INDY Week October 30, 2024

COUNTER MESSAGING COUNTER-MESSAGING

After weeks of Moms for Liberty and the Michele Morrow campaign disrupting Wake school board meetings, the Wake County PTA and dozens of concerned parents are fighting back by speaking out.

by Chloe Courtney Bohl, p.4

Raleigh W Durham W Chapel Hill

VOL. 41 NO. 22

CONTENTS

NEWS

4 Wake County PTA parents are speaking out at school board meetings after weeks of disruption from Moms for Liberty and the Michele Morrow campaign. BY CHLOE COURTNEY BOHL

6 Progressive Democrats and good government groups are urging a vote against the citizens-only constitutional amendment on North Carolinians' ballots. BY CHASE PELLEGRINI DE PAUR

8 NC State student Ethan Clark worked to get Hurricane Helene on everyone's radar. BY HANNAH KAUFMAN

10 Suspended UNC student protesters say the university lacked due diligence in bringing disciplinary charges against them. BY LENA GELLER

22o4

FEATURE

14 The INDY's 2024 General Election Clip-Out Voter Guide. BY INDY STAFF

CULTURE

22o4

16 Talking with Durham's Bill Adair about his new book, Beyond the Big Lie, and how misinformation in politics became mainstream. BY SARAH EDWARDS

18 On Jesus Piece, the long-awaited debut album by XOXOK, Keenan Jenkins takes apart internalized racism link by link. BY BRIAN HOWE

20 PHOTO FARM, a new space for creatives, has a vision of being both ambitious and accessible. BY SARAH EDWARDS

21 Durham's Omisade Burney-Scott invites storytelling around social justice and menopause. BY DESMERA GATEWOOD

THE REGULARS

3 Backtalk 22 Culture calendar

COVER ILLUSTRATION BY NICOLE PAJOR MOORE

CORRECTION In our endorsements package two weeks ago, we incorrectly stated that NC Senate District 22 candidate Ray Ubinger has never received more than 3 percent of the vote since he began running for public office in 2018. In fact, he has never won more than 3 percent of the vote since he first ran for the NC Senate District 22 seat in 2018; he has run for public office several times before then. Also please note: we updated our Clip-Out Voter Guide with a recommendation on how to vote on the constitutional amendment that appears on all North Carolina voters' ballots.

W E M A D E T H I S

PUBLISHER

John Hurld

EDITORIAL

Editor-in-Chief

Jane Porter

Culture Editor

Sarah Edwards

Reporters

Chloe Courtney Bohl

Lena Geller

Justin Laidlaw

Chase Pellegrini de Paur

Contributors

Mariana Fabian, Jasmine Gallup, Desmera Gatewood, Spencer Griffith, Carr Harkrader, Matt Hartman, Tasso Hartzog, Brian Howe, Kyesha Jennings, Jordan Lawrence, Elim Lee, Glenn McDonald, Nick McGregor, Gabi Mendick, Cy Neff, Sam Overton, Shelbi Polk, Byron Woods, Barry Yeoman

Omisade Burney-Scott. (See story, page 21.)

BY ANGELICA EDWARDS

Copy Editor Iza Wojciechowska

CREATIVE

Creative Director Nicole Pajor Moore

Graphic Designer Ann Salman

Staff Photographer Angelica Edwards

ADVERTISING

Publisher

John Hurld

Director of Revenue

Mathias Marchington

Director of Operations

Chelsey Koch

CIRCULATION

Berry Media Group

MEMBERSHIP/SUBSCRIPTIONS

John Hurld

2 October 30, 2024 INDYweek.com

PHOTO

Two weeks ago, the INDY published its editorial endorsements for all local elections on Triangle voters’ ballots. You can see our list of endorsed candidates in our clip-out voter guide on p. 14. We updated the voter guide to include a recommendation to “vote against” the constitutional amendment on all North Carolina voters’ ballots this fall (see Chase Pellegrini de Paur’s story about the amendment on p. 6). While the response to our recommendations has been quieter this election cycle than in election cycles past, plenty of readers still had thoughts, particularly about our endorsement of incumbent city council member Christina Jones in the Raleigh District E race. We’re sharing a few here.

From reader JOSEPH L. RIDDICK in Raleigh:

As a longtime resident of the Raleigh City Council’s District E, I’m disappointed that IndyWeek endorsed erratic incumbent council member Christina Jones for re-election—especially without reporting her record accurately.

Jones talks a good game about supporting public safety, but her record belies her rhetoric. When it came time to vote this year for a raise for Raleigh’s police, firefighters, and 911 operators, Jones voted flatly, without explanation: No.

Raleigh has a rising crime rate and not nearly enough police officers. The city must increase police pay to hire more officers. Jones knows this, and still voted no.

She likewise rejected alternative policing programs to hire social worker response partners and mental-health crisis clinicians, as well as a homeless-encampment response plan.

Jones also voted against $233 million in badly needed city water and sewer

projects, $42 million in parks and recreation upgrades, $11.4 million to promote affordable housing, and $88 million in city transportation projects, many of them in District E.

Meanwhile, Jones spent her time representing us at the council table chanting with pro-Hamas protesters who demanded a pointless resolution calling for a ceasefire in a war 6,000 miles away over which our city has zero control. She seems to care more about Ramallah than Raleigh.

Despite Jones’ distractions and dereliction, you concluded that she “has done the work to earn another term.”

I couldn’t disagree more. I urge fellow District E voters to elect the far more responsible candidate, John Cerqueira.

From reader DANIEL KOMANSKY in Raleigh:

I wish that your endorsement of Christina Jones for re-election to Raleigh City Council, District E, had addressed Ms. Jones’s divisive conduct during her current term in office. As just two examples, Ms. Jones has recently

(continues

N E W S Wake County

Counter-Messaging

After weeks of Moms for Liberty and the Michele Morrow campaign disrupting Wake school board meetings, the Wake County PTA and dozens of concerned parents are fighting back by speaking out.

BY CHLOE COURTNEY BOHL chloe@indyweek.com

Meg Schroeder was visibly emotional as she introduced herself to the school board as a mom of three kids in three schools.

“I’ve never done this,” she said, her voice breaking. “But I feel so very passionate and that’s why I’m here.”

In recent weeks, the Wake County Board of Education’s bimonthly public comment sessions have increasingly become a forum for conservative political vitriol and viral social media moments. Moms for Liberty and Michele Morrow, the far-right candidate for state superintendent of public instruction, have been rallying their supporters to disrupt school board meetings over issues like graphic content in books. Recently, a teacher was singled out for wearing a tutu during school spirit week. But now, parents like Schroeder and the Wake County PTA are fighting back, bringing their supporters out in numbers to speak against book banning and to support school staff.

At the Wake school board’s September 17 meeting, an Athens Drive High School student named Lorena Benson told the nine board members that her English teacher had assigned a short story that Benson said contained “graphic, incestual sexual language” that made her uncomfortable. A video of her two-minute speech

spread across social media and landed on the Wake County Moms for Liberty Facebook page, where the moderator encouraged parents to “contact your child’s teacher and make sure you know EVERYTHING they are reading.”

At the next school board meeting, a conservative Wake Forest pastor named John Amanchukwu staged a protest during the public comment period, yelling “Justice for Lorena Benson!” and refusing to leave the podium after his speaking time elapsed. A large group of Morrow supporters wearing T-shirts emblazoned with her name clapped and cheered for Amanchukwu as a guard handcuffed him and removed him from the meeting.

Morrow was in the room and had planned the stunt with Amanchukwu ahead of time. In an e-blast to her supporters the day before, she asked them to cancel their plans and join her and Amanchukwu at the meeting.

“We need 50+ people there, in my shirts, standing behind John outside as he gives an interview to the press,” Morrow’s message to the Wake Forest Area Republican Club read. “This is the greatest ‘commercial’ for our campaign and it is FREE!”

Two weeks later, the Wake chapter of Moms for Liberty—a far right group that advocates book bans and anti-LGBTQ

school policies—shared a photo of a male teacher, Adam Chu, at Martin Magnet Middle School wearing a long tutu-style skirt during spirit week. The post called the teacher “perverse” and asked group members to speak about it during public comment at the next school board meeting.

Chu took the attacks in stride, telling The News & Observer, “I agree with the Moms for Liberty that I was totally not pulling off the tutu. Not my best look.”

Members of Moms for Liberty did attend the October 15 meeting to talk about the tutu, disparage the school board, and baselessly accuse public school teachers of grooming students. But they were outnumbered—for the first time in weeks—by a different group of public commenters.

Schroeder, wearing a red Briarcliff Elementary hoodie, explained that her kids have been in Wake public schools for 11 years. She’s also worked as a long-term and daily substitute teacher within the school system. She voiced major concerns about House Bill 10, a state bill that would divert nearly $100 million in public school funding toward private school vouchers next year if it becomes law.

