz: So, to people that I know from high school and people I knew when I was growing up it’s very unlikely that I’m now doing hip-hop because that’s not how they knew me when I was in school. I was interested in classical music. I was interested in rock. I liked Led Zeppelin, I liked the blues, but I was a classical music kid. I played violin. My favorite composers were and still are Brahms and Schubert. But I remember when hip hop started to become popular and started to gain national attention.

Host: But when Mark was a teenager, he got his first taste of a different kind of sound.

Katz: The sound of scratching I first heard on the song Rockit by Herbie Hancock.

And he brought in this amazing DJ, Grand Mixer DST, now known as DXT, to this scratching. I just remember loving that sound when I was 13, it just sounded so crisp, so novel. I don’t know that I would analyze it like this, but part of what I like is that it’s kind transgressive – it scratches the surface of a record which is not meant to be scratched.

Host: In the late ’90s and early 2000s, Mark heard scratching come back around in pop and rock songs, and it sparked a new educational passion.

Katz: It reminded me how much I love that sound, and I decided that I wanted to write about it. Because what I realized is – I spent a lot of time thinking about music technology, and how people use music technology – is that what deejays were doing is that they were transforming a technology for sound reproduction into a musical instrument for sound creation. So, I just thought that was fascinating and transgressive and interesting.

Host: Mark started researching the technology DJ’s were using, and quickly discovered the craft was about much more than creating music. There is an entire culture surrounding it.

Katz: I learned that there are these things called battles, where deejays just on their own without rappers, or break dancers, B-Boys B-Girls would compete against each other and would create these scratch routines to see who could be the best. Some I went and this battle, which blew me away. I went into this dark room, there is a guy in front of two turntables wildly manipulating the records, and people were shouting and cheering and saying “ooh” and “ahh,” and it was this language that I didn’t understand, because sometimes the DJ would do something and everyone would react as if it was a terrible insult to his rival…and these were all men…and I had no idea what was going on. I was also the only one taking notes at this event, and I found out that there was a whole language, too, that’s called “turntablism.”

And people would manipulate lyrics on songs and use that as a proxy to insult their rivals. So, there is this incredible dissing that was going on, and once I became attuned to it I realized just how complex this form of musical interaction was.

Katz: I think the typical image that people have of deejays is usually a white man with a pair of headphones on, one earpiece off and one hand cupped to one of the sides of the headphones pumping his fist in the air, and not doing much more than that. So, people see that and wonder what exactly do DJs do. Do they just dance around while music is playing? And some of them do and make huge amounts of money doing it. But the thing that was so surprising to me…and I think it’s surprising to people when I talk to them about deejaying, in particular, is this form of DJing called turntablism is how much skill is involved. So that’s part of my job, I feel is to demonstrate to others who probably have a low opinion of – particularly DJing but also hip hop and in general and a lot of popular music in general – is just how much skill creativity and dedication is involved in making that music.

Host: In 2011, Mark applied for an Innovation Grant from Carolina’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities to teach students about the musical, technological, and cultural sides of deejaying.

Katz: I proposed a project in which I would create a new form of music class that would combine traditional instruction in music-making, in music history. But would do that in collaboration with musical professionals in the community, not just as guests but as co-teachers. So, in fact, I started in 2011 teaching a class called Beat Making Lab with a local producer whose professional name is Apple Juice Kid, and it was a very popular class. Everyone interested in making beats and hip hop seemed to want to get into that class and I realized there was this huge demand for hip hop instruction that students weren’t getting.

Host: Many students who have enrolled in Mark’s Beat Making Lab class and several others, such as Art and Culture of the DJ and Rock Lab, aren’t just learning the technical side of making music or scratching records. Instead, they combine new music-making skills with a deeper understanding of the culture Mark has dedicated his research to.

Katz: So, when I talk with people and tell them that I study deejaying or I run this international hip hop exchange program, they look at me and say something like, “really? You?” Or “you don’t look like you’re into hip hop,” and I’m always tempted – though I never do – ask, “So what should I look like?”

But what I do look like is a nerdy white professor – a middle-aged professor. So, I understand why I’m not…my picture isn’t in the dictionary next to hip hop. And I don’t pretend that that race doesn’t matter, and that color doesn’t matter. I’m not colorblind in terms of race, and I think it’s very important that I acknowledge that hip hop is a tradition, culture that came out of African American History and is deeply indebted to people of color; not just African Americans but Latinx culture. So, that’s something that I think is very important for me to acknowledge and respect and support. So, that’s also why it’s very important for me in the classroom not simply to be the only one who is talking about hip hop, but to bring artists in. And so that students will see a wide variety of professionals – most of them, people of color – talking to them as experts and that I’m not just the mouthpiece for hip hop. I don’t want to pretend that I can speak for hip hop myself.

Host: Mark teaches about the historical and cultural significance of hip-hop and DJing, but also challenges students to think about its evolution.

Katz: For example, Art and Culture of the DJ, which is one that I frequently teach, it’s quite a bit about the history of deejaying. It’s a study of music history through the figure of the DJ. It’s a study of the impact of musical technology on society, on culture. It’s also a study of club culture and all of the challenges and controversies around that. We talk a lot about identity, we talk a lot about queer identity because queer people – particularly queer people of color – created so much of the dance music that people love across the world.

In addition to that, they create music through their laptops. I have them create playlists, I have them create sets. They go into the lab and they learn how to do some basic scratching, they learn to do some basic mixing. Some students have become DJ’s after taking my class and have become professional DJ’s. Most people don’t aspire to that but. It’s possible that for students to do that some of the other classes take a different approach. For example, Rap Lab is largely a performance class so they will write rap songs, write rhymes every week, they will get into a cipher – which is a circle formation and improvise and work with each other. That is very intensively practical in terms of making music.

Host: The unique projects Mark assigns in his classes attract all types of Carolina students each semester. Mark says that many who enroll don’t even call themselves musicians.

Katz: One thing that really struck me is on the very first day when we were doing introductions, we brought all the students together, and one student said in response to the question which I posed to everyone – what does hip hop mean to you? He said “hip hop is my pedagogy. Hip hop is how I learn and if it weren’t for hip-hop, I’m not sure where I would be.”

And for him and a lot of other students. Hip hop is much more than just music that they like to listen to – it is part of their identity, it’s part of their culture. So, the students really, really connected to these classes. Some of them had we’re not deeply connected to hip hop already, some were, but they all came out of this having learned a huge amount both about hip hop but about themselves in terms of what it means to create art that expresses themselves – not playing other people’s music but creating their own music – or dancing and several of them said it was life-changing. I mean it wasn’t their expectation was that they were going to learn some nice moves, or they were going to make some cool beats, but they came away with a deep appreciation of the culture but also a way of understanding the power of art.

Host: Mark has also worked to bring his classes around the globe, thanks to professional DJ’s who have taught students at Carolina.

Katz: So one thing that that has been an important part of my career is that once I created the Beat Making Lab as a class I collaborated with two artists – Apple Juice Kid and Pierce Freelon – to create what was called Beat Making Lab, but it was an international workshop instead of course at UNC. And the two of them went around the world teaching beat making — or music composition with electronic equipment — in places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Fiji, Ethiopia, Panama, and it became a really vibrant and successful way of going into communities collaborating with local young people to create music, then donating equipment to the local communities so that they can continue to make music.

Host: Ok, so my last question is, what is your DJ name?

Katz: OK. So, I’ll have to tell you this story [laughs] so I do have a DJ name. Traditionally DJs don’t come up with their own names. It’s considered the most authentic way to get a name is for it to be bestowed upon you, or for it to just manifest itself. So anyway, DJ name came about. I think…14 years ago and I remember the incident because I was holding my daughter who was a baby, and she was looking at me, and she was flailing her arms around me at my face, and my wife was standing there and she said, “Anna don’t scratch daddy!” And then somehow you know there’s a light bulb that went off the clouds parted, and I realized that my DJ name was Scratch Daddy. And so that is my DJ name.

Host: Thanks so much for listening to this episode of Well Said. While you won’t be able to catch a performance by Scratch Daddy, you can learn more about Mark’s courses at music.unc.edu.

Do you have an idea for an episode of Well Said? Send us a tweet @UNC, or shoot us an email at wellsaid@unc.edu. You can find Well Said wherever you get podcasts, so we hope you’ll subscribe and leave us a review. See you next week.

Well Said: It's OK to have seconds

Andrew Hardaway:My favorite Thanksgiving tradition? Oh, it’s got to be football. You know, sitting down with family and friends and watching football. Maybe enjoying a beer and some leftovers or some pies. It’s a cliché, but I love it.

Host:Thanksgiving is all about football, family and food. Lots and lots of food.

Hardaway:My favorite thing to eat is probably mashed potatoes, specifically my mom’s mashed potatoes. See look, we’ve already transitioned into food. This is going to be a perfect segue.

Host:A perfect segue because Andrew Hardaway researches how food interacts with the brain at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine as a research assistant professor in the department of pharmacology.

Welcome to Well Said, Carolina’s official storytelling podcast. On today’s episode, Andrew will explain the differences between binge eating and the overeating we all might do on Thanksgiving, so don’t worry about loosening your belts on that day. But, first, he’ll define comfort food.

Hardaway:I would say a comfort food is something that when you eat it, you get some other, greater, subjective feeling about it. It evokes some feeling of satisfaction or nostalgia that goes along with it in addition to it just tasting good. It’s probably going to taste good too, but how much sugar, how much fat it has, it’s probably less important. I associate fried chicken and mashed potatoes with my mom, right? A novel food that you ate for the first time is not going to have that. The memories that are most evocative to me are usually associated with music, smells or food, so they have these sensory components. All of these things come together with particular foods to create a comfort food.

Host:But there’s a difference between overeating a comfort food on Thanksgiving and a binge eating disorder.

Hardaway:The really objective ways to operationalize binge eating is that it’s a large amount of food consumed within a short amount of time. Those are the objective components: a lot of food, short amount of time. For people who have binge eating disorder, there’s also these subjective components as well. For people who have a binge eating disorder or engage in binge eating, they also had this sense of loss of control, like they literally cannot stop eating. You can’t snap them out of it when they’ve got a whole bag of Doritos or whatever it is that they’re binge eating, and Thanksgiving is this time where we naturally let up on the brakes a little bit, and we allow that to happen. But there’s a ritual behind it. There’s a socialization behind it, and that’s really different from doing this alone at your house with no one else around and being nonresponsive and experiencing a loss of control.

Host:At Carolina, Andrew conducts his research out of a lab led by Thomas Kash of the School of Medicine.

Hardaway:Tom Kash is my mentor and the principal investigator of the lab where I work now. He is in the Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies and the department of pharmacology. Most of the Kash Lab focuses on neural circuits of alcohol use disorders and how specific neural circuits in the brain contribute to specific components of alcohol abuse and alcohol use disorders. This fits in in that in terms of comparing food intake to different types of drugs of abuse or alcohol, there’s actually a lot of shared neural circuitry between those two in terms of how they contribute to the consumption of those, whether it’s alcohol or whether it’s tasty food, whether it’s kale salad or whether it’s a drug of abuse, like cocaine or opioids. There’s actually a lot of shared neural circuitry between the two.

Host:Earlier this year, Andrew published a research paper about what’s happening in brains when a large amount of food is consumed in a short amount of time — like say, over a holiday meal, for example. He found something interesting happening in the amygdala — the area of the brain associated with memory, decision-making and emotional responses. He found that cells in this area were highly activated after a period of binge eating. These cells were generating a peptide — or a short chain of amino acids — similar to those targeted by hard drugs of abuse, like opioids.

Hardaway:So, then we started digging into more of the specific cells in the central amygdala, and we found a novel cell population in the central amygdala. In the central amygdala, there are these cells that highly express this peptide called Prepronociceptin, and this is an opioid-like nerve peptide. It’s been understudied and only kind of recently discovered relative to these other very well-known opioid-like peptides. And we got interested in that peptide because some earlier studies had shown that Nociceptin can also evoke the same type of voracious feeding pattern, so that suggested to us that there’s some kind of synergy here perhaps between cells in the CEA that express Nociceptin and how Nociceptin in the peptide actually works to promote feeding behavior.

Host:What Andrew found is that tasty food activates Prepronociceptin cells in the central amygdala. He found a correlation, that they’re activated during this process. But, that doesn’t mean that they’re actually contributing to it. To determine that, he took a more casual approach to his experiment. He manipulated the amount of time there was access specifically to the high-calorie, tasty food.  And, he used neural circuit tools at Carolina to analyze the brain activity when these cells were present and when they weren’t.

Hardaway:We did this acutely, so just short-term access to the palatable food, and then we did this over the long term, too, so, those were two, kind of, causal methods we showed that not only are they activated, but they actually contribute to the palatable food consumption process itself. The key takeaways from this research is that these cells in the central amygdala are critical for driving hedonic food consumption.

Host:And, understanding how the brain is involved in this process can help develop medications and therapies for people with food disorders.

Hardaway:There are ways that you can treat these people. First, I’ll speak to people with binge eating disorders. They can be treated with behavioral therapies, and those work pretty well. Some people respond much better to behavioral therapy in conjunction with pharmacological therapy. And, there are some out there, but they don’t work for all people. You might need to employ a cocktail of approaches to treat these people better. For people with obesity, they might want to lose weight. They might not. It might be critical for those people to lose enough weight, so they can control their Type 2 diabetes symptoms. For those people, it’s very difficult to just flip a switch in their brain and change the behaviors, and they just need help initially treating those symptoms of diabetes, and obesity also increases the risk for a number of other conditions, especially cardiac conditions. For these people, they need another tool in the toolbox if they choose to use it, and that’s what we’re going to provide.

Host:Andrew’s research can apply to anyone when they sit down for their Thanksgiving meal. And even when they go back for seconds.

Hardaway:The other part that is more of like the human experience element that I think about a lot, and that is the simple notion of comfort foods. A couple of years ago when I gave a talk, I started my talk — I always like to start my talks with a picture of something really tasty because I find that engages people — but I started mine with a picture of my mom, and she had just cooked some fried chicken. That’s one of my comfort foods, and I started with that because the comfort food idea is that we suffuse foods with emotional value and so, not surprisingly, what my work is showing and what other people have shown in humans and other species is that the amygdala, which is the brain’s emotional center, is important for this process of suffusing food with emotional value. At Thanksgiving, when you sit down and you think about your favorite food, think about how your amygdala is probably being activated in that moment.

Host:While we’re all sitting down for Thanksgiving, Andrew will actually be in the process of moving. He is starting a new position as an assistant professor at the University of Alabama Birmingham’s department of psychiatry, where he’ll continue to research what’s going on in our brains when we eat. In addition to all of the boxes, books and stuff he’ll take with him to Birmingham, Andrew will also take the tools and skills he learned here at Carolina.

