Tag: Michelle

  • In the Doghouse

    One thing really does lead to another. Last fall, John Steinberger was sitting in his back yard, idly thinking about his neighbor, Lisa. She’d just put her house on the market, and she’d just gotten a new dog. He didn’t want her to leave. Maybe, just maybe, he thought, he could do something to convince…

  • A River of the People

    About a year ago, writer Phoebe Zerwick and photojournalist Christine Rucker set out on an audacious project to tell the story of the Yadkin River. The river is right now the focus of an intense fight between Alcoa and the state of North Carolina over who should control a series of hydroelectric dams on the…

  • The Murders at Grassy Creek

    When three people were murdered on a Grayson County, Va., Christmas tree farm, suspicion soon focused on Freddie Hammer, a man who earned his living chopping firewood and doing odd jobs in neighboring Ashe County, N.C. In 2008, reporter Monte Mitchell of the Winston-Salem Journal spent several months unraveling Hammer’s complicated past, including his conviction on…

  • A Warmer, Happier Place

    A couple of years ago, a group of students at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, North Carolina, joined forces with a Buncombe County program to weatherize the homes of low-income homeowners as a way to save money — and energy. The program, Insulate!, is becoming a national model for student service on energy conservation and social action….

  • The Need to Read

      About four years ago, I was among a group of radio producers who worked on a documentary project that focused on two main questions: What is poverty? And how has poverty changed since the 1960s, when it was a subject of considerable public discourse? The series, “North Carolina Voices: Understanding Poverty,” aired in 2005 on…

  • Confronting the Achievement Gap

    Mount Tabor High School, in Winston-Salem, N.C., tried to close the ‘achievement gap’ by pushing more students into rigorous course work. The approach fixed some problems, but created others — more non-white students were taking advanced placement or honors courses — but their need for individual help sometimes felt overwhelming to teachers. This story aired…

  • Jousting with the Dictionary

    The story of spelling whiz Josiah Wright, a home-schooler from Fleetwood, N.C., in Ashe County, was one of my very early video pieces, and despite its vast imperfections it is still one of my favorites. Josiah represented Northwest N.C. at the Scripps National Spelling bee in 2007. He made it to the finals, but was…

  • Suicide on Campus

    Two long months have passed and the door to the room where Paul Wilfong lived at the N.C. School of the Arts remains locked, the shades closed. On Thanksgiving night, Wilfong, 22, a fourth-year student in modern dance, turned down dinner invitations from friends, cleaned his room, made one last try at calling his mother…

  • A Strict Protocol

    With a blue-chip pedigree, Dr. William Frederick McGuirt Jr. used to be a respected member of the faculty at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine. Now, he is scheduled to go before the N.C. Medical Board on charges that he falsified research data for an industry-sponsored clinical trial – violating a fundamental tenet of…

  • Making a Lake

    Photographer Ted Richardson and I spent quite a few weekends one summer rambling around the Deep River, where the Randleman reservoir was about to be built.  We met dairy farmers and homeowners, renters and swimmers and lifetime dam opponents, whose conflicting feelings about the dam we tried to capture in a radio story, photographs and…