“I have seen firsthand what it looks like to be understaffed, underfunded, and undersupported,” she said. “I am a newly single mom of these three kids and I need

these schools, these teachers, these bus drivers. Please don’t take any more money from our schools.”

One after another, parents of students in Wake public schools took the podium to protest HB 10, praise public school teachers, and call for better school funding. (Wake County Public Schools are chronically underfunded by the state legislature and the county government must fill the funding gap each year.)

“Every time I send my child into her school I am literally flooded with gratitude because I know that she is surrounded by dedicated, talented professional educators,” Carrie Whitaker, a mom to a Wake County Public Schools elementary schooler, told the board.

“The voices that might be ranting about book content, or about what a teacher wore on spirit day—those voices are distractions from what really matters.”

Whitaker urged the board to stay focused on school safety, public school funding, and teacher pay.

As the commenters took turns going up to speak, Marie Dexter smiled and whispered words of encouragement to them from her seat near the back of the room.

Dexter is president of the Wake PTA Council, a nonpartisan, all-volunteer organization that oversees the nearly 200 par-

ILLUSTRATION BY NICOLE PAJOR MOORE

ent-teacher associations in Wake County. In a conversation with the INDY, she explains that the role of a PTA is “not just fundraising and having fun-runs and spring carnivals.” At a time when far-right groups are routinely questioning the value of public education, PTAs are defending it.

The Wake PTA Council sent out an email blast ahead of the October 15 board meeting asking members to come and speak about positive experiences they’ve had at their kids’ schools, the power of PTA, and the importance of public education.

“We were trying to really pack the room at the last school board meeting to counteract the negativity that’s been happening,” Dexter says. “The more we can say it, hopefully the more people will hear our message, and not just the other side.”

Dexter acknowledges that it’s not easy to countermessage against groups like Moms for Liberty or the Morrow campaign, who latch on to specific incidents to stir up anger toward educators and the school board. The PTA Council tries to stay above the fray, she says.

the Parents’ Bill of Rights law during school board meetings, especially when they object to certain books being assigned or accessible at school. The legislation is divisive: critics say it discriminates against LGBTQ students and makes it harder for teachers to do their jobs.

The Wake PTA Council offers a different view of “family engagement” in schools— why it matters and what it should look like.

“For us, family engagement is knowing what’s going on in your child’s school, being there to support the teachers, being there to connect with other families, to volunteer in the schools and help our kids with things like reading and writing and math,” Dexter says. “It’s not about parents being able to approve the curriculum.”

“If you guys want to rant and rave about that, then you go and look a little bit crazy.”

“We didn’t put out any messaging about the issue at Martin Middle because it’s kind of ridiculous, from our perspective,” Dexter says. “The teacher was wearing a tutu during spirit week. If you guys want to go rant and rave about that, then you go and look a little bit crazy. We’re not going to respond.”

Instead, the PTA Council tries to focus on legislative issues and elections that affect public education.

“We know the state legislature is going to be meeting soon about HB 10, so that’s really why we were focusing on getting the message out last week,” Dexter says. “And of course, we want people to understand the importance of researching their candidates.”

Moms for Liberty has found success sharing videos and calls to action on social media, but that strategy hasn’t been effective for the PTA Council.

“We have tried in the past to do some social media posts,” Dexter says. “But all that has ended up happening is that groups like Moms for Liberty have commented very hateful things, and then we’ve had to take the posts down.” Moms for Liberty members often invoke

As for the part of the Parents’ Bill of Rights that requires the school to notify a parent if their child changes their name or pronouns, “that kind of stuff is just hurtful to our students,” Dexter says. “If they can’t talk about that at home and school is their safe place to talk about that, we want them to have somewhere to go to be able to express who they really are.”

Dexter believes in the power of the PTA Council to shift the narrative around Wake County Public Schools, but she also acknowledges that PTAs have their flaws.

“The difficulty with PTA is that there’s a very stereotypical view of a white mom who doesn’t work, who’s at the school all the time doing stuff,” Dexter says.

She hopes to encourage more engagement from dads and Black and Hispanic parents in the future, but she knows that barriers exist to participating in a time-consuming volunteer activity like PTA.

For now, Dexter is focused on the upcoming election, where several school board seats as well as the state superintendent of public instruction position are on the ballot. She wants to maintain a consistent PTA presence at school board meetings past election day.

“If a certain candidate does win the superintendent position, I am sure that we will be busier than ever with our advocacy pushes,” she says. “But even if the other candidate wins, we’re still going to be taking positions and passing resolutions on important issues.”W

B AC K TA L K

(continued from page 3)

made the following public statements:

Using her “christinaforraleigh” Instagram account, Ms. Jones “liked” a September 10, 2024, post in which the writer urges “overthrow” of “the whole capitalist system”, which the writer claimed is responsible for “imperialism, oppression, genocide .. racist oppressive extractionism” [sic]. Ms. Jones, a sitting elected official, is perfectly entitled to state her opinion by “liking” calls for “overthrow” of “the whole capitalist system”, but to do so while she purports to be an advocate for Raleigh’s hard working small business community is, at minimum, disingenuous and deceptive to her constituents.

Also using her “christinaforraleigh” Instagram account, Ms. Jones “liked” a July 19, 2024, Instagram post in which the post’s writer calls Israel “a criminal state.” That writer is the same person who, as your paper reported, Ms. Jones publicly embraced in City Council chambers and who called Hamas’s October 7 mass murder, rape and kidnapping of babies, children, women and elderly Holocaust survivors “a beautiful day.”

Ms. Jones is certainly entitled to her opinions and to her alliances, as disturbing as they are, but is her conduct becoming of an elected public official who claims to show “… empathy and respect to those in need”?

More importantly, should Indy Week reward that conduct by bestowing its endorsement upon Ms. Jones. Respectfully, no.

From reader TIM NILES in Raleigh:

Your Raleigh City Council endorsements seemingly are judging different candidates using different standards. One glaring example is the issue of the

2020 council disbanding Raleigh’s 50 year-old CACs. You note positively that Councilor Corey Branch voted against the disbanding. On the other hand, the only other candidate running for council who has a record on this issue is Jonathan Lambert-Melton who voted in favor of disbanding the CACs. But, you made no mention of this in your analysis. If the issue was important enough to mention for one candidate, it should have been mentioned for both.

Similarly, you could have mentioned the issue of moving Red Hat for both Branch and Lambert-Melton. Branch is the Council Liaison to the Raleigh Convention & Performing Arts Centers. Lambert-Melton is liaison to the Raleigh Convention Center & Visitors’ Bureau.

Both of these council members should have been well informed of the plans for moving Red Hat and closing South Street if they were actually doing their jobs as liaisons. They both should have been keeping the rest of the City Council informed.

The excuse that council just recently was informed of these plans doesn’t pass muster unless you believe neither of these council members were doing their jobs as liaisons. If that’s the case, it should be campaign-ending for both of them.

From Cary reader BRUCE ROGER:

While I always appreciate Indy’s Voter Guide endorsements, I think you missed the mark re. the Cary Municipal Bond issue. The $560M bond is way too costly and the impact to Cary residents’ property taxes is far more than the “9¢ tax increase” portrayed by the Town of Cary’s mailer which was sent to all residents this week. Please see carybonds.info.

N E W S North Carolina

Sowing Confusion

A constitutional amendment on voters’ ballots redundantly seeks to codify that only U.S. citizens may vote in NC elections. Progressive Democrats are urging a vote against it.

BY CHASE PELLEGRINI DE PAUR chase@indyweek.com

Noncitizens may not currently vote in any election in North Carolina.

The state constitution says that “every person born in the United States and every person who has been naturalized” may vote. A statewide referendum on ballots this year proposes amending that to say that “only a citizen of the United States” may vote.

The proposed change doesn’t really make sense, because anyone born in the United States or naturalized is, by law, a citizen.

So why did both parties in the state legislature overwhelmingly vote for a bill to put this confusing measure before North Carolina voters?

In a GOP press release in support of the measure, Republican house speaker Tim Moore said that “recent efforts to allow non-citizens to vote would undermine the public’s confidence in our electoral system and leave the door open for chaos and election fraud to take hold.”

Some cities, including San Francisco, do allow noncitizens to vote for local offices like school boards. But it’s not clear what “efforts to allow non-citizens to vote” Moore is talking about, because, again, the North Carolina Constitution does not allow noncitizens to vote in any election.

South Carolina, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin have similar measures on their ballots this year, although, like North Carolina, none of those states’ constitutions currently allow for noncitizens to vote.

“This pointless bill aims to confuse voters, sow distrust in our elections, and stir up anti-immigrant rhetoric. We will not stand for this misinformation,” says the ACLU of

North Carolina, joining groups like Democracy NC and the League of Women voters in advocating against the amendment.