Hardaway:It’s been a really amazing experience both from a basic science perspective of having all these wonderful tools at my disposal to do the research, but then having it being informed by a translational perspective has been so critical to this work. The UNC Center of Excellence for Eating Disorders here at UNC has been critical in this work and providing me with a translational mindset. I don’t think I could’ve talked to you here today unless I had really spent a lot of time with these people and understood eating disorders better. I think that could’ve have happened really anywhere else, so I’m pretty grateful for this environment and specifically that interaction for this work.

Host:What’s your comfort food? What will you be getting a second or third helping of on Thanksgiving? Share with us on Twitter at UNC, or send us an email at WellSaid@UNC.edu. We’d love to hear from you and other thoughts and ideas you might have for us. You can find Well Said wherever you listen to podcasts, so we hope you’ll subscribe and leave us a review. Thanks for listening to this episode. See you next week.

Well Said: This is your brain on stress

Anthony Zannas: It’s a normal reaction. It’s a very conserved response. We see it pretty much in all organisms — even in single-celled organisms. It’s an inevitable part of life. Whenever we can prevent what we call excessive or chronic and persistent stress, then we should, but in many cases, it’s not possible to avoid it. What we want to do is to teach the individuals how to best deal with it.

Host:That’s right. Everyone gets stressed. Kids, traffic, jobs. Whatever it is we all have stressors. For many students, one of those stressors are exams. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, final exams begin Dec. 6.

Welcome to Well Said, Carolina’s official storytelling podcast. On today’s episode, we’re talking about stress with Anthony Zannas. He’s an assistant professor in the department of psychiatry in the School of Medicine, and he studies how our genes interact with stressors and what that means for our physical health.

Zannas: In many cases, it is a very good response for survival. You know, it’s a response that you need to survive when your life is threatened. You need to have this hyperarousal and take immediate action. Now, one difficulty that we have to face is that we have this conserved mechanism in terms of how we respond to stress, but our life is not on a day-to-day basis threatened. But, we get this constant chronic low-level stress, which can become problematic. No one can escape from it. We have to learn ways to deal with it.

Host:Problematic because stress negatively affects our health — from low-level stressors to long-term burnout.

Zannas:There are very profound changes including increase in blood pressure, increase in heart rate, and this is part of the adrenaline response. Adrenaline goes high, or another kind of similar chemical called noradrenaline. There are also many hormonal changes at the time of stress. One very well-known hormone that we know increases after stress is called cortisol. And this we can see in the blood of individuals that are exposed to stress, but also in many other parts of the body.  Sometimes in the short-term, we see this hyperactivity, high levels of cortisol, high blood pressure, high heart rate, but in the long run, many times what you’ve seen individuals that have been exposed to chronic stress, especially, is a decreased response to stress. We can think of it as burnout of the stress system, so those individuals cannot respond any more to stress.

Host: Cortisol is a steroid hormone that is crucial to maintaining health and balance in the body. Think of cortisol as the body’s built-in alarm system. It’s the fight-or-flight hormone, which is great for life-or-death situations but not so great when worried about work or an exam.

Zannas: Cortisol goes up when we’re exposed to stress. It’s a very acute response immediately after exposure to stress. Within a few minutes, we can detect this increase in cortisol in the blood. We see very different responses across individuals, so some will have a much higher increase in cortisol. Some will have less. Some will have even no increase in cortisol. A big part of that is how the brain interprets the exposure to stress because the whole cascade that leads to increase in cortisol starts at the level of the brain, so there’s something detected in the brain, a stressor, by our emotional centers in the brain. This leads to a hormonal cascade that in the end leads to exposure to cortisol, so if we could train the brain on how to interpret these stressful experiences, we might be able to dampen the increase in cortisol or other hormones that we detect in the blood and the other parts of our body.

Host: That’s what Anthony is trying to do. His lab’s research focuses on something called epigenetics, which is the study of biological mechanisms that switch genes on and off.  This can help predict how your body will respond to stress based on your genetics.

Zannas: It’s something related to genetics but a little bit different. The term is a Greek term. It comes from a combination of the prefix, “epi,” which in Greek means “on top of” and “genetics.” So, with epigenetics, you don’t change the sequence of the genes. The sequence of the genes is the same. This is what we’re born with pretty much. But we change some chemicals that are on top of DNA. Those chemical changes will determine whether the genes will be active or not. It’s like a set of chemical switches, or you can think of it as a very complex set of chemical rheostats that will fine tune how the genes will work, and this will affect how cells work and how our bodies work. And, this is part of where epigenetics might help because if we can detect these epigenetic changes that happen in response to stress early on, before we even have the emergence the development of these disorders, then we might have a chance of intervening or targeting those individuals earlier .

Host: Basically, some people are genetically predisposed to be more stressed. Predicting their responses to stressors can help them deal with their stress in a healthier way, which is critical to overall health.

Zannas:We are interested in many different types of disease that are related to stress, not only psychiatric disorders, but also, for example, individuals that are stress chronically have been shown to age faster. We’re understanding this connection between stress and aging. And, this can lead to other diseases like cancer, like cardiovascular disease, which are already related to aging and stress. You see that already in works of fiction. You see characters that are exposed to stress, and they appear to age very fast, like within the course of an hour of being through a very extreme stress. Their hair has become gray, they have wrinkles and so on.  But, we also see it in the clinic. We see patients that have been through a very extreme stress they present with gray hair. And then there is a recovery as well. You can see this gray hair going away, so this is the good news. We learn more and more that actually not all of these effect on aging are irreversible.

Host:Think of the pictures of presidents before and after their terms. The gray hair and the wrinkles? Those were most like caused by stress. But, the good news is that some effects of stress are reversible, and there are effective solutions.

Zannas: Exercise, for example, has this effect. There are some studies showing that just reading and book and being able to really concentrate on the book. After six minutes or so, you can see a decrease in the heart rate and blood pressure of the individual. One good thing is to get a little bit disconnected when your exercise like, let the cell phone go. Pay attention to your body more because you also do better exercise if you are really focused on the moment. We can very broadly say that there are good types of stress and bad types of stress. A short duration of stress is actually a good thing as long as it’s not a very, very extreme thing. It makes us better. It’s, again, important for survival. Immediately when we exercise, we have hyperactivation of the stress response among other changes that happen when we’re exercising. Then, following that phase of exercising, actually we have release of other substances that are very beneficial. For example, they are called endorphins. It’s like a similar thing like morphine. And those help us relax.

Host: And if that doesn’t work…

Zannas: Then we can go to different levels of intervention like meditation, like psychotherapy. Basically, the individual is coached by a psychotherapist to learn different ways to cope with stress. And these medications help create the right environment for the neuronal cells to recover from this stress. With the medications we change the chemicals in the brain, and we give the opportunity to the brain to recover from the stress.

Host:Another part of managing stress is knowing yourself and your body.

Zannas:The most important thing is to take care of themselves. Each of us know about or is learning about ourselves and what makes us feel better.  One thing I want to make clear is that we don’t want to avoid stress. There are certain things in life that we have to come in terms with, that we have to face. There are many studies showing that the more you avoid a stressful situation, the more stressful it will become when you actually face it. This is something called in psychology, in psychiatry avoidance of a situation. I would recommend not avoiding but facing the situation and finding ways to take care of ourselves. There are simple things, like a healthy diet definitely plays a role in better regulating all the stress responses, exercising regularly, having enough time to sleep. Sleep, sleep is a big factor as well. Friends and social support is very important.

Host:Stress is a part of life. So, the next time you have a big meeting or find yourself in the middle of finals, take a deep breath, get some sleep, and hang out with friends.

Zannas: Whenever we can prevent what we call excessive or chronic and persistent stress, then we should, but in many cases, not possible to avoid it. But, what we want to do is to teach the individuals how to best deal with it. Part of that is learning going through life and learning from experience to experience you know, how to cope with these situations. Some of us are lucky and able to learn it. Someone can see it as a work in progress for everyone, but some are not able to do that, and in those cases, we have to propose other solutions.

Host: If you want more information about stress and how it interacts with the body or Anthony’s lab, you can find that on the School of Medicine’s website, Med.UNC.edu. They’re looking for volunteers interested in the field.

And if you’re looking for resources to help handle stress, you can find them at CampusHealth.UNC.edu.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Well Said. See you next week.

Well Said: From Carolina to Cisco

Bryan Hernandez:I think that they’ll definitely be proud just because my parents didn’t have the opportunity to go to college, and they gave up everything, so we had at least the chance to go to college. It’ll definitely feel like their hard work paid off too. It’s not just mine. It’s definitely theirs.

Host:That’s Bryan Hernandez, a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, explaining how he’ll feel at Winter Commencement on Sunday when he joins more than 1,500 other Tar Heels in moving onto their next chapters in life.

And this is Well Said, Carolina’s official storytelling podcast. On today’s episode, Bryan will share with us why he’s grateful for the opportunities he’s had at Carolina and how he plans to pay it forward for the next generation of Tar Heels.

When Bryan was in high school in Sanford, North Carolina, he knew that he wanted to be a Tar Heel.

Hernandez:Carolina was just the best school around when you consider price and how far away it is. I wanted a school that was far away enough from home that I had my own space, but I could also come back in case anything happened.

Host:Bryan applied to Carolina as a high school senior, but he didn’t get accepted. Instead of going to another university, Bryan decided to take advantage of Carolina’s C-STEP program.

Hernandez:What the program is for people who don’t know, you apply your senior year of high school, and you can also apply your first year at Sandhills or any community college that is in the program. They’ll look at your application, take into account different factors such as your grades or extracurriculars or anything like that, and then they will go ahead and pre-admit you to transfer over to Carolina whenever you’re done at community college, and you have to have a certain GPA and things like that but a relatively simple program.

Host:Bryan studied at Sandhills Community College for two years, completing his general education requirements. Then, he transferred into Carolina in the fall of 2017 as a junior majoring in business administration at the UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School.

Hernandez:The business school’s just a more small-knit community. You’re working with a lot of the same people on group projects. They’re going through the same classes. You’re seeing a lot of the same people every day within this one building. That kind of helped me find a group of friends, and then obviously as you spend more time on campus, you find more friends, too, but I would say the small, close-knit community of the business school was really helpful, and then just having a wide variety of people that you can talk to on main campus was really nice.

Host:While a student in the Kenan-Flagler Business School, Bryan took advantage of every opportunity he could. The undergraduate program in the business school offers seven career treks each year. Bryan went on the Tech Trek, which is for students interested in the business side of technology.

Hernandez:We went out to San Francisco during spring break. We have obviously a lot of connections in the Bay Area at really reputable companies, like Google and LinkedIn and DropBox. We did a lot of company visits. I think the first one was Google. The goal of that was to learn about the company as a whole, what they do and then to kind of give you some people within that company that can help you find that ideal career path. A lot of it was networking and just learning more about the companies. And then obviously there was the piece where you get to explore the city, which that was honestly really fun.

Host:Another company the group met with in San Francisco was Cisco. Bryan leveraged that tour to land an internship there this past summer.

Hernandez:I interviewed and actually got to talk about my experience on the Tech Trek, and I think that kind of really helped me stand out when compared to other people because I knew about the cool technology, like Webex, or Spark at the time, that Cisco was working on. I knew what the company did as a whole. I knew what a lot of their focus was on. That really helped me to stand out when going into the interview. And then from there, I figured out that I wanted to do sales because that was the team that we were supporting. We were supporting sales, so within the company, I networked. I reached out to different people, Carolina graduates and all that, and they helped me prepare for the internship interview, and then even while at the internship, we still had one more interview to go through before we got the full-time offer. Again, just reaching out to people that you know from Carolina or at Cisco and just making sure that you’re prepared.

Host:So, that full-time position at Cisco as an associate sales rep came from his internship. And that internship came from his trip out to California with the business school.

Hernandez:I did expect it to be valuable, but I didn’t think it would lead me where I’m going now. I honestly didn’t know where I was going to go at the time. That kind of helped me figure out I probably would want to work in a tech company, but it just didn’t solidify at the time. Now, obviously, going to Cisco, it’s crazy to just kind of retrace my steps and realized that that’s what led me to Cisco.

Host:When he thinks about Carolina, trips like the Tech Trek are what come to mind.

Hernandez:I just think of opportunity whenever I think of how lucky I am to be at Carolina. Before I got to Carolina, I thought that the only careers available in business was just like a regular manager at a small business, which is great. There’s definitely people that really enjoy that, but then I came here, and I found out that there’s all these careers in like banking or consulting or sales or marketing, and so I just really think of opportunity, whether you’re at the J-school, whether you’re at the B-school, whether you’re premed. There’s just so much going on here and so much opportunity that comes with being at a school like this.

Host:As Bryan approaches the end of his Carolina career, it’s time for him to start thinking about graduation and all the work that’s gotten him to this moment.

Hernandez:Definitely excitement. It’s kind of been a long time coming. It’s been a lot of work, and, obviously, I didn’t get in the first time, so just kind of knowing that even if you persist, you can accomplish what you want to. I didn’t get accepted the first time and found a different way in and then managed to get into the business school and got a well-rounded education and have a job. I think that is just kind of the culmination of a lot of hard work, so I’ll definitely be proud of the fact that I was able to accomplish what I wanted to.

Host:As his time as a Carolina student is coming to an end, Bryan reflects on the value of the education he’s received.

Hernandez:The value of a Carolina education would probably be just how challenging it is. I know, for a lot of people, going to school is just about getting a degree and checking the boxes. It kind of was that for me before just because I’m like, “Man, I don’t want to wait four more years.” But, once you come here, you really realize how challenging it can be. When you come to Carolina, you have to try and figure you get problems and in class, and then you’ll get something totally different on the exam, and that’s just to test how flexible you are. There’s a lot of flexibility and just being able to think outside the box that is required to be here at UNC, so thinking critically and working with others, that’s been a big thing too. Yeah, I would say the difficulty of the courses and then just having that exposure to teamwork has just been something that I would say makes Carolina stand out.

Host:Bryan also thinks about how that valuable Carolina education has prepared him for his next steps after college.

Hernandez:It’s definitely challenged me to go outside of my comfort zone. I know one of my least favorite classes going into it was BUSI401, which is our communications class that every business major has to take. One, it’s a really challenging class because almost no one gets an A, but, two, it forces you to speak in front of people and just be confident about what you’re saying, so that was a really big challenge for me with public speaking, so I think that was something that I definitely improved on and still improving on as I go. You know, those soft skills like communication, teamwork, but also kind of giving you a foundation with those hard skills, whether it be corporate finance or business analytics, I just think I got a really well-rounded education from Carolina. I think that’s what prepared me.

Host:Finally, he thinks about how he’ll help other Carolina students like him in the future.

