The State of Things on WUNC

Perry Deane Young died on New Year’s Day at 77 years old. The North Carolina-based writer and reporter landed in Vietnam on the first day of the Tet Offensive in 1968. He befriended a group of journalists determined to go beyond the official U.S. government story to tell a more nuanced version of the unfolding war.

The stories of beat poets helped define a generation. These poets spoke the language of the streets and defied the established literary canons. Poet and author Thomas Rain Crowe was in San Francisco in the 1970s, where he was mentored and inspired by the first generation of beat poets and was part of the “baby beat” generation.

Timothy Tyson is known as an award-winning writer and historian. His books “Blood Done Sign My Name” and “The Blood of Emmett Till” capture a point in history when the fight for civil rights fostered a South ripe with fear, violence and anger. Tyson witnessed much of this first hand as the son of Reverend Vernon Tyson, a respected leader in the fight for social justice.

President Donald Trump headed to the U.S. southwest border Thursday to tout his push for a border wall amid a federal government shutdown. Trump calls the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border a national crisis, while Democrats like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi strongly refute the claim, calling it a manufactured crisis.

Shakespeare’s “ Measure for Measure ” has long been considered one of the Bard of Avon’s “problem plays”: It is neither a comedy nor a drama, and it touches on some especially contentious topics. Written in the early 1600s, the play depicts sexual assault and harassment, and it poses a particular set of challenges for directors and actors staging the production today: How can a modern version provide new insight into the conversation around consent? And what exactly was Shakespeare trying to say

Singer John Ensslin vividly remembers his first concert: Mick Jagger and The Rolling Stones in 1981. His next two live experiences were of David Byrne of Talking Heads and Richard Butler of The Psychedelic Furs. After watching the likes of Jagger, Ensslin knew he wanted to be a front man. He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a degree in art, but even back in school music was his primary passion, and he spent much of his time playing music with friends.

Ethics questions continue to swirl around North Carolina House Speaker Tim Moore after reports that a high-ranking aid in his office contacted the state Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) to inquire about storage tanks at a chicken processing plant in Siler City owned by Moore and his business partners.

Prolific journalist and writer Frye Gaillard ’s latest book takes readers back to a time of profound political and cultural change: the 1960s. Gaillard was a young teen in middle school at the start of the decade, and by the end he was working as a reporter. In those years he witnessed firsthand the power and dynamism of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., both of whom were assassinated in 1968.

Panos Karan grew up with a piano in his home and a dad who loved to play on it for fun. At age 7, Karan asked for lessons, and while some would say it was the beginning of his road to becoming a concert pianist, his first piano teacher would disagree. She thought Karan had little potential, but he kept at it.

More than 500,000 transgender people live in the South, according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law . National data show that nearly a quarter of trans people do not get any kind of healthcare because of a fear of discrimination. A new report from the Campaign for Southern Equality and Western NC Community Health Services examines the specific barriers faced by transgender people who live in the South.