Senator Graig Meyer, a Democrat who represents Orange, Caswell, and Person Counties, is one of the few legislators who voted against the bill. He calls the referendum a Republican “turnout tool to match all of their anti-immigrant rhetoric” and urges Democrats and progressives to vote against it in this election.

But the measure seems to defy even that simple categorization, as Republicans have largely left it out of statewide messaging. It has not—unlike GOP talking points on immigration, inflation, and “parents’ rights” in education—permeated local or national campaigns. It has not been mentioned at a single campaign event that the INDY has covered this cycle.

That lack of information has left voters— Republicans, Democrats, and unaffiliated— more confused than motivated.

Some corners of Reddit have worried that this amendment could be the first step down a path toward possible disenfranchisement of naturalized citizens. Meyer doesn’t see it as that sinister, but he’s still annoyed that it’s even on the ballot to begin with.

“I don’t understand why any Democrat [in the legislature] would have voted for it,” says Meyer. “The constitution is a document that is foundational to how we build and maintain our democracy. It should not be a political toy.”

Because every Republican lawmaker in the General Assembly voted for the bill, it would’ve passed even without any Democratic support. And although Triangle Dem-

ocrats seem to disapprove of the bill, their votes didn’t always make that clear.

Durham Representative Marcia Morey, who voted against the bill, suspects that some Democrats who voted for it were worried about handing political ammunition to Republican candidates on the campaign trail.

“If I had a contested election, a flier would go out [saying] that ‘Morey votes against citizen-only voting,’” Morey says.

Many of the Triangle’s legislators, though, are not in competitive races.

In a statement to the INDY, Durham Representative Zack Hawkins, who is running unopposed for reelection, called the amendment “a cheap attempt to distract from the real issues my GOP colleagues have neglected in the General Assembly” and “a signaling bill that changes nothing for North Carolinians.”

But Hawkins still voted for the bill, arguing that “we can’t lean into Republican sensationalism, and voting against this political gimmick only fuels GOP misinformation efforts.”

“I’m not worried about GOP attacks, but I’m saddened that this issue got a vote before passing a budget or funding our public schools,” said Hawkins. “If my GOP colleagues were serious about voting rights, they’d be working with Democrats to make sure Carolinians affected by Helene can get to the polls—that’s the real story here.”

Senator Jay Chaudhuri, a Wake County

Democrat who has a Republican and Libertarian opponent this election cycle, also voted for the bill placing the amendment on ballots. He argued that, though a waste of time, it would not have any tangible impact.

“We should focus our efforts on legislation, litigation, and election efforts that actually hurt immigrants,” he said in an email to the INDY, pointing out several examples of his advocacy for immigrant voters. “As one of the few children of immigrants to serve in the North Carolina General Assembly, I’m well aware of how Republicans have used anti-immigration legislation and rhetoric as a way to turn out their base.”

The INDY reached out to every Triangle Democrat in the legislature who voted for the measure. Senators Gale Adcock, Dan Blue, Mary Wills Bode, Lisa Grafstein, and Mike Woodard as well as Representatives Allen Buansi, Allison Dahle, Ray Jeffers, and Tim Longest did not respond to interview requests. Representative Ya Liu’s office asked for a phone interview but did not call before publication.

The INDY also did not hear back from Senator Rachel Hunt, the Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor, who was absent from the June 27 vote.

Among Triangle Democrats, Senator Natalie Murdock, as well as Representatives Maria Cervania, Sarah Crawford, Rosa Gill, and Renée Price, joined Meyer and Morey in voting against the amendment proposal. W

ILLUSTRATION BY NICOLE PAJOR MOORE

Weather Authority

How NC State student Ethan Clark worked to get Hurricane Helene on everyone’s radar.

BY HANNAH KAUFMAN backtalk@indyweek.com

Four weeks ago, Ethan Clark gathered his weather models, leaned over his computer, and attempted to define catastrophe.

From hours of analyzing forecasts, Clark, 21, knew that extreme flooding in Western North Carolina was inevitable. At the same time, the National Weather Service was releasing alert after alert about the danger of Hurricane Helene touching down in an area already drenched from rain. Most people, though, don’t know what “14 to 20 inches of rain” or “historic flooding” could look like.

It was Clark’s job to tell them.

Clark, a fourth-year student at North Carolina State University studying meteorology, runs a weather forecasting page called North Carolina’s Weather Authority. He says he enjoys doing regular student life things, like attending football games and hanging out with friends—but in his eight years of doing daily weather reports, he hasn’t missed a single day.

The Facebook page for North Carolina’s Weather Authority has reached over 585,000 followers in recent weeks, but many people have followed him since he founded the account, eight years ago, at the age of 12.

One follower, Annie Ingram, moved to the North Carolina coast in 2019, where she has watched hurricanes become more frequent and intense due to climate change. After losing part of her roof in Hurricane Isaias, she says that finding a reliable weather source became a necessity.

“I was like, ‘OK, I better buckle down and find something that I can trust,’ just because that was terrifying,” Ingram says. “After Isaias, I found out about Ethan’s account and started following him, and anytime we have severe weather, he’s always on it with his daily forecast.”

With Helene on the way, Clark began posting about the risk of heavy rainfall and flash flooding on Tuesday, September 24, writing in his caption, “Western NC, I am worried about this much rain. Hopefully, the forecast busts!” From there, though, his concern only compounded.

“On Wednesday evening, I sounded the alarm, and was like, ‘It’s going to be bad,’” Clark tells the INDY. “I kept saying I was concerned, because my followers know that if I’m concerned, shit’s really going to hit the fan.”

Clark expected a predecessor rain event (PRE): heavy-impact rainfall before a tropical storm’s arrival. On Thursday, he stayed up most of the night tracking Helene as she touched down as a Category 4, barreling up the Gulf coast of Florida and knocking out roads and cell service along the way. By Friday, she’d made it to Western North Carolina as a Category 2, unleashing hell.

The death toll from Helene in North Carolina currently stands at 98, with more than 40 people still missing, according to the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. The situation worsened in the days after the storm due to a lack of running water and flooded roads that left residents stranded. Haunting videos have been shared across news and social media of once-vibrant areas like Asheville’s River Arts District almost completely underwater. Some of the other hardest-hit cities and towns include Black Mountain, Swannanoa, Fairview, Spruce Pine, Hendersonville, Lansing, Burnsville, and Marshall.

In Transylvania County, one follower was in touch with Clark right as the storm began to hit.

Victoria Arrington lives with her husband and daughter just outside the Brevard city limit and has been following North Carolina’s Weather Authority for six or seven years

after noticing Clark’s accuracy and what she describes as his lack of “excitement” in his weather reports.

“The more and more I watched, I was like, ‘This guy is really good, and he’s breaking everything down, and his accuracy is good,’” Arrington says. “And he never gets excited. That’s the thing about Ethan: if he gets excited, it’s time to get excited, because it’s going to happen.”

Arrington built up a rapport with Clark over the years and was updating Clark about conditions, right up until she lost service. When she regained service at the Henderson County line, two days later, she opened her phone to multiple messages from Clark.

“There’s two or three messages from Ethan,” she says, “He’s like, ‘Are you guys OK? Are you there? Is everything OK?’”

Clark has always tried to respond to as many comments and messages as possible. Lately, though, he’s getting comments of a different tier: people thanking him for saving their lives and the lives of loved ones.

Clark’s interest in weather emerged in third grade while reading forecasts for the elementary school news. From there, he says, he read books and taught himself how to make weather graphics. In seventh grade he began running a weather account called “Ethan’s Weather” for friends and family; once it began to pick up steam at the end of middle school, he rebranded as North Carolina’s Weather Authority and anonymously ran the account all through high school.

“I didn’t want to be a nerd in high school, so I didn’t want my friends to know,” Clark said. “It was a massive secret until it started to sort of get out during one of the

Ethan Clark PHOTO BY ANGELICA EDWARDS

severe weather events—people heard my voice, and one of my high school friends recognized my voice.”

By the end of high school, the page had amassed around 200,000 followers, at which point Clark finally revealed his identity. One high school teacher, Lisa Patterson, says she still remembers the shock followers felt.

“[People] thought it was a retired meteorologist,” Patterson says. “When he announced right before he went to college who he was and who was behind North Carolina’s Weather Authority, people were floored. They were like, ‘Oh my gosh, I didn’t know you were a kid. I’ve been following you for years, and you’re the most accurate, the most reliable.’”

In high school, Clark was an intern meteorologist for WRAL, where he still works part-time. They, too, take North Carolina’s Weather Authority seriously.

“Some of the meteorologists would run their forecast for the week, and then they would ask Ethan, ‘Well, what did you get for this week’s forecast?’ And they would change their forecast based on what Ethan said,” says Patterson.

But Clark’s most important work happens at his own desk in Raleigh, where he can usually be found analyzing multiple maps and radars. He blocks out time to devote to the weather each day, and if he anticipates a particularly busy week of weather, he will highlight the bad days ahead of time.