Hernandez:Just pay it forward. All those people that helped me, the students that helped me with studying or with classwork, all the alums who helped me get to where I am today. I think that’s definitely what I’ll take forward. Any time someone from Carolina reaches out, it would be nice to reach back out to them as soon as I can just because I know what it was like being that student that wanted to learn more about a certain role or learn more about a certain company, so just paying it forward whenever you get the chance to.

Host:Winter Commencement is Sunday at 2 p.m. in the Dean E. Smith Center. More than 1,500 Tar Heels will have their degrees conferred. This ceremony will celebrate undergraduate and graduate students who graduated in August and December.

There are 14 community college partners in the C-STEP program. It stands for Carolina Student Transfer Excellence Program. You can find out more about the program on Admissions.UNC.edu.

Do you have a story idea for Well Said? Please share it with us on Twitter @UNC, or email us at WellSaid@UNC.edu. You can find Well Said wherever you get podcasts, so we hope you’ll subscribe and leave us a review. It helps others find us too. Thanks for listening to this episode of Well Said. See you next week.

Well Said: The sounds of Winter Commencement

Kevin Rodriguez:As vice president of the class of 2020, I’m privileged to lead you in moving your tassels from right to left, signifying your new status as graduates. Congratulations.

Host:Welcome to Well Said, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s official storytelling podcast. Today, we’re celebrating the more than 1,500 Tar Heels whose next chapters in life began Sunday at Winter Commencement.

Kevin Guskiewicz.:Welcome to the 2019 Winter Commencement ceremony of the nation’s first public university, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Host:Chancellor Kevin M. Guskiewicz kicked off the event by welcoming the undergraduate, graduate and professional students.

Guskiewicz: You have made it, and we are excited to celebrate your accomplishments today.

Host:The event was his first as chancellor after being appointed to the position on Dec. 13.

Guskiewicz: Today, we recognize your hard work, accomplishments and contributions here at Carolina. You’re graduating from an amazing institution. It’s not only the leading global public research university in the nation but also the place that you can always call home. That feeling of home and the memories that make it so will stay with you. Maybe it will be the memory of sitting around a T.V. in an overcrowded dorm room watching an ACC game or looking over your friend at 6 a.m. in the library as you both realize the 8 a.m. exam is probably not going to go very well or a conversation in the lab with one of your research mentors or maybe while reading poetry at Linda’s as part of Michael McPhee’s Linda’s fellowship. Whatever it is that binds you to this place as home, the good memories and the tough memories, I urge you to hold onto them. This will always be a home for you.

Host:To help celebrate the graduates, Chancellor Guskiewicz turned to Bill Ferris to share words of wisdom with them from his distinguished career researching and documenting folk life of the American South.

Bill Ferris:Thank you, Lenore. What an honor it is to be with all of you here today, and what a journey you and your families have completed that brings you to this moment. Congratulations to the family members and special friends who are with us today for this momentous occasion. My brother was a farmer, who often said that when you see a turtle sitting on a fence post, you know he had some help getting there. Each of us are like that turtle, and the families and friends who helped us arrive at this place we are celebrating today.

Host:Bill is the Joel R. Williamson eminent professor emeritus of history. Beloved by his students, he has received worldwide acclaim for his research and documentation of folk life in the American South. His box set, “Voices of Mississippi” won two Grammy Awards in February. Even though Bill has seen and learned so much, he’s still learning today. And, he encouraged the graduates to learn every day from everyone around them.

Ferris:I want to share with you a few thoughts about teachers and how they shape our lives from birth to death. Each of you have worked with great teachers in classrooms at Carolina, but others outside the classroom have also enriched your life and will continue to do so. Open yourself to all of those people, likely and unlikely. My father once told me, “You can learn from every person whom you meet in life a lesson.” I’ve never stopped listening. As a folklorist, I’ve learned from quiltmakers, from blues singers and storytellers. My work is grounded in memory and a sense of place that is framed by the farm where I was born and by its people, black and white.

Host:Bill shared stories of the lessons he learned from those quiltmakers, singers and storytellers, and he reminded the graduates of how their experiences at Carolina have prepared them to have an impact on their communities.

Ferris:Your Carolina education will help you face both your history and your future. You carry the tools to build a brighter future for our nation and our world. Thank you.

Host:Following Bill’s remarks, each school presented graduates, and Chancellor Guskiewicz conferred their degrees.

Guskiewicz: Now, will all the degree candidates please rise? By the virtue vested in the University of North Carolina by the state of North Carolina and by the university entrusted to me, I hereby confer upon you the degree for which the faculty has certified you together with all the rights and privileges thereunto pertaining, effective Dec. 31, 2019, and I offer you my warmest congratulations. I now call upon Kevin Rodriguez, vice president of the senior class to come forward and lead you in the switching of your tassel signifying your graduation from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Rodriguez: As vice president of the class of 2020, I’m privileged to lead you in moving your tassels from right to left, signifying your new status as graduates. Congratulations.

Host:Addressing this group of now Tar Heel alumni, Chancellor Guskiewicz encouraged the graduates as they embark on their careers.

Guskiewicz: Welcome to the ranks of 336,000-plus alumni of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. You are graduating today in 2019, but most of you will be retiring around the year 2070. Think about that. It’s not too early. What jobs will you be retiring from? Regardless of what degree might be on your diploma today, I’m confident that our world-class faculty has prepared you to excel in your chosen field but also to successfully pivot as needed toward those careers that may not yet exist today but will have a significant impact in the world we live in.

Host:And, Chancellor Guskiewicz used the words of Fred Rogers to inspire the students to continue Carolina’s legacy of serving others. He said a hero is someone who responds to the world’s needs.

Guskiewicz: As we conclude our program today, my charge to you is to first be the hero Mr. Rogers describes and to be a hero that your hometown would be proud of. You may never live there again or may not be going back tomorrow, but never forget the impact that it had on your life. Be someone that your hometown owns. Be a son or a daughter of your place who gives back to your community. Second, I charge you to give it your all each and every day. UNC women’s soccer coach Anson Dorrance once described a champion as someone bent over, drenched in sweat at a point of exhaustion when no one is watching. Be that person, and do it trying to solve your community’s problems. Be an influencer, a catalyst, someone who answers the call to action. There will be many times when the challenges just seem too big, and maybe they are, but always just keep trying. That is the moment where greatness happens. And, finally, be patient because your dream job won’t likely be your first one. It’s about deferred gratification, knowing you must pay the price now to reap the reward later, so I urge you to take steps that will get you a job with a mission you believe in. It took me hard work and patience to get here today, leading our great university. This job is an honor, and I am excited for it because I believe in Carolina’s mission, the work our great university does in preparing graduates like yourselves. It’s the most vital work that I’ve ever been a part of. My hope is that in the months to come, just as you throw yourself into the hard work of improving your hometown, your state, your country and your world, Carolina will continue on its journey to being the best it can be.

Host:To conclude the event, the graduates linked arms once again to sing the alma mater. This time, they were doing so as alumni.

Congratulations to all of the graduates. We can’t wait to see where you’ll head next. But, remember, Chapel Hill will always be home.

To hear the amazing stories of some of these graduates, visit our website, UNC.edu. And, to see all the buzz and excitement from this past weekend, follow the hashtag, #UNCgrad on Twitter and Instagram or visit any of our social media channels. You can find that on UNC.edu, too.

And, if you’d like to hear more from the commencement speaker Bill Ferris discussing his work that led to two Grammy awards, listen to our February episode, “Songs of the American South.”

Thank you for listening to Well Said this week and every week — and for sharing it with a friend. We’ll be back in January.

Well Said: The fall season rewind

Host:Hey, everybody, and welcome to Well Said, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s podcast. I’m your host, Will Rimer. We’re excited for all of the new things the spring semester has in store for us, but before it really gets rolling, let’s take a look back at some stories from this past fall. On this week’s episode, we’ll update you on two stories. We’ll catch up with two people who participated in two big events at Carolina.

First, we’ll talk about the Tar Heel Bus Tour. The three buses packed with faculty, staff and administration covered more than 1,600 miles across North Carolina — from the Blue Ridge Mountains to coast. The purpose of this tour was to learn how Carolina is serving the needs across the state and discover new ways Carolina can continue to help. One of the staff members on the bus was Maria Estorino. She’s the associate university librarian for special collections and the director of Wilson Library.

Maria Estorino:If you ever rode a bus in school, it was a lot like that in that the rowdy people were in the back and the quieter people were in the front. If you were like me, you sat in a different spot every time depending on what mood you were in. If I felt like I wanted some quiet time and just time to reflect or to just look out the window, I would head towards the front, and if I wanted to have some more fun or just be part of some of the larger conversations, I would sit in the back. That was the kind of organic way that the day unfolded, but we were very fortunate to have a great leadership team on our bus. We had Martin Brinkley, dean of the law school, as our color commentator, and he was incredible in providing historical context. We were also incredibly fortunate to have Anita Brown-Graham as the host on our bus, and she also was amazing at providing more information, answering our questions.

Host:Maria went on the southeastern route, and her first stop was in Siler City, where she heard from Paul Cuadros about his work the Latinx community there, which we also featured on Well Said on Sept. 18.

Estorino:I was very excited actually to kick it off in that way. I am Latinx. My family is from Cuba, so I was really interested in Paul’s work and also in learning more about that context, especially so close to Chapel Hill but also because it turns out that that parish priest was Cuban. There’s not a lot of us in the state of North Carolina, so it’s always exciting to meet someone else with that same history and background, so we had a chance to talk a little bit about that in addition to the larger work that they’re doing in Siler City.

Host:Maria has been at Carolina for almost three years, and it was little connections like the one with the parish priest in Siler City that stood out to her about the bus tour.

Estorino:I hoped that there would be opportunity to connect with other members of this campus community and to see parts of the state that were less familiar to me and less familiar to me for a couple reasons. One, I’m not from North Carolina. I’m from Miami, Florida, so the state itself is new to me. Two, I have lived primarily in big cities, Miami, New Orleans, Boston. I have lived a very urban life, and North Carolina is not that. It’s not centered around its major metropolitan areas. I don’t know that I expected it, but it was definitely something that I gained a lot from. Being in parts of the state that are away from the kind of urban centers of the state was really educational for me. I don’t have much experience with farms. We were in Clinton, for example, and I learned a lot about the farming in that area and how it has changed over the decades and what the demands and opportunities are for those communities. What I was hoping to get out of it was to learn more about the state that now as a part of UNC, I serve in my role.

Host:While on the road, Maria learned more about how she can help serve the people of North Carolina in her role at Wilson Library.

Estorino:We at the library, especially at Wilson special collections library, have always really been connected to the public mission of this university. The collections that we create and steward, we hold them in public trust. They serve our campus, our students, our researchers and our faculty. But, really, they are for the public, and we take that very seriously. All of our services are open to the public. There are no restrictions on who can use our collections, and that public service ethic as a newcomer, I have found to be very strong in the library, so I felt that was an important thing for me to connect with as well. I had worked at a private university before, so that was a big change.

Host:The tour also helped her connect with other Tar Heels across campus.

Estorino:This a large campus. It’s a big place. It was a very quick way to get in the mix and start talking to people that I might not have had a chance to speak with or interact with or think together with about interesting topics had it not been for being stuck on a bus together for three days. The experience of getting to know so many different faculty and administrators from across the campus is also something that stays with me. I feel very fortunate to have had that time. I look forward to how that could potentially continue into the future, where perhaps natural connections might not continue day-to-day, but you could in a sense create a sense of cohort in how you might reach across campus to think about the challenges and the opportunities of our state and how you might bring together people from different disciplines or different administrative functions at the campus to try to address some of those challenges and opportunities.

Host:Of all those great experiences and memories, Maria says what will stay with her the most from the Tar Heel Bus Tour is the new perspective it gave her.

Estorino:There are so many different ways to think about and to be in and to experience North Carolina. While my work does not so directly interact with students in that I mean I’m not teaching in a classroom, I’m not providing direct services to students, I thought it was really important to see the places where our students come from. That was really transformative, as well. We really need to understand North Carolina in order to be able to better serve the student, not just the educational experience of being at a university but really the whole student. I think that being able to be on the bus certainly made me more aware of that, the great diversity of places that our students come from, the great diversity of experiences that they may or may not have when they come to this campus and how that might inform what their experience is. No matter what part of the university you work in, that’s something really important to know and to understand and to reflect on. The University has and will continue to need to redefine what it means to be from North Carolina, of North Carolina, for North Carolina. That is something that really lingered with me. Our job is not to help people become Tar Heels. It is to let those students in those communities redefine what it means to be a Tar Heel, so that it is a shared definition of what it means to be a Tar Heel, what it means to be a North Carolinian.

Host:Moving on from the Tar Heel Bus Tour, we’ll talk to one of the students we met earlier this year, and we’ll allow him to reflect on his experiences in his first semester as a Tar Heel.

Host:We introduced you to Jovan Sheshbaradaran at FallFest in August. It’s the event with lots of free food, t-shirts and other giveaways. It’s also where students can sign up to join more than 800 Carolina student organizations.

Jovan Sheshbaradaran:I remember signing up to be a member of the BSM. I think I looked for the student government table. I think I signed up there. I looked into admissions ambassadors. I put my name down on a lot of different things just to get emails about a lot to see what I’d be interested in. I stuck with student government, so I’m in student government right now. I’m in BSM as well. I also stuck with the Pakistani Heritage Club. I’m about to get more involved with that as the semester goes on, and then I’ll just be looking for new clubs once I come back.

Host:All of these clubs and activities on top of his classes is keeping Jovan pretty busy as a first-year student.

Sheshbaradaran:For the most part, yeah, it works out in my favor. I just don’t mind staying up late to study, so I make it work.

Host:Taking classes in business, political science, Spanish, statistics and history, Jovan was able to make it work in his first semester as an undergraduate student. But that step up from high school to college did come with a little adversity, too.

Sheshbaradaran:It was tricky. I’m not going to lie. I think every first-year comes in with big eyes and is just like, ‘Oh, this place is amazing.’ But there comes a point where there’s a slap of reality, and you’re like, ‘Yeah, I’m in college, and I have to do college-level work.’ That required me to step up to the plate and work a little bit harder, but in the same token, I just found so much more freedom and so much more space to do what I want and express myself in different areas. It met expectations, and then it went above that. There wasn’t a day that I left my dorm feeling like it was going to be a terrible day. I had joy wherever I went on campus, and I feel like that’s what everybody feels like when they’re here.

Host:Jovan’s from Gastonia, North Carolina, and growing up there, he always noticed that joy in students who came back from Chapel Hill for winter break.

