Well Said

Well Said

From March Madness to Cuban relations, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill community is playing a role in some of the most important topics and issues making headlines around the world. Join us every Wednesday for the UNC-Chapel Hill's “Well Said” podcast as we talk with Carolina’s newsmakers and experts. Each week, students, faculty, staff and alumni will discuss whats going on in classrooms, labs and around campus, and how it pertains to the local, national and international headlines.

Episodes

March 11, 2020 13 mins
Morganton, North Carolina, has historically been known for its strong manufacturing and textile industries, but those industries took a significant hit during the 2009 recession and companies moved much of their operations overseas. Unemployment in the town rocketed to 15%. Carolina alumna Sara Chester '07 saw that critical time as a chance to reshape the city's economy and build a better future by encouraging businesses to plant ...
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There are 24 hours in a day, seven days in a week and 366 days in 2020. “The Earth doesn't orbit the sun in exactly 365 days. There's a little bit extra,” said Jordan Sheely, a senior astrophysics major and science educator at Morehead Planetarium and Science Center. “It's about .24 days, so just about a quarter of a day. Every year we're behind by just a little bit.” That means people like Carolina sophomore Lauren Stiller only ...
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This year marks the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the Negro Leagues — professional baseball leagues comprised mostly of African American players. The leagues were created in 1920 as a response to non-white players being kept out of major league baseball. “As long as there has been baseball, there have been African Americans playing baseball,” said Matthew Andrews, a teaching associate professor in the College of Arts &...
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February 12, 2020 14 mins
Love songs have the power to define big 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,” Jocelyn Neal said. The Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Term Professor of Music in the College of Arts & Sciences, Neal specializes in Southern music studies, but she said love songs fulfill the same purpose in all genres. “They come in so...
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“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.” Those are the words of Freddie Kiger ’74, ’77 (M.A.) describing Carolina’s rivalry with Duke. It’s a subject he knows well, having watched about 100 basketball games between them from courtside. While finalizing his master’s degree in history...
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Growing up, Lindsey James always loved solving problems and puzzles. She even majored in chemistry in college because it combines science with the problem-solving she liked about math. James liked chemistry so much, she earned her doctoral degree in it from Carolina in 2010, and she’s been here ever since. Now at the Eshelman School of Pharmacy, her research into possible treatments for cancer, HIV and other diseases helps to add...
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Daniel Wallace wasn’t a voracious reader growing up. “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,’” Wallace said. But Wallace had that spark after all. Today, he is Carolina’s J. Ross MacDonald Distinguished Professor of English and the director of the College of Arts and Sciences' creative writing program. He’s als...
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“It really does change your life and the trajectory that your life can take,” said Erin Hager, a senior psychology student from Wilmington who studied abroad in Santiago, Chile, for the fall semester in 2018. Those changes in trajectory come from the personal and social growth you experience while abroad. “A big realization was that I can do anything that I want to by myself,” she said. “That squashes a lot of fear because if you...
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January 8, 2020 10 mins
Today is the first day of classes of the spring semester, but before we jump into all the excitement it has in store for campus, we are revisiting some of our top stories from this past fall — the Tar Heel Bus Tour and FallFest. In October, Maria Estorino, the associate university librarian for special collections and director of Wilson Library, rode one of the three buses that together covered more than 1,600 miles across North C...
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More than 1,500 undergraduate, graduate and professional students turned their tassels to signify their graduation Sunday at Winter Commencement. The celebration acknowledged more than just the students, as commencement speaker Bill Ferris reminded the graduates to consider the contributions they have received from friends and family. “When you see a turtle sitting on a fence post, you know he had some help getting there,” said F...
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December 11, 2019 9 mins
Winter Commencement is a time to celebrate the graduating Tar Heels. But, Bryan Hernandez, a graduating UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School business administration major, knows the day is about more than him. It’s a day to celebrate all of the people who have helped him get to this moment, like classmates, professors, mentors and, especially, his parents. “They gave up everything, so we had the chance to go to college,” he said. “...
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December 4, 2019 10 mins
Everyone gets stressed. It’s a natural part of life. We all face many stressors every day. Stressors can take many forms — jobs, relationships, children. For college students, final exams are one of the stressors they face throughout the semester. Final exams begin Dec. 6 at Carolina. To appropriately deal with stress, Anthony Zannas said, you don’t want to avoid it. “There are certain things in life that we have to come to term...
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November 27, 2019 9 mins
What’s your favorite food? How you answer that question probably isn’t only about how the food tastes but also the memories you associate with the food. For Andrew Hardaway, a research assistant professor in the UNC School of Medicine, his favorite food is mashed potatoes. Specifically, his mother’s mashed potatoes. He’ll make sure to go back for a second — or even a third — helping of them on Thanksgiving. As a member of Thomas...
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November 20, 2019 15 mins
It’s hard to describe a “typical” classroom experience at Carolina. From makerspaces to research labs, learning spaces are designed to provide hands-on experiences. On this episode of Well Said, Katz shares what drew him to research and teach hip-hop and discusses the culture of DJing. The room is decorated with graffiti Katz commissioned from alumni artists and filled with turntables, recorders and CD players for his Art and Cul...
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When Nikole Hannah-Jones ’03 (MA) was in high school, she became obsessed with one year: 1619 — the year African slaves were first transported to an English-speaking colony in the Americas. As the 400th anniversary of that voyage was approaching, Hannah-Jones found herself at the New York Times Magazine, where she works as an investigative reporter. She pitched a project to re-examine the legacy of slavery in this country tied to ...
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