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Hi! Happy weekend.
Earlier this week, a friend asked what I’m looking forward to and all I could think of was: “daylight savings?”—surely there’s more to be excited about, but there are also a lot of frightening things happening.
Earlier this morning, Sarah Willets shared my story about Pauli Murray’s biographical page getting pulled from a National Park Service website, part of a Trump administration culling of LGBTQ+ content and a clear example of how history gets rewritten in real time. Elsewhere, you can read my colleagues’ reporting on immigration crackdowns and the hundreds of USAID job cuts in the Triangle. We’ll continue to follow those stories.
For now, a lighter story: Chase Pellegrini de Paur wrote about the Southern accents haunting this season of The White Lotus. Personally, I started out the season being irked by the drawls of Jason Isaacs and Parker Posey, the wealthy Durham parents of a split UNC-Duke brood, but I’ve come around. We wanted an expert opinion, though, and got Walt Wolfram, NC State linguist and author of Talkin’ Tar Heel: How Our Voices Tell the Story of North Carolina, to weigh in.
In response to Isaacs’ claim that Durham has a very “specific” accent, Wolfram says this:
“We’ve done over 3,500 interviews everywhere in North Carolina over the last 30 years. And no one has ever said that there is anything unique about a couple of vowels in Durham.”
Will our fictional Durham neighbors make it through the “financial, spiritual, and lustful shenanigans” of their not-so-zen White Lotus vacation? Only the next five episodes will tell.
More below. Thank you for reading and supporting the INDY.
Sam Nivola and Parker Posey in season three of The White Lotus. Photograph by Fabio Lovino/HBO.
elsewhere in the culture section
Two interviews about new books with local connections: First, freelancer Jasmine Gallups talks with Tracy Deonn, who grew up in North Carolina, about the release of Oathbound, the latest in her bestselling Legendborn series. She has some thoughtful things to say about the genre, the drawbacks of the “Black Girl Magic” tagline, and the allure of UNC-Chapel Hill’s campus.
Second: Journalist Rob Christensen, a reporter at The News & Observer for decades, just released a book about the newspaper’s complicated political legacy in North Carolina. One takeaway from freelancer Carr Harkrader’s interview with Christensen:
“The N&O, like most newspapers across the country, is greatly diminished. It went, in a few years, from around 270 journalists to around 50 journalists. It is no longer as powerful or as feared. And it no longer has nearly as strong a voice in the capital as it once did. I think the fact that we’ve had the rise of Republican control in the state—well, there are a lot of reasons, but one reason is the diminishment of The News & Observer and other newspapers as a counterbalance.”
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Also: Raleigh chefs roll out a series of unique tacos for charity, and things to do this weekend. ICYMI: A new Watchhouse album, Wheels reopens.
out and about in the triangle
Some news from around town: The annual Music in the Garden summer series is shifting from Duke Gardens to Duke’s East Campus, while the gardens undergo a year-long renovation. (More on that renovation here.) And more on the summer series soon!
Local festival season—aka, the month of April—is fast-approaching. Here’s our annual festival directory, full of community-submitted events for everyone.
Biscuits & Banjos dropped its final lineup, which includes a mix of local and national voices, like Charly Lowry, Dasan Ahanu, Dr. Tressie McMillian Cottom, Toni Tipton-Martin, and more. While the festival is sold-out, we’ll be getting the rundown of some community programming soon. (Meanwhile: You can listen to a brand-new Rhiannon Giddens track here.) I visited the Full Frame’s offices this morning to learn more about this year’s festival and am so amped for it to kick off. Last week, the festival announced its curator; this week, it announced the annual honoree.
— Sarah Edwards —
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