Sheshbaradaran:I remember when I’d be at home and people would tell me about Carolina, a big smile would always come over their face. I just thought to myself, ‘There must be something in the water there that makes people feel this way,’ but I definitely feel it. It just feels different here, and it makes you feel happy. It makes you enjoy life. Even when things are rough, I still have a great time here, so the first semester’s really shown that.

Host:Jovan said his fall experience has helped him get adjusted to life at Carolina and the expectations here, and he’s ready for the spring semester. He’s also already excited for Fall Fest later this year, and he has some advice for the new students of the Carolina class of 2024, who will experience it for the first time in August.

Sheshbaradaran:Have an idea of what you’re interested in before you go in. I would look at Heel Life to figure out some clubs that you’d be interested in, but don’t limit yourself. Go in there with an open mind. I know I definitely signed up for things that I never thought I’d be doing. Just come in with an open mind.

Host:If you have a story idea for the spring semester, please email us at WellSaid@UNC.edu. Or tweet us @UNC.

Thank you for listening to Well Said this episode of Well Said. See you next week.

Well Said: Growing from study abroad experiences

Host:You know that feeling when you’re packing for a flight, but the suitcase just won’t close? You’re fighting, struggling, doing anything you can just to get it to zip.

Erin Hager:I left in the morning at 6 a.m., and the night before I left — it had to have been like 2 a.m. — I was sitting on my suitcase in my bedroom trying to get it close. I was freaking out. I was standing on it while my mom zipped it up. It was bad.

Host:For Carolina senior, Erin Hager, this struggle happened at home in Wilmington ahead of a flight to Santiago, Chile. The psychology major studied abroad there in the fall of 2018.

Host:Welcome to Well Said, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s podcast. I’m your host, Will Rimer. On today’s episode, we’ll talk to Heather Ward. She’s the associate dean for Study Abroad and International Exchanges at Carolina. And then Erin will share with us what she learned from her experiences in Chile. And maybe some packing tips.

Hager:Pack way less than you think you need. Pack like you’re going somewhere for two weeks maximum.

Host:But, Erin wasn’t just going there for two weeks. She studied the whole semester in Santiago.

Hager:I took one class, actually, two classes that were intended for exchange students. One was in English, and one was in Spanish. The one in English was about gender in Chile’s history, so, basically, it was looking at the history of Chile but from a gendered perspective. The other one was called Chilean seminar, and it gave an overview of a bunch of different aspects of Chile, like economy, history, politics, and then the third class I took was a normal Chilean class, and it was geography of Chile, which was really cool. I wanted to learn a lot about where I was at, and I think I succeeded in doing that.

Host:She also wanted to work on her Spanish. Erin says she knew Spanish and was able to use it sometimes in North Carolina. But, there’s a difference when you’re using it every day, especially in Chile.

Hager:Your Spanish will improve more than anything because Chilean Spanish is the hardest Spanish. They say if you can master that, then you can master any other Spanish.  Now, I love learning about the different types of Spanish from different countries. I watch videos on YouTube, and I’ll take the accent challenges to try and guess what accent is from where. It opens a whole new world for you and a whole new set of views and dynamics.

Host:Erin says the biggest benefit from her time in Chile was a new perspective that came with having new experiences and meeting new people.

Hager:Just experiencing new things, meeting new people, meeting people from all different backgrounds. Also seeing new places. The landscapes in Chile are astonishing. They’re so diverse and beautiful. A lot of it was the connections that I made with people, and the connections that I could make from learning another language, connections that I wouldn’t make if I didn’t know that language. When you make those connections, and when you learn another language, you learn more a lot more about culture and about how people perceive things, and I just really enjoyed making those connections.

Host:Study abroad experiences like Erin’s help students grow academically, personally and socially. Heather Ward is the associate dean of the UNC Study Abroad Office. Carolina offers more than 350 programs in 70 different countries. Heather says there’s not a magic formula for these transformative experiences, but they help Carolina students become nimble thinkers who are prepared for the global economy.

Heather Ward:A big part of that has to be the discomfort from having to navigate in a different reality where the street signs are in a different language and where the public transit system doesn’t look like the beautiful, free, blue buses that we have all over this campus. Learning to think on your feet is a big part of study abroad. Learning to get along with other people who are not like you in whatever way. They may not look like you. Maybe they speak a different language. Maybe they have different habits in their home life.

Hager:I definitely became a lot more confident in myself. Before Chile, I had only ever been to Canada, and I went with my cousin. In Chile, I was in a country where they spoke a different language than my own. And I was doing a lot of stuff by myself, which was very new for me, and I think a big realization was that I can do anything that I want to by myself, and that opens a lot of doors and squashes a lot of fear because if you want to do something, you can just go do it now because you know that you can do it by yourself. That’s a big way that I grew. I grew more confident in going around and talking and making friends.

Host:The perspective change Erin had also helped her to combine her passions of Spanish and helping children. As a Carolina Covenant scholar, Erin’s able to attend and graduate from Carolina debt-free. The Covenant covers full financial need through a combination of grants, scholarships and work-study placements. When Erin came back from Santiago, she was looking for a new work-study position that helped her stay connected to Chile, and she found one at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute as a research assistant.

Hager:I got back, and I realized I really needed to find some way to bridge who I was before I had this experience and who I was during my experience because those are two different things. Because who you were during that experience can’t necessarily continue while you’re back. You have to combine them somehow. I specifically looked at jobs that would help bridge that gap. I work in the research center, but it’s studying dual-lingual education, so that’s kind of my bridge. I get to do things in Spanish there, and they also work with kids from different countries and parents from different backgrounds, and I really enjoy that, so I just tried to get involved in things that brought me the same happiness that I found down there.

Host:Carolina is among the nation’s leading institutions for students studying abroad. Forty-one percent of Tar Heel students study abroad before graduation, but Carolina wants more than half of its students, regardless of financial circumstances, to study abroad by 2023. This year, the University is launching the Global Guarantee. It’s a promise that every Carolina student will have access to a global experience.

Ward:It’s our obligation as a public university to make that opportunity available for every student and to not make it a privilege for some. That’s the idea behind the Global Guarantee, that we’re promising every student can have the same opportunities.

Host:The same opportunities to have the same benefits.

Ward:We’re seeing evidence that students who study abroad do better in school. They have academic development benefits, and in fact, just a few months ago, I partnered with the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment here at Carolina. They helped us with some analysis of study abroad participants and student outcomes, so we looked at time to degree and GPA at the time of graduation controlling for things like income, Pell eligibility, first-generation status. We saw across the board that students who studied abroad were 14 percentage points more likely to finish their degrees in four years than their peers, and they ended their studies at Carolina with a GPA three-tenths of a point higher than their peers. One further benefit that I want to point out, well, two benefits, would be career preparation. More and more, we see that employers are looking for global experiences on a resume, and that becomes a point of distinction. You walk into an interview with a resume with 10 other students from this institution. What are you going to talk about? Well, that semester that you were in Shanghai becomes a thing that really sets you apart from your peers. And then social capital. More and more our career networks, our social networks are connected. Students who study abroad have a broader social network. They have all these other contacts in china and in Vietnam and in Switzerland or wherever they studied abroad that they can draw upon when it’s time to look for that next step in their career trajectory.

Host:For Erin, that next step in her career trajectory is graduation. After that, she plans to go abroad again. Maybe back to Chile but definitely another Spanish-speaking country. She wants to teach English there before going onto graduate school.

Hager:I know it’s cheesy and you always say it, or you always hear it, but it really does change your life and changes the trajectory that your life can take. It opens up a lot of new opportunities that you didn’t know were possible and a lot of futures that you didn’t know were possible. You learn a lot. You meet a lot of amazing people. People meet people while they’re abroad whether they’re from that country or other international students, and they keep those friendships for a really long time. I know I always see them. They will go and visit each other in different countries. When you go abroad, you build a network around the world, and that lasts. And that’s really cool because you learn about other countries too and other backgrounds. It makes you realize how small you are but also how big the world is. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It was a really cool thing to realize.

Host:And if you remember, Erin also realized that you don’t need to pack everything you’ll need for six months even if you’re going there for that long.

Hager:I definitely packed too much. A lot of it was just shirts I didn’t wear. There were some shirts I didn’t even wear once while I was down there. Then, I was like, “why did I bring this?” Shoes. I packed way too many shoes. I basically wore the same pair of shoes the entire time I was there. Don’t bring any shampoo. Don’t bring any conditioner unless there’s something really specific. Like, you have to have this specific product and you don’t think they’ll have it there. Bring that, for sure, if it’s something you don’t want to not have, but otherwise I know I packed shampoo and conditioner and body wash, and I got down there, and I found they had all those same brands that I use and all of those things, and that stuff and really heavy. I had to pay for weight on my suitcase because that’s all liquids, and it’s heavy. So pack less. Learn from me.

Host:Maybe you’re not packing yet, but you think one of the more than 350 Carolina programs is right for you. Learn more about those programs at the Study Abroad website. It’s StudyAbroad.UNC.edu. Or visit the Study Abroad Fair on Jan. 24^th in the Carolina Union. The deadline to apply for summer, fall and year-long terms is February 10^th. UNC Study Abroad awards more than $1 million each year in scholarships. The deadline for those scholarships is also February 10^th.

And this week on Carolina’s website, we’re highlighting even more Tar Heel students and faculty members with valuable global experiences. Read and watch them at UNC.edu.

Did you study abroad at Carolina? Share photos and a little bit about your experiences with us. You can email us at WellSaid@UNC.edu, or you can tweet us @UNC. You can find Well Said wherever you listen to podcasts, so thanks for subscribing and sharing it with a friend. And thank you for listening to this episode of Well Said. See you next week.

Well Said: A profession of mythic proportions

Daniel Wallace:I wasn’t a voracious reader; I was an average reader. I was an average writer. Nobody took me aside when I was a kid and said, “You’re one of the lucky ones, you’ve got that special spark.”

Host:But Daniel Wallace had that spark after all. He’s Carolina’s J. Ross MacDonald Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and director of the University’s creative writing program. He’s also the author of Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions. Welcome to Well Said, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s official storytelling podcast. I’m Cee Cee Huffman, a student podcaster at Carolina. This week, we’re talking with Daniel about how he developed his own spark and how he’s teaching Carolina students to do the same.

Host:Daniel graduated from Carolina in 2008; although, his road to graduation wasn’t typical. He spent his junior and senior years at Carolina in the early ‘80s but initially left before graduating. A few years later, he returned to Chapel Hill, and with him he brought his dream of becoming a writer.

Wallace:I started seriously writing when I was 24 and didn’t publish my first book until I was almost 40. So, a lot of time spent writing and writing badly and then unsuccessfully. If it had happened, I think, when I was much younger, that would be much more interesting, but all I wanted was to publish a book by that time. I’d never had any ideas or dreams or hopes for anything else, I just never thought about it. All I wanted to do is a book, and once I got that published, or once I was told, “We are going to publish your book,” I was so happy. I thought, and this is not an exaggeration, I thought “I’m going to be happy forever.”

Host:That book, Big Fish, was his big break. It was published in 1998, and in 2003 it was turned into a film by Tim Burton. Ten years after that, it was turned into a musical in Chicago…then Broadway…then all over the world. His years of practice had finally paid off.  But before the success of Big Fish, there was a lot of rejection. And, Daniel often shares lessons he learned from rejection with his creative writing students. He says he can look back on things he wrote that were just horrible, and that he brings boxes of his rejection slips to class.

Wallace:Well I’d written five novels before writing that book, and I had as much fun or got as much joy out of writing the really bad books that came before it as I did this book, which later would be published. I feel like everything that I’m working on, when I’m working on it, is wonderful, it’s only the next day that I realize that it’s not. So I have a lot of rejection, in other words, and I understand the process. I understand how to get from one place to another, and how hard it is. And I was them. As hard as writing is, there has to be, at its heart, a joy – and it’s a hard joy – but I would rather fail as a writer than to be a success at doing anything else. The joy of failure is so much greater than the joy of success at doing anything else. So, it is tough, and it’s nothing that can be taught it a semester-long class. It’s a day after day, month after month, and year after year, and I never tell anyone that they should not write.

Host:When he was a kid, though, no one told him that he should.

Wallace:I wasn’t a voracious reader; I was an average reader, and I was an average writer. Nobody took me aside when I was a kid and said, “You’re one of the lucky ones, you’ve got that special spark.” Nobody ever did that, and I didn’t have that special spark. I think a lot of the things that bring a person to whatever it is they do, whether it’s writing or selling lampshades, is that if you’re happy doing it, it’s because it corresponds to something outside of the thing you’re doing itself. So, I love working on my own, I love creating things on my own to be able to show something to somebody and say, “I did this. I went into this room by myself, stayed there for a few hours and now look what I made.”

Host:And as director of Carolina’s creative writing program, he shares with his students his secrets to working alone. Daniel says the program is one of the best in the country, not because students learn how to create, but because students learn how to communicate.

Wallace:I think outside of being instructed in a program such as ours, there’s a self-indulgence that we associate with creativity, which is fine, but the next step is to take that and put some meat on the bones and to say what you want to say in ways that are not only enjoyable for the writer, but realizing that the ultimate goal is to communicate with another human being, and that’s what we’re here for and that’s what the art is. It a very practical way of approaching what a lot of people think of as kind of airy inspiration and self-indulgent expression.

Host:He says constant practice is the only way to becoming a better writer and mastering the art of communicating.

Wallace:That’s the truth. It sounds simple, but there’s no way that you can learn how to do something like writing without just doing it a lot. You would think that if you graduate from college with a major in English that you should be able to take everything that you read – hundreds and hundreds of books – and somehow that you’re able to take that and use it to your own ends and write your own stories, that it should just flow out, but it doesn’t. It’s a practiced art form. It’s like anything else that you want to be good at, you know, whether it’s sports, talking, anything – you can’t do it without experiencing it and feeling what it feels like to do it. It just takes a really, really long time, and some people longer than others. You want to nurture each student according to the things that they want. The goal is not to create an army of professional writers. That’s just not going to happen. And if you compare it to say, a sports team or a college sports team, how many of those people are going to go on to play sports at a professional level? I want them to leave the program understating how stories are made, how poems are written, what a creative life is, what it can mean, the power of storytelling, understanding that even though we have a special program dedicated to telling stories in these different forms, it’s what everybody does every day of their life many, many times a day and knowing how it’s done and how to do it better yourself. I think that, I assume – and as professors we assume – an amount of creativity that all students bring to the table and it’s our job, really, to work with them to not necessarily to harness it, but to understand it and understand the ways that a smart writer expresses it.

Host:The creative writing program at Carolina is both a major and minor. It’s in the department of English and comparative literature in the College of Arts & Sciences. To learn more about the program, please visit their website at englishcomplit.UNC.edu.