“I plan my plans around trends,” Clark says. “I tell my friends: ‘You know just as well as me, if stuff goes bad, I’m not going to be able to come.’”

His process involves hours of looking at every possible model and creating maps, graphics, and reports. He also consults the National Weather Service to make sure their forecasts paint a similar picture. He kept up this regimen during Helene, and by the weekend, Clark was flooded with messages.

On Saturday, he got a call from a producer at WRAL and left the NC State football game early to compare reports and help them spread information.

“I was getting thousands and thousands of messages,” Clark says. “And [the producer says], ‘Just come here for like an hour or two and sit here and do whatever you see as important.’ I found some important stuff and they shared it.”

While most of Clark’s reports are written posts, he makes videos for extreme weather events, explaining conditions in layman’s terms. His video about flooding danger in the mountains was what led Hillsborough resident Tori Winfield to question the safety

of her annual girls’ trip to Banner Elk, which she and her friends were planning to leave for on Thursday morning.

“Ethan was talking about landslides and flash flooding and how a lot of deaths occur in vehicles for flash flooding,” Winfield says. “I didn’t feel comfortable driving in that, nor did I feel comfortable having my girlfriends go out ahead of us.”

Because of Clark’s video, Winfield raised the alarm with her friends—some were completely unaware of the impending weather— and they canceled their Airbnb rental and set off for the coast instead. It was surreal, Winfield says, watching everything in Western North Carolina unfold that weekend.

“Ethan posted a picture of Banner Elk, and the roads were washed out to where we would have been,” Winfield says. “We feel like we dodged a bullet there, and we were able to come back.”

Many people weren’t so lucky. There are still thousands of National Guard soldiers in Western North Carolina aiding in relief efforts like roof clearance, search and rescue, and the delivery of resources, and federal assistance for Hurricane Helene exceeded $286 million this month, according to FEMA.

Breaking from his regular weather updates, Clark has used his platform to amplify missing person reports, donation requests, county announcements, and even a heartfelt poem from a Transylvania County elementary school teacher about the beauty and resilience of Southern Appalachia.

“I’ve worked hard because I want people to know how bad it was in Western North Carolina,” Clark says.

The work did take a toll, though.

“Normally it’s fine,” Clark says. “The past two weeks, I’ve had no life. It’s been pretty much do as much weather as possible, and then do as much class as possible, and then go to bed.”

But no matter what the weather is, Clark’s character holds steady, Patterson says.

“He’s still the same humble, down-toearth kid,” says Patterson. “He’s like, ‘I just want to report the weather and let people know, and I don’t want them to panic. I want to inform. I want to teach. I just want to keep doing that, and if it happens to save some lives along the way, then that’s awesome.’”

Clark plans to graduate from NC State next fall. For as long as he runs North Carolina’s Weather Authority, Arrington says she will continue to tune in, always on the lookout for weather updates about the small town she calls home.

“He’s a state treasure,” Arrington says. “We’re lucky to have him here in North Carolina.” W

Chapel Hill

An Ordeal

Suspended UNC student protesters say the university lacked due diligence in bringing disciplinary charges against them.

BY LENA GELLER lgeller@indyweek.com

In May, following student-led antiwar demonstrations that intensified after campus police intervened, UNC-Chapel Hill officials suspended 17 pro-Palestine student activists, according to Students for Justice in Palestine, or SJP.

Federal privacy laws prevent UNC from disclosing or discussing conduct cases.

The students were suspended on summary charges ranging from alleged free speech violations to alleged assaults on law enforcement officials, according to suspension notices reviewed by the INDY. Suspensions were temporary but indefinite, and immediate: during a month students planned to spend taking final exams, they were barred from academic involvement and banned from campus.

Most of the 17 students opted to resolve their suspensions through an agreement with conditions. (Students declined to discuss the conditions with the INDY, citing concerns over a clause that allows UNC to release the document, including the names of all signatories, if any details are misrepresented.)

But several asked for formal hearings to challenge the charges. What followed for two—Hashem Amireh, a doctoral student in economics and the president of the UNC-Chapel Hill Graduate Student Union, and Kaleb, a senior majoring in history and computer science who requested the INDY use only his first name—was a months-long odyssey that led both to question the fairness and transparency of the university’s disciplinary process.

Both students say UNC lacked due diligence in bringing the disciplinary charges. They also allege that, in deciding

their suspensions, the university placed undue weight on testimonies from sources who the students say are biased, including a professor and a campus police officer.

Amireh, who was not arrested, alleges that a professor in the economics department played an outsized role in encouraging the university to pursue disciplinary actions against him. Records reviewed by the INDY support this claim. Amireh’s suspension, which rested on murky charges that he was “observed participating” in violence and “may have provided unauthorized access” to a campus building, was dismissed by the Emergency Evaluation and Action Committee (EEAC) in July. Last week, he faced the UNC Honor Court to address honor code violation allegations, which were also dismissed.

Kaleb, meanwhile, was arrested during a May protest and charged with several criminal offenses, including assault on a government official. The EEAC upheld his suspension, which was based on those pending charges, following a July hearing. He now awaits both the outcome of his suspension appeal—which challenges the university’s use of pending criminal charges as grounds for discipline and alleges misconduct by campus police—and the resolution of his criminal case.

The ordeal has weighed heavily on both students. Amireh, who is Palestinian Jordanian, could have lost his visa if his suspension had been upheld, while Kaleb’s graduation and graduate school plans hang in the balance.

The resolutions of their cases will have implications for the student movement at UNC, where pro-Palestine demonstrations have resumed since the fall semester began. Reports from the besieged Gaza Strip—where hostages remain and where Israeli forces have now killed at

least 43,000 Palestinians, including nearly 17,000 children, according to Gazan health officials, though public health experts say the actual death toll is presumed to be higher—are still unfathomably dire.

Recent actions on campus, including a packed evening vigil on October 7 and a “Walkout for the West Bank” in September, have varied from subdued to charged, with some protesters at the walkout vandalizing academic buildings and the Naval ROTC Armory. Across the board, UNC has doubled down on security measures. Last month, the planned location for the October 7 vigil was fenced off ahead of the event, and the university has implemented surveillance cameras and student ID requirements in response to planned protests.

In a statement to the INDY, UNC’s media relations team wrote that the university often has peaceful demonstrations around campus and that it supports community members’ rights to demonstrate peacefully under the First Amendment.

“However,” the statement reads, “everyone must follow University policies, and we must enforce our policies and local/state laws equitably across the board, no matter the viewpoint.”

Amireh was among hundreds who participated in the Palestine Solidarity Encampment that occupied UNC’s quad for four days in late April.

Following the dismantling of the encampment on April 30, he also attended a rally that escalated when campus police clashed with protesters amid forcibly reinstating an American flag.

But Amireh was not among the 30-plus protesters

Hashem Amireh (right) tries to pull a man off of a fellow student protestor PHOTO BY ANGELICA EDWARDS

detained or arrested in connection with those demonstrations. So on May 3, he was confused to receive a notice of suspension and campus ban. The notice cited two allegations as grounds for his suspension: that he had been “observed participating in at least one physical act of violence toward another person” and that he “may have provided” student protesters with “unauthorized access” to Gardner Hall, the building that houses UNC’s economics department. But it did not explain the origin of the claims or provide evidence to back them, only noting that, as a teaching assistant, Amireh has access to Gardner Hall.

“Just because I have a key and I’m part of the pro-Palestine movement does not mean I provided access to people who were in that building,” Amireh says.

After receiving the notice, Amireh contacted a legal team that had volunteered to represent other student protesters. His options included requesting a formal hearing to resolve the suspension. Preparing a defense would be tricky without a disclosure under the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) to understand the source of the allegations. FERPA requests take up to 45 days, so Amireh had to delay the hearing, commit to remaining banned from campus, and set aside his academic research. Amireh says he could take this route solely because classes had just ended.

“The process is supremely deficient,” Amireh says. “If this happened halfway through the semester, you would feel obligated to have a hearing super quickly to not jeopardize your education, but you wouldn’t have the information you need to … defend yourself.”

Amireh received the FERPA disclosure in June, while he was at the gym. He tried to scroll through it on his phone but it was hundreds of pages long.

“I had to go home to look at it on the computer,” Amireh says. “I couldn’t wait, I was too anxious.”

When he started reviewing the document, his stomach turned. Emails in the disclosure, which the INDY has reviewed, indicated that the allegations cited in Amireh’s suspension notice had come largely from a professor in Amireh’s own department, Jonathan Williams.

Williams did not respond to the INDY’s request for comment.

On May 2, UNC provost Chris Clemens wrote in an email to Amy John-

son, vice chancellor for student affairs, that he had received a photo that he believed depicted Amireh “assaulting an older man on our campus, perhaps an employee.” An attached photo depicted Amireh with his arms wrapped around a man during the rally at the flagpole. Clemens also wrote that Amireh was “likely the person responsible for allowing protesters to camp after hours in Gardner Hall.”

