The State of Things

From an early age, Georgiary Bledsoe aspired to a life beyond what she knew as a child. She is the youngest of 17 siblings and grew up very poor in East Saint Louis, Illinois, a city often considered one of the most dangerous in America.

North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein gave the green light for a major healthcare sale in western North Carolina. He approved the sales contract of nonprofit Mission Health to for-profit company HCA Healthcare — with some changes. One of those changes will require HCA to keep operating its rural hospitals for 10 years.

Asheville-based stand up comic Hilliary S. Begley had never acted professionally before landing a role in the hit Netflix movie “ Dumplin .’” The film stars Jennifer Aniston, and is hailed as a feel-good, must-see movie of the season. It tells the story of a self-conscious teenage girl named Willowdean (Will), played by Danielle MacDonald, and her beauty-obsessed mother, played by Aniston, who is more concerned with running her beauty pageant than building a relationship with her daughter.

Guitarist and composer Django Reinhardt is regarded as one of the greatest musicians of the 20th century. The Romani-French composer gave birth to a new form of music in the 1930s known as gypsy jazz or Django music. The genre calls on classical and jazz traditions and is deeply influenced by the musette bands of Paris.

How is the partial government shutdown affecting North Carolinians? The federal impasse is in its fourth week with no end in sight. President Donald Trump demands funding for a wall along the southern border of the United States and says the shutdown could last months or even years .

Self-taught portrait photographer Hugh Mangum thought of himself as an artist from a young age. He attended classes at the Methodist Female Seminary’s art department in Durham as a young boy and ultimately became a traveling photographer.

On Jupiter’s moon Io, lava sweeps across the surface and shoots in a giant arc hundreds of miles into space. Saturn’s moon Titan, meanwhile, has lakes made of liquid methane and is decorated with mountains, lakes, rivers, and cryovolcanoes. For geologist Jani Radebaugh , the marvels of these distant moons never cease to amaze.

A fresh batch of state lawmakers were sworn in last week bringing with them sweeping changes to some North Carolina districts. Both Wake and Mecklenburg County now have no Republican representatives in the House and only two Republican senators between them. Nearly 40 new representatives will officially start work for the long session in two weeks.

Eleven percent of all voters on Election Day in 2018 were Latinx, based on exit poll estimates . According to internal analytics from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee , Latinx early voting participation was up 174 percent compared to the 2014 midterms.

Allan Gurganus is a New York Times best-selling author whose work has been seen on both television and the Broadway stage. The TV adaptation of his novel “Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All” won four primetime Emmy awards, including a best supporting actress win for Cicely Tyson. He built much of his career telling stories of the old South, but in his early days Gurganus was an aspiring artist who studied painting at the University of Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.