Do you have an idea for an upcoming episode of Well Said? Let us know. Tweet us at @UNC or email us at WellSaid@UNC.edu. You can find Well Said wherever you listen to podcasts, so we hope you’ll subscribe and leave us a review. Thank you for listening to this episode of Well Said. See you next week!

Well Said: Investigating potential cancer treatments

Lindsey James:That is what we do as researchers. We problem-solve. My husband always used to ask me, “How do you do something when you fail 95 percent of the time?” That is what research is. There’s a lot of failure, but then those successes are really, really, really rewarding. You tackle it one day at a time, solve problems.

Host:As an assistant professor in the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, Lindsey James is a problem-solver. A researcher in the Division of Chemical Biology and Medicinal Chemistry, Lindsey investigates problems related to cancer, HIV and other diseases. She’s solving pieces of the puzzles for these diseases that she hopes will lead to greater understanding and better treatments.

Welcome to Well Said, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s podcast. I’m your host, Will Rimer. We’re in Lindsey’s office in Marsico Hall near the UNC Health Care buildings. Her research into possible treatments for a specific type of cancer called multiple myeloma, recently received funding from Pinnacle Hill to answer questions about the disease and try to find better treatments for it. Pinnacle Hill is a partnership between Carolina and Deerfield Management Company to develop more effective innovations for the world’s medical needs. On today’s episode, Lindsey will discuss her research and the potential impact it can have on patients suffering from the second-most prevalent blood cancer in the United States. And, she’ll explain why she loves being a scientist.

James:When I went to college, I thought I either wanted to go into science or medicine or mathematics. My father’s a physician, so I developed an interest in medicine. And then I was particularly inspired by my chemistry teacher in high school, who was probably the hardest teacher in the school and everybody avoided but kind of sparked my interest. I started taking some chemistry classes in college and really liked the combination of science and also problem-solving that you get more in math.

Host:Lindsey majored in chemistry in college and then came to Carolina for her doctoral degree, which she earned in 2010 from the department of chemistry. She’s been at Carolina ever since. She found her next home in the Eshelman School of Pharmacy, which is perfect for her to combine her love of chemistry and interest in medicine. There, she leads a research lab that is part of the Center for Integrative Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery.

James:The research that we do is at the interface of chemistry and biology. We use our knowledge of organic chemistry and are interested in being able to make molecules. We’d like to make them not necessarily to say that we made them but to see what type of impact they can have in a biological setting, particularly a disease-relevant setting. We use techniques that we know in biology, for example, cell biology or chemical biology, cancer biology, to use these molecules that we’re able to make ourselves in the lab and see what impact they may be able to have on human health. A lot of my students have training in organic chemistry, but they think about it, they have an interest in medicine and an interest in using their skills in organic chemistry to have an impact on human health.

Host:So, Lindsey and her lab create molecules. What those molecules do and the effects they have in cells help to better understand the causes of certain diseases and assist her team in thinking about ways to approach the development of new therapies.

James:Sometimes, we’re working on proteins that we really don’t know what’s going to happen when we inhibit them. In an ideal scenario, yeah, we’re going after a protein that we know is problematic, but that’s not always the case. Pharmaceutical companies are largely looking to academia these days to validate new targets, to present enough data in the literature to say, “It looks like if we go after this target based on what group whoever has done, it’s a good way to tackle this disease.”

Host:And that’s what’s happened with Lindsey’s research into possible treatments for multiple myeloma. It’s a blood cancer that affects about 30,000 new Americans every year and disproportionately affects African Americans. Patients receive pharmaceutical, chemotherapy or radiation treatments, but those treatments aren’t particularly effective.

James:It’s a cancer that there really is no good cure for, and a lot of patients do not respond well to current treatments. It’s one that we don’t understand all of the causes of it, and that’s why we’ve gotten interested in it. There is some data in the literature about misregulation of certain genes that could be associated with multiple myeloma, so we’re driven to better understand if maybe going after some of these genes would lead to a cure or a way to treat patients that have multiple myeloma.

Host:Lindsey’s lab worked with the Structural Genomics Consortium in Toronto to create a molecule. In developing that molecule, they targeted a specific protein, which is one that’s thought to play a significant role in multiple myeloma and other diseases. Her research findings led Pinnacle Hill to invest in Lindsey’s research to find more effective treatments for the disease. Launched in October 2018, Pinnacle Hill was established as a research and development partnership between Carolina and Deerfield Management Company to advance the development of new medicines.

James:It’s somewhat a continuation of an existing project. I have funding related to it from other sources, but the Pinnacle Hill or Deerfield funding definitely takes everything to a new level.

Host:Pinnacle Hill was established with a $65 million funding commitment from Deerfield. The goal of the partnership is to accelerate the development of biomedical innovations to address significant unmet medical needs.

James:I remember going to an information session and not knowing quite what they wanted — but it’s clearly different from, for example, applications that we put into the NIH that are very exploratory. You kind of get the money and you run with it and you do as much as you can; whereas, this, my impression was that they wanted new therapies or new things that could potentially have a commercial implication. I thought about the projects that we had ongoing in the lab. Was there one that may be a good fit for this type of mechanism. Like most PIs, especially young PIs, you’re scrambling to get any funding you can and to keep your lab alive, to get tenure, things like that. I, like a lot of people, threw in an application and kind of rolled the dice.

Host:Lindsey’s project is the first one to be awarded with funds from Pinnacle Hill. The goal of this project is to try to develop compounds that block the function of a specific protein, which is thought to play a specific role in the progression of a subtype of multiple myeloma. If they can develop a compound that inhibits that protein, that solves one more problem and might lead to a new, more effective treatment.

James:The Deerfield mechanism is really pushing towards IND, or investigational new drug. With a lot of projects, we just think about getting a really high-quality publication. And that’s great. That’s definitely what we strive to do. But, this has kind of expanded mine and the viewpoint of folks in the group to think about not only that publication. While we always have a desire to impact human health, it’s harder to think about that as a reality. Through this Deerfield mechanism, it’s brought us a little bit closer to thinking about how what we do in the lab can not only lead to a good publication but can maybe be more transformative, more translational and hopefully impact human health if we are successful.

Host:For the problems that Lindsey’s investigating, there aren’t always final answers. New answers often just lead to more problems. But that’s just the way she likes it.

James:In some ways, it makes it fun that there’s not always a final answer to come to. You have to be able to design experiments and design ways to tackle problems. There’s something analytical about that. Sometimes, you finally do get an answer that is that ultimate success. But even then, it’s never-ending. I think that’s the one part that I find sometimes frustrating about my career is that the science is open-ended and never-ending. That’s the plus and the minus at the same time, so the work kind of never ends. That’s good because there’s always problems to solve but bad because there’s always new problems to solve. You really have to enjoy what you do to be successful. Doing research is fun. In my mind, it doesn’t seem like a job, but it is hard. There isn’t always an answer, and there’s a lot of failure, so I think it’s just a combination. Ultimately, I really enjoy having an endpoint that is related to human health to see where that impact may go.

Host:Lindsey also says the culture at here Carolina makes her job even better.

Lindsey:Not only are there people here that have the expertise that I can benefit from, but there are people here who genuinely want to collaborate and genuinely want to work on high-impact, difficult research problems together. There’s no competitive culture that I’ve interacted with. It makes it really enjoyable to do what we do on a regular basis. And it makes it fun to come to work on Mondays. It makes it fun to work on the hard projects that we’re really invested in.

Host:To learn more about Lindsey’s project finding potential treatments for multiple myeloma and other projects she’s doing, go to the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy website. That’s Pharmacy.UNC.edu.

What’s a difficult problem you’re working to solve? Let us know at WellSaid@UNC.edu or on Twitter at UNC. Share what you think of the show and any ideas you might have for us. You can find Well Said wherever you listen to podcasts, so thanks for subscribing and sharing it with a friend. And thank you for listening to this episode of Well Said. See you next

Well Said: Sitting courtside with Freddie Kiger

Freddie Kiger:To get here to Carolina and to find a channel and people who were willing to funnel me toward the proper appropriate people, and they gave me a chance to be a part of the storied program, nobody can ever take that from me. And I am so blessed to have been a part of something in this area, where basketball is king. How many people would give their left and maybe their right arm to sit where I sit for a game and to have had the associations and experiences that I’ve had over that span of times?

Host:Freddie Kiger grew up with Carolina basketball. For a kid who lived on Tobaccoville Road in North Carolina, it’s fitting that he’s spent nearly 50 years telling stories of the Tar Heels’ players and coaches. At games, you can see him sitting at the scorer’s table. There, he’s using statistics as an associate producer to tell what’s happening in Atlantic Coast Conference games and the context around them for the TV broadcast. Usually, it’s for ESPN broadcasts, but he’s worked CBS, NBC and other networks, too.

Kiger:Stats tell a lot of stories about how teams prepare, how individuals prepare, how they execute, trends. Every game is just a series of anecdotes. How things respond, how people respond. Statistics tell not just about, if you will, barometric pressure or reading for a team and a coach, but it reflects one person’s ascension, another person’s bad game, failure to execute, coaches’ philosophies. It is interesting to look at numbers and to understand that it says a great deal about who’s putting those numbers down and how they are executing and how they are showing a slice of their own preparation and execution through those numbers.

Host:Welcome to Well Said, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s podcast. I’m your host Will Rimer. Carolina hosts Duke on Saturday in the greatest rivalry in sports. Freddie’s seen about 100 of those games. On today’s episode, he’ll will tell us some of the stories he’s accumulated over the years.

Host:But, first, he’ll tell us his story. Freddie enrolled at Carolina in 1970 and majored in history. He got his master’s in history from Carolina in 1977 and likes to joke that you don’t have to study journalism to work in sports television. But his route to T.V. is definitely a little different. For him, it starts with intramurals.

Kiger:I was a huge intramural junkie when I was here at Carolina. I lived in Teague Dorm. Anson Dorrance, Anson and I played on several teams together. We won like nine consecutive intramural overall championships. It became a thing of pride for Teague Dorm. To this day, if you ask Anson the great dynasties of his life, he’ll tell you, first, was the Teague dynasty, and, second, he’ll tell you it’s, of course, his own dynasty, which is remarkable

Host:Because he was so involved in intramurals, Freddie was approached by a faculty member in the department of physical education, Ron Hyatt, to be an official. Doing well in that, he was asked to be the assistant supervisor of intramural officials.

Kiger:My mentor to teach me how to work in that particular role was a guy by the name of Roy Williams, who was the supervisor of intramural officials. And even to this day, I still remember Roy as extremely intense. He was very committed to his role as a supervisor, and, of course, his ties with Coach Smith and the JV program and sitting in practices are legendary.

Host:From his experience as the assistant supervisor officials, Freddie’s name came across the desks of Dean Smith and Bill Gutheridge. He applied for a position to keep statistics for the men’s basketball team.

Kiger:They accepted, and it began this four-year, wonderful opportunity to be a part of something extremely special. I kept statistics one season after I had left Carolina and was teaching as a junior high school history teacher in the 8^th grade in 1978. A very convoluted, circuitous route, but I had fun each step of the way.

Host:A long, circuitous journey that was really just getting started. Freddie then kept statistics for Carolina football and the Tar Heel Sports Network. Then WCHL. Each opportunity led to another. Then, he was working with major networks on big events, like the Olympics, the X Games and others. But those events, he says, can’t really compare to a Carolina game against Duke.

Kiger:You tell me two other schools in this country that are eight miles, nine miles apart, who have the storied reputation of excellence and success. I don’t know of any. Duke’s got five national championships. NCAA. Carolina has six and then, of course, seven if we count the 1924 as voted by the Helms Foundation back in 1924. Let’s just talk NCAA titles. You’re talking about two schools eight miles apart who have won 11 national championships. That’s staggering. That is unbelievable. And then you start talking about the intensity and the bragging rights. Incredible ebullience and depression roll off of those matchups each time that Duke and North Carolina play one another. And, of course, there is the pride of the coaching staffs. Who doesn’t want to beat North Carolina, or who doesn’t want to beat Duke because of the reputation of both programs? It’s an incredibly unique experience. To the fans who berate Duke and hope they never win another game and to the Duke fans who hope Carolina never wins another game, we need each other to be good because that’s the basis of this incredible, unique thing, this phenomenon that we have that cannot be shared, is not shared by practically everbody in this country.

Host:Throughout his time working with ESPN, Freddie’s also had chances to share what makes this rivalry so special.

Kiger:This was a tease that I had the good fortune to be able to write for Carolina-Duke over in Cameron on March 6, 2004, and I’ll try to read it as I hoped Mike Patrick would have voiced it. Each day, each event measured in hours, minutes, seconds and then lost to eternity. A precious few are not. They linger. Committed to memory, treasured. This rivalry is just that. Timeless.

Host:Many of the rivalry’s moments still linger in his mind, but nothing has topped the second Duke-Carolina game he worked as part of the Tar Heel basketball staff. That game was on March 2, 1974.

Kiger:Down eight points in 17 seconds with no three-point shot. Pretty incredible feeling. I was keeping statistics for Coach Smith, so I had to keep some sort of quote professional decorum that I had to maintain. I’m sitting there with John Justice, who became a longtime sports information officer at Wake Forest. We still chuckle about those particular days and times, but we were seated at courtside. I had pretty much resigned myself that we were going to lose to Duke. Woody Durham was already setting the tables for what the ACC Tournament in Greensboro and where Carolina was going to be seeded. And then everything that could go wrong for Duke did, and everything that could possibly have gone right for Carolina did. Bobby Jones hits two free throws. Steal, basket. Another steal inbounds from a player. Basket by Carolina. Foul of a Duke player, who the season before had been one of the ACC’s leading free throw shooters, misses the front end of a one-and-one. And Coach Smith in the huddle, down two with three seconds left. “Ah, boys, isn’t this fun?” We’re chuckling. Sure enough, Mitch Kupchack, sideline fastbreak. Walter Davis, who didn’t go to the spot he was supposed to, catches the ball, turns, a couple of dribbles and throws up about a 25-foot prayer — and it was a prayer — and it went through the hoop. I thought Carmichael’s roof was going to collapse. Unbelievable. There’s been so many incredible basketball games between Duke and Carolina, but that one still. I can’t say a whole lot about the first 39 minutes and 43 seconds, but the last 17 and then the overtime was unbelievable drama. Hollywood couldn’t script what happened in those last 17 seconds.

Host:Of all the memories and emotions that stay with Freddie from his involvement with the basketball, his favorite thing is the relationships he’s built along the way.

Kiger:Day after day seeing those guys in practice and knowing them not as basketball players — not first — but as friends, and we still are. That’s the beauty of Carolina basketball because those friendships and relationships cross generations. If you’re part of the Carolina basketball family, I know it’s talked about all the time, but it truly is a family. I’m not a brother in there. I’m a cousin. But, I like being a cousin, and I truly am flattered, honored and appreciative that I’m still included when things are such that all those guys get together. To be invited to some things, to be with people who have been successful and good people, every day is Christmas when I’m doing that. It’s good.