“It would be helpful to get a report of this incident to run it through our EEAC and Student Conduct processes,” Johnson responded. “Is the provider of the photo able to share any information?”

Clemens told Johnson the photo came from Williams and connected Johnson with

“The [UNC disciplinary] process is supremely deficient.”

the professor through email. The next day, Johnson invited Williams to share what he knew about “what happened and who the players are” in a report or a phone call, records show. Williams responded that he was available for a call before noon. Hours later, Amireh was suspended.

Other documentation indicates that the allegation that Amireh provided unauthorized access to Gardner Hall also originated with Williams, at least in part. A chronicle of the information that the Office of Student Conduct gathered from Williams and Donna Gilleskie, the chair of UNC’s economics department, on May 3, alleges that on April 20, Amireh gathered around dozens of people on the third floor of Gardner Hall and “paraded around.” It further alleges that the following weekend, Amireh “again gave access to a large number of protestors.” It does not specify which information came from Williams and which from Gilleskie, though in an email exchange between Johnson and Jennifer Spangenberg, director of student conduct, the same day, Spangenberg shared two photos, attributed them to Williams, and said they relate to the unauthorized access claim. It’s not clear how the photos implicate Amireh. One shows two students, their faces redacted, walking in a hallway, while the other depicts a backpack, blankets, and a pillow piled on a table in a classroom.

ly served on his PhD committee but that the two don’t have a personal relationship and doesn’t want to speculate over whether the professor targeted him. Overall, Amireh says, the disclosure shows UNC’s lack of due diligence, noting that much of the correspondence between university officials seemed as focused on whether Amireh could grade students’ final papers while suspended as on the actual allegations against him. (Amireh ultimately volunteered to complete the grading and submit final grades remotely.)

Amireh likens preparing for the EEAC hearing to a full-time job. To refute that the photo Williams sent allegedly depicts him engaging in an act of violence, Amireh compiled 17 images—video screenshots, protesters’ photos, photos published by the INDY and The News & Observer—that show the before, during, and after of the altercation. Taken all together, the images show that the other man acted first, wrapping his arm around the neck of a protester wearing a keffiyeh and that Amireh intervened to pull him off of her. That man, based on photos and texts the INDY reviewed, was Chris Ducar, an assistant UNC women’s soccer coach. Ducar did not respond to the INDY’s request for comment.

In the days following Amireh’s suspension, Williams continued to email the university.

“I believe Hashem is back on campus and participating in the march today on campus,” Williams wrote in an email to dean of students Desirée Rieckenberg on May 5. A blurry, distant photo of a protester carrying a Palestinian flag was attached. “You can see this beige hat that he regularly wears on the individual holding the flag,” Williams wrote.

Two days later, Williams alleged in another email that Amireh was “advocat[ing] for violence against police” on social media. Williams attached a screenshot of an Instagram post in which Amireh had written “proud of the students at FU and fuck the fascist pigs” in reference to a video of students clashing with police at the Free University in Berlin, Germany. Williams added that Amireh “aspires to be listed on Canary Mission’s site,” an anonymous platform known for doxxing pro-Palestinian activists.

Amireh says Williams previous-

To counter the allegation that he had provided unauthorized access to Gardner Hall, Amireh used location data from his phone. Those records revealed that Amireh was not on campus on April 20, the day it was alleged that he had “paraded” students through Gardner Hall.

Location records also showed that Amireh wasn’t on campus the day that Williams accused him of breaking his campus ban to attend a protest. To further refute that allegation, Amireh found an ABC11 clip that captured the face of the actual student in the beige hat.

To supplement his defense, Amireh gathered letters of support from colleagues and students.

“While I do not know why [Amireh] was suspended,” reads one letter from a former student, “I know that it cannot be because of his character in the classroom or around his students.”

Amireh’s EEAC hearing on July 31 went smoothly, he says. After he presented his case, the panel voted to dismiss his suspension. The Honor Court hearing went similarly, with a panel finding Amireh not guilty on charges of four honor code violations. Johnson, Rieckenberg, Gilleskie, and Spangenberg did not respond to the INDY’s request for comment. Clemens wrote in an emailed statement to the INDY that, in his capacity as a required reporter under [Equal Opportunity and Compliance] poli-

Hashem Amireh PHOTO BY ANGELICA EDWARDS

cies, he has no further comment.

The cause driving Amireh and Kaleb to participate in campus demonstrations is personal to both of them. While Amireh is Palestinian, Kaleb is Jewish and says his family’s history informs his activism—particularly the stories passed down from his grandfather, a Holocaust survivor.

“The way that Goebbels talked about Jews and the way that Netanyahu talks about Palestinians are the exact same,” Kaleb says. “It’s in my grandfather’s honor and memory to be part of SJP.”

Kaleb’s suspension is tied to criminal charges he sustained in the wake of a protest on May 8. The protest began with a rally on the steps of the South Building, where pro-Palestine demonstrators called on administrators to “grant amnesty” to students who had been suspended the week prior. According to WUNC, the situation escalated when protesters blocked the building’s exits and followed administrators, who were being escorted by campus police and a K-9 unit, to the parking lot. Protesters then obstructed several vehicles, including that of Provost Clemens, surrounding his car and striking it as he attempted to leave, per WUNC.

Kaleb was arrested that day and later charged with assault on a government official, impeding traffic, disorderly conduct, and two counts of resisting a public officer. His suspension notice, issued May 24, cites those charges.

In his emailed statement to the INDY, Clemens said he didn’t know the names of “any of the students or others who were pounding on my car, yelling at me (in one case with a bullhorn), breaking into the vehicle, writing on it with chalk, throwing water bottles at it, papering it with stickers, and blocking my way out of the parking lot.” He added they “were not peaceful protesters” and didn’t seem interested in having a conversation.

Kaleb says he offered a detailed account of the events preceding his arrest and “consistently denied wrongdoing” during his July 29 EEAC hearing, including refuting allegations that he had come into contact with the provost’s vehicle or failed to comply with law enforcement directives. But the panel posed some questions that he could not address, he says.

“They asked me a bunch of questions and I said, ‘Sorry, I can’t answer that because I have an ongoing criminal case and I have a right to not self-incriminate,’” Kaleb says. “They asked, ‘What would you have done differently on this day?’ And it’s like, who says I did anything wrong on this day?”

The university upheld Kaleb’s suspen-

sion. A month later, he filed an appeal.

Much of the 10-page appeal has to do with the fact that the university is using pending criminal charges as a basis for disciplinary action. Also central is the role of Capt. Lawrence Twiddy, a UNC campus police officer and voting member of the EEAC. Kaleb alleges that Twiddy’s dual role as a witness to the protest and a decision-maker in Kaleb’s hearing represents a conflict of interest. He also alleges that Twiddy was biased in his decision-making in part because he reports to UNC campus police chief Brian James, who, in a statement about the May 8 protest, labeled Kaleb a leader of SJP and described SJP’s activities as “detrimental to UNC” and creating “an environment of harassment and intimidation to many, including employees.”

In the statement, James further alleged that Kaleb led “the group berating the UNC Police Officers” on May 8 and that he had been a “prominent figure” during previous SJP actions, including when SJP members “attempted to shout down a speaker and had to be escorted out of the Student Union Auditorium” in January.

The appeal notes that while Kaleb is listed as the point person for SJP, he does not hold any official leadership role within the organization, which operates with a decentralized structure. James’s statement “reflects a predetermined, negative view of” Kaleb, the appeal states, “which was likely imparted to Captain Twiddy, thus contaminating his impartiality.”

The appeal also claims that Twiddy used extrinsic evidence during the hearing—a violation of university policy, which states that decisions should be based solely on the evidence presented at the hearing. At the hearing of another student suspended for the May 8 protest, Twiddy acknowledged discussing the protest with two officers he had known for decades and credited their accounts, along with bodycam footage and investigative reports, in forming his opinion, according to the appeal and to a recording of the hearing.

Finally, the appeal alleges that during the May 8 protest, campus police used unnecessary force against Kaleb and other demonstrators. Kaleb recalls officers pushing and shoving him.

“Instead of responding to our honestly very reasonable and very low-bar request of divesting from an ongoing genocide,” Kaleb says, “they decide to call the cops on students and beat the shit out of us.”

Twiddy and James did not respond to the INDY’s request for comment. UNC did not acknowledge the INDY’s inquiry about police brutality toward students in its response to a request for comment. W

INDY's 2024 General Election

Voter Guide

STATEWIDE

NC Constitutional Amendment: VOTE AGAINST

U.S. CONGRESS

U.S. House District 2 W

Deborah Ross (D)

NC Senate District 23 O

Graig Meyer (D)

NORTH CAROLINA HOUSE

NC House District 2 D

Ray Jeffers (D)

NC House District 11 W

Allison Dahle (D)

NC House District 21 W

Ya Liu (D)

NC House District 41 W

Maria Cervania (D)

NC House District 49 W

Cynthia Ball (D)

NC House District 50 O

Renée Price (D)

NC House District 56 O

Allen Buansi (D)

NC House District 66 W

Sarah Crawford (D)

U.S. House District 4 D O

Valerie Foushee (D)

U.S. House District 13 W

Frank Pierce (D)

NORTH CAROLINA SENATE

NC State Senate District 13 W

Lisa Grafstein (D)

NC State Senate District 14 W

Dan Blue (D)

NC State Senate District 15 W

Jay Chaudhuri (D)

NC State Senate District 16 W

Gale Adcock (D)

NC State Senate District 17 W

Sydney Batch (D)

NC Senate District 18 W

Terence Everitt (D)

NC Senate District 20 D

Natalie Murdock (D)

NC House District 29 D

Vernetta Alston (D)

NC House District 30 D

Marcia Morey (D)

NC House District 31 D

Zack Hawkins (D)

NC House District 33 W

Monika Johnson-Hostler (D)

NC House District 34 W

Tim Longest (D)

NC House District 35 W

Evonne Hopkins (D)

NC House District 36 W

Julie von Haefen (D)

NC House District 37 W

Safiyah Jackson (D)

NC Senate District 22 D

Sophia Chitlik (D)

NC House District 38 W

Abe Jones (D)

NC House District 39 W

James Roberson (D)

NC House District 40 W

Joe John (D)

DURHAM COUNTY

Durham County Commissioners, voters select up to 5

Wendy Jacobs

Mike Lee

Stephen Valentine

Nida Allam

Michelle Burton

NC SUPERIOR COURT JUDGE

District 16A Seat 01

No endorsement

NC DISTRICT COURT JUDGE

District 16 Seat 07

Kendra Montgomery-Blinn

Durham County Register of Deeds

Sharon Davis

Durham County Soil and Water

Conservation District Supervisor

Ja’Nell Henry

Durham Infrastructure Bonds: VOTE YES

INDY's 2024 General Election voter guide

ORANGE COUNTY

Orange County Board of Commissioners, District 1 (2 seats)

Jean Hamilton

Marilyn Carter

Orange County Board of Commissioners, District 2

Phyllis Portie-Ascott

Orange County Board of Commissioners, At-Large

Amy Fowler

Carrboro Town Council Special Election

Cristóbal Palmer

Orange County Soil and Water

Conservation District Supervisor

Gail McKee Hughes

NC DISTRICT COURT JUDGE

District 18 Seat 02

Samantha Cabe

District 18 Seat 03

Hathaway Pendergrass

District 18 Seat 04

Sherri Murrell

District 18 Seat 05

Joal Hall Broun

Orange County Schools/Chapel HillCarborro City Schools Bonds: VOTE YES

Chapel Hill Municipal Bonds: VOTE YES

WAKE COUNTY

Wake County Commissioners, District 4

Susan Evans

Wake County Commissioners, District 5

Tara Waters

Wake County Commissioners, District 6

Shinica Thomas

Wake Board of Education, District 3

Jordyne Blaise

Wake Board of Education, District 4

Toshiba Rice

Wake Board of Education, District 5

Lynn Edmonds

Wake Board of Education, District 6

Sam Hershey

Wake Board of Education, District 8

Lindsay Mahaffey

Wake Register of Deeds

Tammy Brunner

Wake County Soil and Water Conservation

District Supervisor

Mark Boone

RALEIGH CITY COUNCIL

Raleigh Mayor

Janet Cowell

Raleigh City Council, At-Large (choose 2)

Jonathan Lambert-Melton

Stormie Forte

Raleigh City Council, District A

Mitchell Silver

Raleigh City Council, District B

Megan Patton

Raleigh City Council, District C

Corey Branch

Raleigh City Council, District D

Jane Harrison

Raleigh City Council, District E

Christina Jones

NC SUPERIOR COURT JUDGE

District 10C Seat 01

Sean Cole

District 10F Seat 01

Jennifer Bedford

NC DISTRICT COURT JUDGE

District 10A Seat 02

No endorsement

District 10A Seat 03

Cindy Kenney

District 10B Seat 02

Ashleigh Parker

District 10B Seat 03

Julie Bell

District 10C Seat 01

Mark Stevens

District 10C Seat 02

Christine Walczyk

District 10C Seat 03

Renee Jordan

District 10D Seat 03

Kevin Boxberger

District 10D Seat 04

Rhonda Young

District 10D Seat 05

Blair Williams

District 10E Seat 03

Crystal Grimes

District 10F Seat 02

Damion McCullers

District 10F Seat 03

No endorsement

Wake County Library Bond: VOTE YES

C ary Municipal Bonds: VOTE YES

Find all of the INDY’s election coverage online here

Atria Books; Oct. 15

Life of a Lie

Talking

Durham’s Bill Adair about his new book Beyond the Big Lie and how misinformation became mainstream.

BY SARAH EDWARDS sedwards@indyweek.com

I

n 2011, former president Donald Trump went on Good Morning America to tease a presidential run and declare his skepticism that then president Barack Obama was born in the United States, a conspiracy that soon proved so useful to his political profile that he became its champion. At the time, racist birtherism was considered shocking and the mainstream press reported it as such.

Thirteen years later, we’ve been worn down: Trump’s prodigious lying has become a part of American political life. In a new book that pulls no punches with its title, Beyond the Big Lie: The Epidemic of Political Lying, Why Republicans Do It More, and How It Could Burn Down Our Democracy, Bill Adair traces the escalation of lying in contemporary politics. But true to the book’s title, Adair urges readers to look beyond just “the big lie”—that is, that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump—and see how widespread and out of control lying has become in the Republican Party.

Adair, the Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University, is well-equipped for the task. In 2007, he founded the fact-checking site PolitiFact, which went on to receive the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for its coverage of the 2008 election. Beyond the Big Lie draws up a frank taxonomy of political lies, dives into Adair’s early 2000s neighborhood friendship with Mike Pence and his family (where he got a front-row seat to Pence’s descent into political opportunism), and looks at the radicalizing effects of social media. Ahead of an event at Flyleaf Books, the INDY sat down with Adair to talk about the election and learn more.

INDY: Hi, Bill. I’ll start by saying that I am sorry that your book is so relevant right now.

BILL ADAIR: Yes. Yeah, I’m the guest you don’t want at your house.

Well, you start the book talking about the balancing act of fact-checkers wanting to appear nonpartisan but, you know, having to acknowledge that one party does consistently lie more than the other. I’m curious how you think that anxiety extends choices journalists make about coverage?

Sure, and there are different genres of journalism here, so let’s take them separately. I think fact-checkers do a great job—I don’t think that they put their thumb on the scale for either party when they’re doing individual fact-checks, and I think they try their best to get a good sampling of things to check. I also don’t expect political fact-checkers to shout from the rooftops that Republicans lie more. When I started off the book, that’s where I was headed. But the more that I talked to political fact-checkers and others in journalism, I realized that’s just not realistic. But I do think that columnists and sort of other entities, maybe universities or independent groups, need to collectively show this pattern—because it is unmistakable, and it is crippling our discourse. What I propose at the end of the book is some sort of

a scoreboard that would be online, maybe even something like the national debt block that you see in New York City, that calls attention to the latest lies, the total number of lies by party, to highlight this disparity. I really think it’s a serious problem that there is such a disparity. And I think that journalists have, like me, ducked the questions because they want to appear impartial.

It also seems—not outside of the scope of journalism but bigger than journalism. Too big of a problem for journalism alone to carry.

I agree. I think this is a systemic problem in our politics, that one party has chosen to just adopt this as a strategy and the other party has decided not to as much. And that’s not to say the Democrats don’t lie—they do, and fact-checkers catch them in plenty of lies. But there is this big difference, and it’s something that people should know.

The book is called Beyond the Big Lie, and you make an effort to talk about the political climate of lying itself and not just Trump. But I wonder if you can talk about the differences in the scope of lying you’ve observed between 2016, 2020, and this current-year election.

This pattern existed when I started covering Congress in the late ’90s. I began to notice it covering tax bills—Republicans are just so good with their talking points, and those

Bill Adair. PHOTO BY COLIN HUTH

BILL ADAIR: BEYOND THE BIG LIE

talking points often exaggerate things or or even have outright lies. I began to notice this pattern then, and it got worse over time. People that I talked to said that it really became part of the Republican strategy with Newt Gingrich, who sort of cemented it as part of the Republican culture.

But then Trump really supercharged it, because he lies so much every day, multiple times, that he normalized lying in ways that no other politician has.