Host:And, of course, the patriarch of that family is Coach Dean Smith.

Kiger:Coach Smith was truly unique, and what Roy says constantly about him is very, very true. As fantastic a coach as he was, he was a better human being. And, in the long run, yes, Carolina basketball’s very special, but I think most of those people would want to be known as a good person first.

Host:Freddie likes using stats to tell stories. But, as you can probably tell, he also just like telling stories. He got that love of history and stories from traveling with his dad, who was a World War II veteran. Freddie would travel all over the country with his dad — Beckley, West Virginia; Lancaster, Pennsylvania; Knoxville, Tennessee — for his dad’s army reunions.

Kiger:I would sit in the back of these Holiday Inn rooms, listening to all these stories from all these men of the 331^st Infantry Regiment that came ashore at Omaha Beach and battled their way across France and worked and fought and lived and too many of their colleagues died. I would be fascinated. And there is no question that history for me, through my father’s experiences, was never the memorization of dates and names. It was always stories. History’s a series of stories. Put the stories together and tell it that way, and, usually, it sticks.

Host:That’s what Freddie did as a junior high, middle school and high school history teacher. He retired from Chapel Hill and Carrboro City Schools in 1997. But he’s still using statistics to tell stories during basketball games. He also weaves stories together to reveal history as part of a lecture series through the General Alumni Association.

Kiger:Here we are in 2020, and I’m still plugging along. But, that’s the beauty of history. I get to pick topics that allow me to stay engaged, that keep me energized. And, I get to construct those lectures into stories and share that with people who want to be there. I enjoy it. I love what I do. I have a lot of friends who will come back into town and say, “So you’re retired?” No. Yes, I’m retired from Chapel Hill Carrboro City School System, but why would I stop doing what I’m doing as far as working with ESPN and the networks and top my digging into U.S. history and into people of interest because I enjoy it? Why would I want to stop that? No, I’m still enjoying myself.

Host:So when Carolina hosts the Blue Devils Saturday in the latest installment of the rivalry, you can be sure to see him at the scorer’s table, relaying valuable information to the broadcasters. And, Freddie says current Carolina students can learn a lot from his career.

Kiger:Every day is a journey, and that’s the best part. It’s never really the arrival of any destination, but the journey has been wonderful. Not just about history. Not just about sports. I don’t think really a whole lot about the past. I treasure it. I embrace it, but the past, hopefully, allows you to be prepared for what’s coming. Every day I wake up, I am excited about what opportunities may be presented each day, each week. You think when you’re 20 or 21 or 22, you got it all figured out. Oh, my goodness. Now, I think students are far more prepared because of all the opportunities to gain insight and to ask questions and find out who you are, what you are, what you might want to do than perhaps when I was in school, but open your mind. Accept and enjoy what you have. Don’t be surprised, and look forward to what the future may hold. The journey is the most wonderful part of what we have because it doesn’t end. It’s the reason why when I usually email people, rather than my last sentence ending in a period, I use an ellipsis. Dot, dot, dot. Because there’s more to be explored. There is more to be discussed, and the conversation will hopefully continue. Life is an ellipsis. Look forward to what’s coming. Don’t close yourself off, and don’t be afraid of change.

Host:We’re approaching the end of this podcast episode, but if you want to hear more from Freddie, you should attend one of the lectures in his N.C. History Series through the General Alumni Association. You can find more information and register to attend a lecture on their website, Alumni.UNC.edu. The N.C. History Series is under “Things To Do” and “Lifelong Learning.”

Host:Of course, the “Well Said” podcast is like an ellipsis, too, so we’ll see you next week.

Well Said: Falling in love with love songs

Host: It’s 1989. You’re a restless teenager lying in bed, unable to get your crush off of your mind. You hear something in the distance – it’s your crush holding a big silver boombox over their head, and it’s playing your song.

OK, maybe you’re not Diane Court from “Say Anything …,” but love songs have definitely played an important role in your life.

Jocelyn Neal:I think that love songs show us some commonalities of how in our broad society we live our lives. They fill these different moments in our lives. You have a proposal song or a wedding song or a prom song, and then people remember that moment and they remember that song. So, this way in which musicians offer us these soundtracks to our lives and the moments that we want to have a memory point, we encapsulate that with a song.

Host: ­­That’s Jocelyn Neal. She’s a Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Term Professor of Music in the College of Arts and Sciences. She’s been at Carolina for over 20 years, and she specializes in Southern music studies.

Welcome to Well Said, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s official storytelling podcast. I’m Cee Cee Huffman, a student podcaster at Carolina. Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, so this week we’re talking with Jocelyn about what makes us love love songs.

Host:Jocelyn’s heard all kinds of love songs in her years of studying music – from country to pop to classical – but she says she doesn’t have a favorite.

Neal:They come in so many different layers. There’s been a number of people who’ve done great research on what songs are about, and without a doubt three-quarters of songs in, say, country music and slightly higher in pop, are either about happy love or lost love, and that that’s the framing device. So, the majority of the music that we might listen to in regular popular musical genres has some connection to that. So there’s so many to choose from that what any person is going to like and what I like is going to vary from moment to moment depending on what genre I’m listening to at that point in time and whether I want a song that’s just plain happy love, which is not the majority of them, or a song that has a kind of nostalgia or these layers of love. And one of the songs that is super popular, it makes the top list of many lists of greatest love songs ever is a great example of that. And it’s Dolly Parton “I Will Always Love You,” which of course was covered by Whitney Houston and used in a movie. And this use in a movie is also really important because that gives your viewer a visual connection to a song as well. And this song makes these lists of top songs ever, and yet it’s a song not only about love, but about loss and leaving and regret and nostalgia and the bitterness of separation. And that’s a whole lot to put in one song that makes his top list of love songs and which many casual listeners think is the ultimate expression of, you know, “I will always love you.”

Host:So,  love songs aren’t always about love. Sometimes they’re about the absence of it. Or sometimes they’re not really about loving a significant other at all; they’re just pop culture.

Neal:Some songs seem to last partly because we, in our culture, put those songs in moments that get a lot of public attention. And so a lot of times, when someone is looking for a song to become their song or they and their lovers song, they’re going to hook back to a movie scene that they saw or a moment in their lives when they were at a place or in a particular conversation and a song came. So they’re connecting time and song. And most love songs that stand … the test of time. They tend to have a couple of features.

They are specific without being unique. So, they have details in them that you can connect to and you can envision the scene that the songwriter or the performer is creating, but it’s not so specific that you couldn’t also see yourself in that scene. They tend to be very apolitical. They tend to have a kind of neutrality that lets people connect to them, whether the person listening to it is young or old, sort of regardless of where they are in life, they try to use these things that we artificially consider universals to connect to them.

Host:Love songs have a sort of timelessness. They’re not full of references to material culture at the time, they’re about emotional culture. And that’s why we might hear the same song over and over by artist after artist because everyone can emotionally connect with it.

Neal:You find people today connecting to songs from the past if that’s the genre that they like to listen to, or more importantly, if that’s the cultural setting that they imagine themselves in. So, if someone has this mental image of an ideal romantic situation as a 1940s movie, maybe even a black and white movie, then you’re going to have a soundtrack that matches that time period connecting to you for that love song. And if you happen to love R&B, then you’re going to gravitate towards an artist in that genre who can use sometimes even the same images of the same kinds of concepts there.

And there have been so many love songs that people sing and talk about and connect to over the years that songwriters also play with that very idea. And they write love songs about love songs and love songs about the clichés of other love songs. And so, you get this wonderfully self-referential collection of music that an individual can hear as unique and special to them, even though eight million other people also are connected to that song. And sometimes sociologists talk about this phenomenon as a kind of public intimacy. So literally, millions of people are imagining and feeling an emotional response to a song as if that songwriter’s singing it directly to them, and yet it’s transferrable to eight million people. So, you know, you and I, we might not have much in common other than professional interactions, and yet we might both think that Ed Sheeran is singing our personal love song to us, and that’s how, of course, he comes up with a hit.

Many people’s daily existence is colored by how we feel emotionally in connection to the people around us, the people we love, the people we want to love, the people who loved us, who used to love us – all of these different layers of it, and musicians pick up on that. There’s also a market for it. That’s what people want to listen to a lot of the time.

Host:So, the moral of the story is people typically connect to a song if they imagine it expressing something they either can’t or won’t say. It’s like the cultural phenomenon of making your crush a mixed CD or a playlist. Every song says what you can’t.

Neal:For instance, when someone wants to propose to their significant other, rather than have to come up with a lot of words to say, they can even log onto the internet and find lists of available songs that will express what, in many ways, should be the absolutely most personal thing they could say, and they’re going to do it through a recording or through a lip-sync or through a cover of a song that a songwriter wrote. And that seems to have been a trend that is not new, that goes back as far as the music that we could listen to does.

These songs fill a kind of imaginary space and how he would like to interact with the people that we’re closest to without having to say or do the things ourselves. And therefore, we find these songs being used for significant cultural moments. You know, a wedding dance, a proposal. You want to craft a soundtrack if you’re planning an intimate date. These songs really become a framing and enabling device in the way that we interact with people around us.

A lot of people agree that songs don’t reflect us, and they don’t speak to us as much as they speak for us. And this is a common phenomenon when people are with someone they care about and a song comes on that they care about and they either sing along or lip sync along or play their instruments along that we become the voice presenting this song in our space.

Host: And this relatability can lead to a lot of repetition, and that can lead to clichés. With everybody trying to write the next great love or break up song for their newest album, songs can start to sound the same.

Neal:And that’s been going on for a long time. The idea of cliché rhymes and it’s always cited as moon June and love dove above, then becomes fodder not for writing a song about the moon in June, but for writing a song about how you’re not going to just sing about the moon in June. And that also becomes very genre-specific. So, there are a lot of songs in the country genre that say many clichés about love are about things I have no personal experience with, so instead I’m going to use these images or these metaphors. There’s a Randy Travis song says, I don’t know about these, you know, oceans and diamonds. I’m going to instead sing love metaphors about the things that are my country experience. And so, these layers of referentiality allow singers to differentiate from the imaginary generic love song.

There is a song that has a Carolina history that’s kind of fun, and it’s back in 1956. And this goes back to what we were talking about, where songs, love songs have clichés. And one of those clichés is a bouquet of roses or that you bring your lover chocolates. And there was a songwriter from Durham named John D. Loudermilk, and he wrote a song called “A Rose and a Baby Ruth.” And here again, it’s about a songwriter taking a cliché and personalizing it. And so, his song was about being too poor to afford the usual cliché trappings of expressing romance. And so instead, all he can afford is one rose and one Baby Ruth. That’s his flowers and chocolate. And there was a student at Carolina named George Hamilton IV who recorded this song, and it was recorded by a local record label, and it became a big hit. And it actually launched the careers in many ways for both the songwriter and the artist. And so, “A Rose and a Baby Ruth” came to life right here on this campus in 1956. And it’s kind of a Carolina love song. Great for Valentine’s Day on a budget.

Host: But it’s not just a song’s themes that matter, it’s the structure of the song as a whole. Artists can’t just write about love.

Neal:Love is not just the generic topic for a song. We have to dive into which of these kinds of expressions of love we want to write and then we have to make something if we want a lot of people to possibly connect to it. We have to make something that has some repetition in the actual structure of the song that someone could sing along to, because again, one of the ways that we like to connect to our love songs is we like to be able to voice them ourselves, even if we’re not actually singing, even if we’re just imagining or singing or lip singing along.

And so many of the most popular songs have a lot of repetition. They have a chorus that is pretty easy to remember or learn so that we can imagine, if we’re just a listener, that it’s our song, too. And then we want to come up with elements for the lyrics that are specific but not too specific, and that’s the danger zone. It needs to be specific enough to give a reality to the song where it takes on a lived material form. So, you know, what are we drinking? Where are we sitting? What’s around us? What are we talking about? Just enough cultural references to give it an instantiation of material culture. And yet it’s still got to be transferable to someone who’s not sitting in that place or experiencing that exact set of circumstances.

Host:So, there’s a psychology to love songs that makes us fall in love. Music is a powerful emotional and cultural tool, and musicians like Jocelyn in Carolina’s Department of Music are diving deeper into its power every day.

Neal:Most of my research centers on American country music, but I also work on ideas about music and dance. And we’ve just piloted a new course that we’re really excited about, a songwriting course in the music department that is in concert with what’s happening in the creative writing program. So, there are more places on campus where students can develop these skills and explore these areas.

I teach a lot of classes in music theory and analysis. I teach classes in the history of popular music, including country music and bluegrass. And I’ve been teaching the songwriting class as well as graduate seminars and different specialized areas of research.

My research has expanded beyond just song analysis or close readings, and I look at how it’s the music is received in cultural settings. I look at how fans, I’ll say the word, consume this music in different aspects of their lives over different time periods and how we can use our understanding of music as a window into understanding culture and understanding what people’s values are. If we think of these songs, as we were talking about earlier, as speaking for the person who’s listening to it, as giving a voice to an idea or a feeling they have, then we can also look at the music carefully and with good research techniques as a way of understanding what individuals or groups of people are thinking about and concerned about and excited about at different points and different communities in history.

Love songs are the one through thread in all of these different changes and that whatever the conditions are, people seem to always be falling in and out of love and cheating on their loves and that idea of a personal connection to a song still exists all the way through.

Host:So what’s our relationship with love songs? It’s complicated.

To learn more about Carolina’s department of music, please visit their website at music.unc.edu.

Do you have an idea for an upcoming episode of Well Said? Let us know. Tweet us, @UNC, or email us at WellSaid@UNC.edu. You can find Well Said wherever you listen to podcasts, so we hope you’ll subscribe and leave us a review. Thank you for listening to this episode of Well Said. See you next week!

Well Said: Honoring the 100th anniversary of the Negro Leagues

Matthew Andrews:I played baseball. I grew up watching baseball. I don’t know why I love baseball. It’s a weird game. It’s a peculiar game. I know why I love it as an American historian. It’s because all of the stories that I want to tell as an American historian are manifested in baseball.

Host:Welcome to Well Said, the University of North Carolina’s podcast. I’m your host, Will Rimer. That was Matthew Andrews, an associate teaching professor in the department of history. Since 2012, Matthew has taught Carolina students to explore major themes in American history through the lens of sports.

Andrews: At the start of my baseball class, I begin with baseball trivia questions. We have a trivia quiz, and then I tell students, no matter how well or how poorly you did on that quiz, tear up that piece of paper because it doesn’t matter. Those aren’t the types of questions we’re gonna be talking about here. We’re gonna be using baseball to get at the big themes in American history: race, gender, class.

Host:On today’s episode, Matthew will tell us about the Negro Leagues — professional baseball leagues comprised mostly of African American players. The leagues were officially established 100 years ago, but the history of African American baseball, Matthew says, goes back much further.

Andrews:As long as there has been baseball, there have been African Americans playing baseball. But as baseball got organized, African Americans found themselves excluded from organized baseball. The first baseball association creates itself in the 1850s, and black players and black teams try to be in this association, and this all-White association says no. So we see a color line being drawn in early baseball. And so what black players and black teams do is they’re what’s known as barnstorming teams. And they travel around by train or by automobile later, and they try to pick up games here and there. They entertain, and they play baseball. It’s just whatever we can do to make a little money playing baseball. There are a couple attempts at the end of the 19th century to create a black league. There’s something called the Colored League in the 1880s. It only lasts for a couple of months, actually. It’s just really hard to get enough capital behind it. So, the big moment in the organization or the institutionalization of black baseball is with the creation of what we now call the Negro Leagues. Specifically, it’s the Negro National League in 1920 by a Chicago baseball entrepreneur, a former great player himself, Rube Foster. And so if you’re talking about the Negro Leagues, you’re really talking about two leagues. There’s the Negro National League and the Negro American League. They last from 1920 to the mid 1950s. It’s kind of hard to pick an end date for the Negro Leagues, but they dissolve over the course of the 1950s.

Host:The rise of the Negro Leagues coincided with the Great Migration, a time in American history when large numbers of African Americans moved out of the South and into the North. They were seeking better jobs and more opportunities, while escaping Jim Crow segregation in the South.

Andrews:You get these growing urban centers in the North at this time. The Negro Leagues are sort of feeding off of that new northern black population. Attendance numbers sound pretty modest from our perspective today. Attendance at the average Negro League game might be 1,500, might be 2,000. But you got to remember, major league teams weren’t drawing more than about 15,000 at that time. Negro League numbers are pretty strong if you compare them to prominent white minor league teams. They’re pretty comparable.

Host:As a staple of black communities, the Negro Leagues became a platform for politics off the field.

Andrews:At opening day of Negro League games, the whole black community would come out, and there would be bands and people would be dressed in their Sunday best. The pictures are quite remarkable how dressed up people got for opening day. Speeches would be given and they’d be political speeches. They’d be speeches given by the head of the local NAACP, so these were political spaces for the black community.

Host: But players in the Negro Leagues weren’t the only African Americans playing baseball at this time. Plenty of African American teams existed around the country, even if they didn’t participate in the Negro Leagues.

Andrews:There are very few Southern teams in those leagues. Probably the most famous was the Birmingham Black Barons, where Willie Mays got his start. But there were black teams in North Carolina. We mistakenly think of the Negro Leagues as being a synonym for black baseball. They were actually just a very, very small part of black baseball. In fact, the teams in the Negro Leagues, like the Elite Giants or the Brown Dodgers, any of these teams, most of the games they would play weren’t as part of the Negro Leagues. They had their Negro Leagues schedule, but they would barnstorm. They would pick up games here and there. They were always hustling, trying to make money playing baseball. So the Negro National and American League are just kind of a small part. But there were black teams in Durham. There’s a famous team in Greensboro, the Goshen Redwings. So, there were local black teams that we baseball historians still don’t know a lot about. I mean, there are a lot of stories out there, a lot of histories out there about black baseball still to be written. Really, wherever you had communities of African Americans, which you obviously did in North Carolina, you had black baseball teams. They just didn’t necessarily play in the Negro Leagues.

Host:Much of what historians like Matthew know about the Negro Leagues comes from primary sources, like newspapers — specifically, the black press. But a big portion of the league’s history is actually unknown. While grandiose stories of the league have stood the test of time, historians don’t know if many of them are true.

Andrews:There are a lot of holes about the Negro League. So even though the black press was publicizing it as best they could and telling as many stories as they could and alerting readers to what was going on in the Negro Leagues, there are a lot of holes. There is very shoddy record keeping. When we talk about Negro League records, we don’t know who holds the records. We suspect that Josh Gibson hit the most home runs in the Negro League. People say he hit more home runs than Babe Ruth hit in the major leagues. Maybe, we just don’t really know. One of the things I like about the Negro Leagues is that there are all these amazing stories that are out there. Speaking of Josh Gibson, there’s a story, for example, that he was playing in Pittsburgh one day, and he hits a ball so hard and so far it just disappears into the sky. And then the next day, his team there in Philadelphia, a ball comes out of the sky, a guy catches it, and the umpire looks at Josh Gibson and says, “You’re out. Yesterday. In Pittsburgh.” And it obviously isn’t true. But that’s the beauty of the Negro Leagues in a sense that because we don’t know what really happened, because we don’t have all the records, there are all these wonderful tall tales that are out there, and no one can really prove them wrong.

Host:That beauty, however, can lead to inaccurate and romanticized memories of the leagues. But Matthew says it’s important that we always remember why these leagues were created in the first place.

Andrews:What we can never forget is that they are a response to segregation. They only exist because black players are not allowed to play Major League Baseball, so I think that’s especially important now as we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Negro Leagues. And I bet in most of these celebrations, the sentence will not be said: The Negro Leagues were created as a response to racism. They were created as a response to segregation. They were created as a temporary response to those things. We do this with baseball all the time. We romanticize baseball all the time. It’s one of the themes of my course. “Baseball used to be better,” we say. People said the same thing in the ‘80s, in the 1960s. I’ve got a quote going back from the 1860s where there’s a guy in a newspaper saying, “Baseball used to be better. It isn’t what it used to be.” So we tend to do that. We romanticize and nostalgize baseball. I don’t think we want to make that mistake in 2020, romanticizing the era of Jim Crow. We can get excited and energized by the creative response to Jim Crow that the Negro Leagues were, but let’s not forget why they were there in the first place.

Host:The symbolic end of the Negro Leagues was marked by Jackie Robinson’s major league debut for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947.

Andrews:We celebrate the story of Jackie Robinson and the desegregation of Major League Baseball, and we should celebrate that. That’s America beginning to live up to its values about equality and justice for all, and the Jackie Robinson story cannot be told too many times. Jackie Robinson, who comes from the Negro Leagues, he plays for the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro Leagues, and he’s picked by Branch Rickey to desegregate Major League Baseball and play for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and he does with grace, and he does it under tremendous pressure. I think what Jackie Robinson does in 1947 is the single greatest event in American sports history, succeeding as well as he does. But, there is a cost to this success. What white major league team owners are going to realize is there is there are great black players out there. There’s good black talent out there, and they’re going to start raiding the Negro Leagues. They’re not going to pay for these players. Back in the 1940s, if a major league team wanted a player from a minor league team, from a white minor league team, they would pay the minor league team for the rights to that player. That’s not how it worked with the Negro Leagues. They just took. Branch Rickey just took players from the Negro Leagues. He brought them over to the Dodgers. The Dodgers were the best National League team in the 1950s because of their black players, the Giants also in the 1950s because of black players, like Willie Mays and Monte Irvin. And so the Negro Leagues got raided and they suffered. They protested, but the major league owners didn’t really have to respond to those protests. What happens to the Negro Leagues? Well, they go away because the best players aren’t on those teams anymore. They go away because black fans start to lose interest in those teams. African Americans in the late ‘40s and early 1950s, they want to save up their money, get on a train, go 200 miles and see the Brooklyn Dodgers and see Jackie Robinson because he’s their guy. The Dodgers are black America’s team in the 1950s. And they lose interest in the local team, the local Negro League teams, and they stop going to the games. Attendance dwindles one by one. Over the course of the early 1950s, these great teams go away.

Host:Although the Negro Leagues faded away in the 1950s, the leagues, their teams and their players have had a lasting impact on the game of baseball.

Andrews:One of the influences of the Negro Leagues is the way they actually change Major League Baseball. In the 1950s, you wouldn’t really differentiate between white and black baseball as far as the style of play goes at the very start of the 20th century. There was baseball, and then because of Babe Ruth in the major leagues, white baseball becomes as much more of a power game. People start choking down on the bats and start swinging for the fences, and base running and stealing and double steals, all that kind of goes away. What’s known as small ball, the type of ball that like Wee Willie Keeler and Ty Cobb made popular at the start of the 20th century. But that style of ball, small ball, speedball, whatever you want to call it, that continued to flourish in the Negro Leagues. And it’s Jackie Robinson who brings it back, so Jackie Robinson has many effects on American culture, many effects on the game of baseball, you know, he desegregates Major League Baseball, but he’s the one who really is thought of as reintroducing speed and base running and daring back into the game. And so the game of baseball itself, Major League Baseball, improves in the 1950s. Now you have both speed and power.

Host:Do you have an idea for an upcoming episode of Well Said? Please tell us. Tweet us at UNC or email us at WellSaid@UNC.edu. You can find Well Said wherever you get podcasts, so we hope you’ll subscribe and leave us a review.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Well Said. See you next week.

Well Said: 2020's extra special day

Lauren Stiller: People are like, “Oh, my gosh, like you’re 4 years old! You’re a toddler. You’re a toddler driving, you’re a toddler in college or whatever.” I’m just like, “Yeah, so funny.”

Host:Lauren Stiller is a sophomore at Carolina, double majoring in environmental studies and public policy. Lauren will be celebrating her fifth birthday this weekend on February 29.

Welcome to Well Said, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s official storytelling podcast. I’m Cee Cee Huffman, a student podcaster at Carolina. This week, we’re talking all about leap day. Lauren’s going to tell us what it’s like to be born on one, and Jordan Sheely, a senior astrophysics major and science educator at Morehead Planetarium and Science Center, will explain why we have them in the first place.

Jordan Sheely:So, every year we’re behind by just a little bit. Our calendar is behind what the actual time is based on the rotation of the Earth around the sun. So, once every four years we make up for it by adding a leap day.

Host:Lauren was actually supposed to be born on another February holiday.

Stiller:So, I was actually supposed to be born on Valentine’s Day, but I was really late. And my aunt said to my mom, “Hey, I bet you shall be born on leap day.” And my mom was like, “No way. No way that’ll happen.” And then it did.

So, I’ll be turning 5 this year. Every year that passes is basically a fourth of a year for me because I only have a birthday every four years. So, as a 19-year-old I say, “I’m 4 and three-fourths,” just for the fun of it. But I’ll be turning exactly 5 this year.

People think of birthdays, as, you know, this one specific day where, you know, you celebrate the time you came into the world, but they’re actually pretty abstract because even though I don’t have a birthday every single year, most of the time I’m still celebrating even though it doesn’t happen. So, I’ve come to view birthdays as more of just a symbolic celebration, if that makes sense. So, I used to celebrate on February 28 because I was born in the morning on February 29, so I was like, “February is my real birth month, so I’ll just celebrate it then.” And then I realized that because I don’t have a birthday most years, I can just choose when I want to. So now I just take February 28 and March 1 and just make it a two-day thing.

Host:But every four years, when Lauren gets the chance to celebrate her true birth date, she makes it extra special.

Stiller:This year, I’m thinking about throwing a party. So, when I was younger, when I turned like 4 and 8 – my first real birthdays – my parents would throw me frog-themed birthdays because it’s a leap day. And so, they thought it was funny to make the connection. So, I was kind of thinking of bringing that theme back just because I really like the idea and just making it entirely frog themed.

Host:Lauren says that birthdays are really special and personal, and hers is no exception.

Stiller: I do get a bunch of different reactions when I tell people some people are like, “Oh, that’s so cool. I’ve never met someone born on leap day before!” Some people are like, “Oh, that’s awesome you have a rare birthday.” Some people are like, “Oh, that’s so sad that you don’t have a birthday every year.”

Host:But having a rare birthday can result in some seriously annoying minor inconveniences, whether it be registering for rewards with a store, buying a lottery ticket or visiting the DMV.

Stiller:It really varies. One time at the DMV, the system – we had to overwrite it to put in my actual birthday. And on my license in the little bar where it says “turns 21,” it actually says  “turns 21 on February 28, 2021,” because there is no 29 that year, but it said the same thing for when I turned 18, so I decided to test that theory then. And on the 28, if I went and tried to buy a lottery ticket and they just refused to sell it to me, they are like, “no, you were born on the 29. You have to wait until March 1.” Which kind of upset me, cause I was like, “Hey, the government says that I was born on – or that I turned on the 28.”

Host:The root of Lauren’s struggles isn’t just some arbitrary decision for a special day. Jordan Sheely says it’s actually based on the Earth’s orbit around the sun.

Sheely:So, the Earth orbits the sun and our calendar, the Gregorian calendar, has 365 days in it, but the Earth doesn’t orbit the sun in exactly 365 days, there’s a little bit extra. It’s about .24 days, so just about a quarter of a day. So, every year we’re behind by just a little bit. Our calendar is behind what the actual time is based on the rotation of the Earth around the sun.

So, once every four years we make up for it by adding a leap day in February at the end of the month, it ends up being February 29. So that gives us 366 days in the year. So, over the span of four years, we end up with the correct amount of time. Pretty much give or take a couple of seconds in comparison to the actual time given by the Earth’s rotation.

Host: As a science educator at Morehead, where they present science and astronomy programs, they always get questions about leap year.

Sheely:Yeah, it definitely comes up, especially with younger kids. Normally along the lines of like, “Why don’t we have a February 29 every year? Or why aren’t the years always the same?” That, and especially with older kids, “so why do we choose February? Or why did we choose this one day or why did we not do it every 16 years or every however many years instead of every four?”

Host:But Jordan says that, at first, even the people in charge of the calendar didn’t understand it.

Sheely:The priests who were in charge of like, adding the leap years after Julius Caesar had decreed that there were to be leap years back like, right when the Roman Empire first started; they had been doing it wrong. So, they had been adding a leap day every three years instead of every four. So, there was a span of time of about, I think, maybe 100 years where we had no leap days because they had overcompensated for it.

So, whenever the Gregorian calendar came into common use, this kind of got corrected for again. So, we were able to figure out through some sort of math at the time that the Greeks and the Romans were able to do, as well as probably people in like the Islamic civilizations, in China – probably figured this out as well, were able to figure that out, correct for it, and then it comes to be just kind of this completely well-known thing in the Gregorian calendar.

We didn’t have one kind of like, central authority before it all until we started the UTC time, which is Coordinated Universal Time. Now that’s an international coalition that basically decides this is what the official time is based off of the time in Greenwich, which is where the prime meridian is. So, if there is to be an extra leap day or leap second, anything else needs to be added to compensate for whatever we figured out, it has to go through this international group.

So, we’ve definitely come a long way from Caesar decreeing that there will be leap years to this very worldly kind of international effort.