And his lies have, of course, been adopted by many members of his party about things such as immigration. Here in North Carolina, we’ve seen it with FEMA and disaster relief, often linking disaster relief to immigration within these lies. It’s just terrible what’s happened. Of course, those [lies] get echoed, not just by other Republicans but by people in conservative media. And that has, I think, made the party’s culture even more welcoming to lying.

I wanted to ask about Western North Carolina. Beyond the FEMA stuff, are there other lies you’ve seen enter the lexicon during this disaster?

Two phenomena have interested me in watching it. One is that some Republican politicians have been willing to speak up against it and basically say, “Hey, fellow members of my party, this is terrible. We shouldn’t do this. FEMA has been here and been responsive, and the state has been

here and been responsive, and we need to stop lying about it.” So I have appreciated those Republicans who have done that. So that’s one thing—but then Trump comes back and repeats the same lies that have already been debunked. This is someone who just doesn’t care about what the facts are, he’s just going to say whatever. This is something that was driven home to me by a psychiatrist who I interviewed in my chapter “The Lying Hall of Fame,” who tried to explain Trump’s lying. Basically, he said it’s not like [Trump] tries to justify lies. He just does what he thinks he needs to say at the moment.

I don’t want to phrase this as “Are we [screwed] with artificial intelligence?” exactly—but how can news organizations handle and fact-check the rise of AI?

We don’t know about how the bad guys are going to use AI. We also don’t know how the forces of good are going to use AI. We’ve been experimenting here at Duke with trying to use it to clone fact-checks, with the idea that there’s a shortage of fact-checks around the country and that, having AI, you could generate cloned fact-checks using generative AI in states where you might not otherwise have any fact-checking. We call that half-baked pizza. Now, in the meantime, as you suggested, the bad guys are finding ways to use AI too, and that’s hard to detect. In the same way that we can’t, as faculty members, detect when a student uses generative AI on a term paper, it’s difficult to detect when someone’s using AI to create a fake message. It allows someone to hypertarget an audience in ways that haven’t been possible before.

Election Day and the days following it are a vulnerable period for misinformation. How can the INDY and other news organizations help curtail misinformation in real time?

I think we should be really careful about putting out the claims of the people who say they’ve won, about people who say there are shenanigans in voting.

The people spreading lies after the election are going to try to develop themes in some of the falsehoods about the vote, and we need to verify those before we allow any of them to get out. W

XOXOK: JESUS PIECE

Nov. 1 | Self-released | Album release show: NorthStar Church of the Arts, Durham, Nov. 10, 6 p.m.

Unchained Melody

On Jesus Piece, the long-awaited debut album by XOXOK, Keenan Jenkins takes apart internalized racism link by link.

BY BRIAN HOWE music@indyweek.com

It’s one of those warm fall days that are more precious because they’re almost gone, and Keenan Jenkins has driven out to Saxapahaw from Durham for coffee on the balcony of Cup 22. In the outdoor amphitheater below, alongside the Haw River, some children on a school outing are holding up colorful handmade posters while parents applaud and lift phones, and sunlight smooths over everything like a gentle hand.

Jenkins—the singer, songwriter, and ace guitarist of XOXOK—is tall, slender, and fine-featured, with a tiny stud in his nose. Today he’s wearing a fitted black T-shirt, and a thin gold chain flashes around his neck. Unburdened by a pendant or jewel, it hangs in an easy circle, its weight evenly distributed.

This minute detail takes on outsize significance in the context of Jesus Piece, XOXOK’s long-awaited debut LP, which follows 2019’s Worthy EP and a string of brilliant

singles. The album is seamed with spoken-word interludes where Jenkins, over twinkling cocktail piano, portrays a freshly signed musician who goes shopping for the titular status symbol and winds up wearing a blond-haired, blueeyed millstone.

There’s something distinctly old-school about the album, and it’s not just the skits. It’s the cover art, complete with the iconic parental advisory label, where Jenkins swoons in a torrent of crimson gauze under a dramatic embossed font, like DMX meets The Sorrows of Young Werther It’s also the lushness of the music, the leanness of the rhythms, the flowingly braided melisma of the singing, the cover of Erykah Badu’s “Didn’t Cha Know.”

It often wouldn’t be out of place on the Foxy 107 radio he grew up with in the ’90s, and it has a cooking band, including keyboardist Gabriel Reynolds, bassist TJ Richardson, and drummer Joe MacPhail. Though Jenkins’s early

PHOTO BY ANGELICA EDWARDS

music was a hair more Radiohead, Jesus Piece represents his full embrace of live R&B and soul.

“My previous work, a lot of it was me sitting alone in my room thinking what cool guitar thing I could do,” he says. “I started playing with other people and I started appreciating how the guitar does not need to be prominent all the time, how less is more, how space is king. I can still do a tiny flashy guitar thing and bury it; I’ll know it’s there.”

As for specific inspirations, he’s quick to rattle off Solange, Moses Sumney, Maxwell, and Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.” “But he was like, What’s going on in the world?” Jenkins says. “And I was like, What’s going on in my head?”

It’s not a surprising question for someone who studied social psychology at UNC to ask. This background detail becomes most relevant in “Right On,” the meditation on police violence and privilege that first put XOXOK on the INDY’s radar. “Just ’cause I’ve got a PhD don’t mean they won’t—” Jenkins sings, pausing, and the music holds its breath; then his lone guitar scampers across the silence and his voice goes phosphorescent: “Light me right on up.”

Later, on the liquidly gleaming title track, the skit story turns inward as metaphor and takes flight in song, a frame in which Jenkins can metabolize his own evolving relationship with external and internalized racism. It’s the only track that couldn’t pass for a regretful love ballad, and it’s a clue for us to hear the others for what they are: measurements of space between white culture and Black experience, exorcisms of misogynoir, mills to separate guilt from shame, thank-yous and apologies and crucibles of growth.

“Famous artists have the luxury of not talking about what their songs are about,” Jenkins says. “Me and millions of people are going to listen to it and get on Genius and annotate it. But I like it when a musician tells me what their songs are about. I could just say this album is about forgiveness, and that would be fine, but I spent a lot of my life thinking I was very enigmatic and mysterious; ‘stoic’ was the word I loved. I’m trying to move differently and be a more vulnerable person now.”

“I’ve been trying to discover / Just why I’ve chosen my lovers” are the first words Jenkins sings on the album, on “Spell,” a pellucid elixir of gospel and jazz. Quiet fireworks rise behind the long cursive script of his voice, his guitar working like a soft knife.

Growing up, before moving on to the NC School of Science and Mathematics and UNC-Chapel Hill, he was one of few Black kids in his classes in Rocky Mount, and his concept of beauty came from MTV: the blond hair,

Keenan Jenkins of XOXOK poses for a portrait at the NorthStar Church of the Arts in Durham.

the blue eyes.

“I think that western beauty standards really fucked me up,” he says. “I looked back at my dating life and was like, OK, white, white, white, not Black, white.”

“Spell” is part of a duo of engrossing songs featuring harpist Cassie Watson Francillon, the other being “Come Around.” If the first is about rooting out internalized racism, the second is about apologizing for it—to someone in particular, and to Black women in general. “The idea, not cognizant but subconscious, that whiteness is better somehow—I’m saying I’m sorry I took so long to come around,” he says.

The gorgeously candlelit “On Game” actually is a love song … to podcasters. Specifically, the Black podcasters that Jenkins credits for his awakening. The Read, Another Round, Code Switch—they were the first critical looks at race he encountered as an adult. They gave substance and sustenance to the feeling he’d had since reading Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? as a teenager, the book seeming to hint at something vital about the past 16 years, and the past couple of hundred.

“The media narrowly portrayed Blackness as this one thing, and they helped me understand the value of Blackness,” Jenkins says. “That Blackness is vast—I always felt that on the inside, but I had never really seen it on the outside.”

His Erykah Badu cover is about the difference between forgiving yourself and letting yourself off the hook. “I’ve come to this fork in the road with this new understanding,” he says, “and I could take the easy route and not challenge myself to do better, or I could take the hard route, take accountability, and feel shitty about myself for a long time but also hopefully come out the other side a better person.”

The climactic, conclusive “Higher Standards” is that other side, and despite all of this hard learning, Jesus Piece has a buoyant, beautiful, celebratory sound. You might not perceive its thornier themes without the skits, and we all know that skits are made to be skipped. That’s why Jenkins weaves them into live performances, like his upcoming album release show at NorthStar Church of the Arts on November 10, with Tre. Charles.

“It always happens the same way,” he muses. “People hear the first part of the skit—Oh, I signed a record deal—and they start clapping. They’re really excited for me, right? And I’m being very serious. And next they’re like, He wants to buy a chain? OK, whatever. By the time I get to the end, about them wanting you to think that blue eyes and blond hair looks best, the people in the audience get it.” W

A RT

Golden Hour

PHOTO FARM, a new space for creatives outside Chapel Hill, has a vision of being both ambitious and accessible. It catches the light just right.