Host:And thanks to this worldly effort, people like Lauren get to celebrate their special days with frog-themed parties every four years – right on time.

To find chances to learn more from educators like Jordan, please visit Morehead Planetarium and Science Center’s website, moreheadplanetarium.org.

Do you have an idea for an upcoming episode of Well Said? Let us know. Tweet us at @UNC or email us at WellSaid@UNC.edu. You can find Well Said wherever you listen to podcasts, so we hope you’ll subscribe and leave us a review. Thank you for listening to this episode of Well Said. See you next week!

Well Said: Revitalizing Morganton

Sara Chester:I think a lot of times people just, kind of, count rural communities out — that they’re places where a lot of progressive, innovative things are not going to be birthed, like all of that kind of innovation is always going to live in a city. And I think there’s actually a lot of innovation that comes out of rural places.

Host:That’s Sara Chester. Sara graduated from Carolina in 2007 with a degree in journalism. Now, she’s the co-executive director of the Industrial Commons, a nonprofit organization dedicated to developing an inclusive economy throughout western North Carolina and creating a culture of dignity for manufacturing workers.

Welcome to Well Said, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s official storytelling podcast. I’m Cee Cee Huffman, a student podcaster at Carolina. Today we’re talking with Sara from her hometown in Morganton, North Carolina to learn how the Tar Heel is rejuvenating a community.

Morganton has historically been known for its strong manufacturing and textile industries. The industries took a big hit during the 2009 recession and they moved most of their operations overseas. Unemployment in the town rocketed to 15%.

Chester:When I was growing up and then as I came back after school, so many of our jobs were being lost, especially in the furniture and the textile industry. And it was because, you know, that you had a mill of 700 people or a furniture company of 1,200 people, and there were one or two owners that that made all the decisions.

Host:But Sara saw it as an opportunity to redefine Morganton and the industries it had relied on for so long. She wanted to harness the power of local workers and small business.

Chester:I started seeing opportunities through entrepreneurship, through small business, but also through other paths to ownership. I started seeing paths to root that wealth here and make sure that the manufacturing jobs that we were creating were inclusive and rooted, versus extractive.

Host:Instead of what Sara calls “traditional economic development,” her work with Industrial Commons focuses on a new kind of economic development. One that encourages businesses to plant their roots in Morganton. She says the hallmark of traditional economic development is recruiting businesses to a community, but the new form economic development keeps them there.

Chester:We’re always going to have traditional economic development, and it absolutely should continue and happen, but I just think there’s this whole kind of opportunity to think about small to mid-sized businesses and how to encourage more scaling. So, I think a lot of people think about economic development in terms of these two buckets: like helping really large manufacturers grow and recruit really large manufacturers into a community, and then they’re thinking on the other end about entrepreneurship and small business. But I think the reality, especially in rural North Carolina, is that there are smaller, small to mid-sized manufacturing firms of, you know, maybe 15 to 50 workers, 70 workers all throughout the state, that neither of those buckets really address how to support and help them. And that was where my interest lied, is thinking about how to help more of those locally owned mid-sized firms scale and grow here in North Carolina and in rural communities.

Host:The Industrial Commons, which Sara helped found in 2015, puts that into practice by leveraging assets from various social enterprises in Morganton and surrounding communities. The result is a new kind of economy, one that Sara describes as inclusive and doesn’t require outsourcing.

Chester:So the Industrial Commons now has six businesses that we have started in Burke County. And all of those are some type of cooperatives. Several of them are workaround cooperatives or moving toward that model. And then several of them are formed more as producer cooperatives. And the whole idea there is to really kind of push the decision making and the power and the control more into the hands of the workers themselves.

Host:One enterprise that Sara and her team work with is the Morganton-based company Material Return.

Chester:In talking with a lot of our local furniture and textile companies, they had a problem with their waste. So, these companies are turning out thousands of pounds of textile waste each month and they didn’t have anywhere for it to go. Often, they were either putting it in the landfill, which they really didn’t want to be doing, but they didn’t have any other option, or they were just kind of holding onto it for years. So, we would go into these companies and they would have thousands of square feet of textile waste that they were just holding on to, trying to find something to do with it. And so, we saw a business opportunity. And so Material Return is a business that goes out and picks up the waste and aggregates it and sorts it all with the vision and the purpose of creating circular economy products. So, our goal there is to collect the waste from these companies, be able to break it down, spin it back into a new yarn and have it made back into a new fabric to go back out on their manufacturing floor as an input. And the whole idea is that you have to start to see your waste as a supply. And so, it just started with this simple problem solving, though, of these companies who needed help figuring out a good, responsible way to get rid of their waste. And it’s turned into a very kind of innovative idea to support a circular economy project. So that’s just one example of the businesses that we’re starting. That they all kind of help solve a problem for small mid-size companies.

Host:Since launching five years ago, the Industrial Commons’ work has brought new life into Morganton and provided citizens with a renewed sense of hope. As rural communities around the state and nation continue to face problems similar to Morganton’s, she hopes that the Industrial Commons can provide a framework for how to leverage a community’s assets.

Chester:I think rural communities, in a lot of ways, are under attack and are often seen as being in decline. And so, I think we have to work together. We have to be pulling in the same direction. And I think, the Industrial Commons, we’ve provided a model and a framework for how to do that, not only for our community, but for other rural communities, and just a sense of hope. I think a lot of folks in rural communities have a real lack of hope. And when you go through something as devastating as what our region went through, which was the loss of a lot of jobs and a lot of furniture and textiles, and at one point we were at like 15% unemployment in our county, when you go through something like that, you just kind of lose you lose hope. The people in your community lose hope. You lose your identity and really the sense of who you are. I think for so long we were really proud to be a textile and furniture community. And there was this sense of loss around those jobs of our identity and a lot of hope. And so, I think we’re bringing that back and we’re giving people a sense of excitement about the future and a renewed sense of excitement about these industries that have long been what our community has relied on and what the workers in our community have relied on. And so how can we use them as assets and see those industries kind of be renewed and reborn in new ways that are both sustainable for the environment and sustainable for workers.

Host:Sara credits much of her success with the Industrial Commons to the work ethic and skills she gained as a student at Carolina.

Chester:I was actually waitlisted for Carolina. It was a really hard thing for me because I grew up pretty sheltered and protected. I hadn’t been handed everything my whole life, but I was smart and things came to me easily, I think. And when I was waitlisted to Chapel Hill, I had probably 10 or 12 friends that all got in and it was just devastating. It kind of felt like the end of the world to not get in. When I finally came off the waitlist and was accepted, I always kind of had this feeling while I was there that I didn’t belong or I wasn’t good enough or I wasn’t smart enough to be there. And so that led to me working 10 times harder than everybody around me to kind of prove my spot and prove that I deserved to be there. And also, I think through that process, learned to really be OK with failure and overcoming failure. And then also just I think Chapel Hill opened my mind and made me comfortable being. Being really excited and open about new ideas and people and experiences and just being open kind of to the world around me and getting an opportunity to come from a small rural community and be a part of something so much bigger than myself and be a part of something that has such tradition and history and yeah, something much bigger than myself. I had a real sense while I was there that I was a part of something special and a part of something bigger than myself. And that has translated a lot in my work because what I’m doing here with the Industrial Commons is rebuilding an economy which is huge and it’s much bigger than one person or one business. And it’s about working together and being open to new things.

Host:Going forward, Sara hopes the Industrial Commons will continue to grow – and provide more people the opportunity to live and work in Morganton, and throughout western North Carolina, without sacrificing the character of the region.

Chester:You know, it’s really interesting in Morganton, we’re sort of down the mountain from Asheville and people for many years have described us as like “Asheville Lite.” We have a local food. We have a great arts movement. We have breweries that are popping up. And it’s a great kind of energy that’s happening. I think the biggest struggle we will face moving forward is how do we harness that growth in a way that doesn’t leave others out? You know, you look at a place like Asheville and there’s a lot of displacement of people who have called Asheville home for a long, long time. And so how do we grow in a way that doesn’t push others out and push out people who’ve been here for a long time and who’ve made this their home for a long time?

We say we would love to see at least 7,000 people in western North Carolina working in some form of employee owned firms or some type of producer co-operative or Federated Network. So, the way that we think about work is that you organize workers in their workplace, you organize those workplaces together into federations, and then those federations can interact with markets. And that would be our ultimate goal, is that at least 7,000 people are organized in that way and have an opportunity to have more of a say in their work life and in the way that they’re living through their work.

Host:To learn more about Sara and her work with the Industrial Commons, you can visit their website at theindustrialcommons.org.

And if you have a great story idea to share with us, send us an email at WellSaid@UNC.edu. Or tweet us @UNC.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Well Said. See you next time.

Well Said: Battle Grove Restoration

Host: Welcome to Well Said, the official storytelling podcast from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

If you took a stroll by McIver Residence Hall here at Carolina, you’d see a beautiful stream filled with budding persimmon and echinacea plants, and you may even be able to spot a frog! But, it wasn’t always this peaceful behind McIver. In fact, it wasn’t even supposed to be a stream at all.

It used to be wet. Just, wet. That not-so-pretty type of swamp that would never drain, thanks to a buried pipe and the natural path of rainwater. Sally Hoyt, stormwater engineer with Carolina’s Energy Services is going to tell us how we went from this swamp to a beautiful landscape thanks to an innovative restoration project in 2016.

Sally Hoyt: So before the project started the landscape was basically turf and trees. So there was some grass kind of in a gentle valley. And there was some trees in the area although actually a lot of those trees were at the end of their lifecycle and actually between when we initially did a survey of the area and when we went to construction several of the trees had to be removed because they were dying and had limbs falling and that sort of thing.

Host: Sally and her team in Energy Services are constantly on the lookout for water restoration project opportunities at Carolina, and the field behind McIver Hall was deemed a priority due to the location, topography, and opportunity to restore land to its natural state, thanks to a process called daylighting.

Sally Hoyt: There’s a lot of benefits to this stream daylighting method which is – the technical term for it is regenerative stormwater conveyance – and it’s kind of a hybrid between the fields of stormwater management and stream restoration.

Host: But daylighting isn’t always cut and dry. There were several different options to restore Battle Grove – that’s what the stream behind McIver Hall is called –  and so the team at Carolina took some time to consider what the best solution was.

Sally Hoyt: In stormwater management, you often use constructed wetlands to settle particles that have pollutants attached to them, and have plants that do some vegetative uptake of nutrients and to slow down the water. And then in stream restoration, you’re often taking an eroded stream and stabilizing it, and creating a natural pool riffle pattern. And so this was a hybrid, where we have pools and we have riffles, but those pools are designed as wetland cells. So, they’re planted with wetland plants and they’re actually designed for water to seep from one pool to the next because underneath the stone that makes up the riffle is a mixture of sand and wood chips that allows seepage, and as the water seeps through it it is providing some treatment.

Folks in our department talked about it. We talked about it with with some experts who were working for the university. We talked about it with some stakeholders and other departments, and we came up with this technique as being an exciting hybrid that got us the habitat benefits and the stormwater benefits, as well as as a university. We like to have our work be tied in with research and we like to pilot new things.

Host: And this new technique – designing pools as wetlands in order for the water to seep from one to the next thanks to the sand mixture at the bottom – it wasn’t just new for us here at Carolina. Battle Grove is the first of only five sites in North Carolina to implement this strategy.

Sally Hoyt: I would say this is the first project of its kind at UNC. What is unique about Battle Grove is that we were improving water quality and treating stormwater for the sake of treating the stormwater and not to offset any new development. So we have some other really cool stormwater control practices on the campus but those were all built in conjunction with new developments.

Host: In 2014, Carolina was awarded a grant by the North Carolina 319 program, which supports watershed restoration projects in the state. When the grant was awarded, the design phase began, and construction started in 2016.

Sally Hoyt: It was not a particularly long construction process. After the initial construction was on in terms of removing the pipe and creating these pools, the grounds department was responsible for doing the planting. And this project would not be the success that it is without the grounds department. They’ve really adopted the site.

Host: Remember how Sally described the idea for the new system? It was a hybrid solution, and the pools of water were designed to seep from one to the other when it rained. That meant that if it wasn’t raining, the land would be dry.

Sally Hoyt: And that’s not what happened. It turns out the groundwater actually, the groundwater table actually rose in response to this project which it turns out is something that happens with stream daylighting. And so there there is constantly water in the system. There’s a tiny bit of base flow through the stream where it’s connected to the groundwater and so the pools are always full of water. So that was definitely unexpected but it has created that aquatic habitat.

Host: So even though the project didn’t go exactly as planned, now there’s an entirely new ecosystem thriving next to McIver Hall, filled with frogs and dragonflies, and even fruiting plants!

Sally Hoyt: So the project ties in with the edible campus initiative that we in addition to planting all native plants at the site. We also selected some plants that are fruiting so in the long run we’ll have pawpaws and persimmons there and there’s elderberries coming.

We’re actually really excited about how wildlife has been taking to this site. I think it makes it the fact that we’ve been able to create that and especially create that where it didn’t exist before where it was just a pipe stream is really exciting and it also provides this opportunity for people who come to visit the site to catch tadpoles and look for macro invertebrates and we have some folks who are looking to identify varieties of dragonflies species that visit the site. There’s a lot of different birds that have been there. There’s there’s some interesting opportunities for citizen science at the site.

Host: And the benefits of the Battle Grove Restoration Project stretch far beyond Carolina’s campus.

Sally Hoyt: Improving the quality of our stormwater is important because it flows downstream and it flows down to places where we – like Jordan Lake – where we recreate and swim, where we go fishing, where we…if you live in Cary…drink the water. So we want to preserve that water quality for those human benefits as well as for the ecological benefits of having a whole ecosystem and including those small aquatic insects that are part of the food chain.

Host: Projects like this one at Battle Grove support an important initiative at Carolina – Three Zeros – launched by Chancellor Carol Folt in Fall 2016. With this new charge, we’re moving toward, well, three zeros. That’s zero water use, zero waste to landfills, and net zero greenhouse gases.

Sally Hoyt: One of the principles of the three Zero’s initiative is to use the campus as a Living Learning Lab. I think that having the Battle Grove of site on campus has given us a destination to talk about stormwater and to talk about water quality on our campus. It will be a window into talking the things we’re talking about today on this podcast, in terms of what is the importance of improving water quality and how do you go about identifying these projects and putting them into practice. So I think that it is fulfilling that goal of being a living learning lab because it’s always more interesting to go see something.

Host: Thanks so much for listening to this episode of Well Said, the official storytelling podcast from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. If you’re interested in learning more about the Battle Grove Restoration Project and our Three Zeros initiative, visit threezeros.unc.edu. That’s t-h-r-e-e z-e-r-o-s dot unc dot edu. You can also visit our website, unc.edu, for more information.

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