BY SARAH EDWARDS sedwards@indyweek.com

Navigate to the organization’s website and you’ll find the phrase “a site of possibility” hovering above a grainy rendering of a barnlike structure. Navigate to that structure, deep in the woods, and you’ll find people milling about murmuring words like “resolution” and “balance”; venture further, and you’ll find yourself in a glowing, windowless red room.

Is this a secret society? A religious cult from the 1970s?

No: This is PHOTO FARM, a capacious new photography space on the outskirts of Chapel Hill founded by award-winning photographer Phyllis B. Dooney. It opened in September and offers artists studio space, workshops, and a well-appointed darkroom. And if there’s any shared religion here, it’s the documentary arts.

On this particular day, the group of 15-to20 here is Photobook Dummies, a monthly meetup organized by photographer Ryan Helsel in which photography lovers gather to showcase photobooks.

Today’s meetup is organized around “portraits,” a broad theme represented, here, in photobooks featuring the colorful geometry of William Eggleston, the black-and-white counterculture of Mary Ellen Mark, and dozens others; one book, by Canadian photojournalist Donald Weber, depicts police interrogations in Ukraine. One attendee shows up wearing a leather jacket with a photo of Cindy Sherman on the back—“on theme,” someone comments.

Helsel kicks things off, holding up Sarah Stolfa’s 2019 photobook The Regulars, taken by Stolfa at the Philadelphia dive

where she worked as a longtime bartender. Spread out on the table, the barside photos—glossy and dark, like a Guinness—tease at some urban and mysterious ache, something that can’t be articulated in words but can be gestured toward on film.

“I loved watching Cheers as a kid—literally as a kid,” one attendee says, reacting to the bar photos. “It made me feel nostalgic, even though I was eight.”

This is the first time Photobook Dummies has met at PHOTO FARM, but it’s exactly the kind of group that Dooney, who runs the space alongside operations and outreach coordinator Rachel Jessen, hopes to draw.

“I don’t think I’m the only one who recognizes that there are a bunch of creative folks in the Triangle, and photo people, and a lot of us have managed to not know each other,” says Jessen. “Hopefully, PHOTO FARM will be a great place to connect.”

Dooney and Jessen met while pursuing MFAs in experimental documentary studies at Duke University, where they graduated from in 2018.

Dooney had long dreamed of opening a photography space and says that a series of events, including the onset of the pandemic, prompted her to take the plunge.

“We were all kind of like, ‘Huh, what do I want to do for the rest of my life after this weird moment in time that I never expected?’” Dooney says of the pandemic. “It was a moment where I was like, ‘Shit—life, you know, doesn’t go on forever. I gotta do what

I’m gonna do, I’m getting old and it’s time to start the next chapter.’”

A plot of land on a tree farm, just southwest of Southern Village, proved the perfect place to begin that next chapter. The 2400-square-foot space, designed by Jose Lopez of Habanero Architecture, is sleek and airy, fitted with white oak millwork and engineered wood. The studio faces south; today, it filters in crisp October light.

The Triangle has long had a rich documentary arts scene. There’s the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke, founded in 1989, which encompasses photography, among other kinds of overlapping documentary arts. There’s the annual CLICK!

Photography Festival and there are numerous museums and creative institutions like Cassilhaus, PEEL Gallery, Shadowbox Studio, and Horse & Buggy Press that offer books, exhibits, and programming.

All this has undoubtedly made the area a Southern photography polestar, though the scene is scattered and, with inflation and real estate high, the going can be tough for artists trying to build something. (The Center for Documentary Studies, too, has had a rocky road in recent years.)

PHOTO FARM, remote though it may be, is an opportunity for the photography community to have something of a home base— and to have its reputation further amplified.

“I’m excited about PHOTO FARM on so many levels,” Harrison Haynes, a Chapel Hill artist, writes over email. “It’s thrilling to see Phyllis, a fellow visual artist, make such an organized and forward-thinking investment in the local art community.”

This fall’s programming includes darkroom basics, bookbinding techniques, and a tintype pop-up, the space also sometimes holds open studio and portrait studio hours.

Dooney says that she is currently fundraising for fellowships to make programming more accessible. The Southern Documentary Fund is PHOTO FARM’s fiscal sponsor, and Dooney—who also teaches photography, as does Jessen—stresses that she wants it to be a site of education where amateurs as well as professionals can be drawn into the fold.

Or, as the website tells it: “We are all teachers and students in one lifetime.

PHOTO FARM provides the space to be both.”

This ethos checks out: at the photobook meetup, the barrier to entry is no higher than an interest in the visual and narrative, the analog and the lost art of appreciating what goes into a compelling image.

“I think we’re filling a need, and perhaps for some people, they don’t even know it’s a need they have,” Jessen says. “I hope people recognize it’s a place for everyone.” W

(From left) Rachel Jessen, PHOTO FARM operations/outreach coordinator, and Phyllis B. Dooney, PHOTO FARM founder and director, in the darkroom PHOTO BY ANGELICA EDWARDS

Come Sit with Me

Durham’s Omisade Burney-Scott invites storytelling around social justice and menopause.

BY DESMERA GATEWOOD arts@indyweek.com

When I first met Omisade Burney-Scott I was an eightyear-old sitting in an audience at the Know Book Store on Fayetteville Street. She, like my parents, had brought her elementary schooler to learn about resistance and culture at Durham’s Black-owned Southern Mecca of diasporic scholarship. Over two decades later, our activism would cross paths and contribute to an overlooked intersection of Black queerness and an unsung branch of Black feminism: conversations around menopause.

Continuing the tradition of Black storytelling and movement-building that defined the institution where we first crossed paths, Burney-Scott is still telling stories through a new lens, a new microphone, and a new perspective in a PBS documentary, The M Factor, which debuted earlier this month. It centers some of the leading voices in the conversation around menopause, like Burney-Scott’s (she is also the founder of the podcast and platform Black Girl’s Guide to Surviving Menopause).

I spoke to Burney-Scott for the INDY during Menopause Awareness Month.

INDY: How did living in Durham contribute to your growing political consciousness?

OMISADE BURNEY-SCOTT: When I think about how I ended up [in this space], it’s connected to how I ended up in Durham—Durham and a nonprofit organization called Public Allies in 1995. Next year will make 30 years working in nonprofits in Durham. Public Allies was a leadership development program for young people who wanted to do social change work inside of the nonprofit sector. We would do these amazing political educationaI training sessions. At that time, I was 28. [My son] Che was three years old when I started working at Public Allies and would often come with me to work and come with me to rallies to protest, to training, to workshops. But in that period of time, that would influence my thinking and understanding of all manner of things that would happen after that. I had access to older people in our communi-

ty who were alumni, old-school organizers from the civil rights movement, from the Black liberation movement, from Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—all of these folk who connected with me were working inside of organizations, and we got to learn a lot about how to organize, how to engage in popular education.

In the same way that we were offering training to these young people, we were being transformed as staff. We had to do deeper dives into political education to be able to offer them something.

And I learned that we have an ancestral imperative. It is around liberation for all Black people. Not just middle-class college-educated Black people, but all Black people. So I got cemented in why it’s an “all of us or none” kind of ethos in my twenties, and now I’m in my late fifties. I’m grateful that the training that I received continues to be iterative; it’s not a one-and-done inside of the social justice movement space.

How did this lay the foundation of your work in reproductive justice that you’ve been doing for about 15 years now?

I think about all of the amazing advocacy, policy, public education campaign successes that [came from] the reproductive justice movement, which was started by nine Black women 30 years ago this year, in 1994—because you got to know that you didn’t give birth to yourself. Those are the mothers of the reproductive justice movement. They gave

birth to the movement, the framework, so I could do that work. Many of them are still alive right now. So when you’re thinking about [the fact that] we’ve been able to address contraceptives inside of the reproductive justice framework, maternal mortality rates of Black women, we’ve been able to address LGBTQIA+ issues and needs, we’ve also been able to address sex positivity—why have we not addressed menopause and aging? Is there, in fact, something inherently connected to the mortality of ourselves as human beings, people who are assigned female at birth, women? Because that also associates with our productivity and our ability to reproduce that falls inside of more traditional gender roles, or gender notions held up by patriarchy.

How did that give birth to Black Girl’s Guide to Surviving Menopause?

The Black Girl’s Guide was born out of it, inside of a menopausal body. It was born inside of a body of a person who still—there’s a little Black girl still inside there, and I needed a creative outlet to connect with other Black people in my community. After I was let go of one of my jobs, I felt like the Durham community rose up again to support me as I moved into 2019. I was like, I’d like to have conversations with Black women in my community that I trust, that I love, to explore this conversation around intimacy getting older. People like [poet] Jaki Shelton Green, and [Black Girl’s Guide contributor] Mama Dee Eaton, who is now an ancestor. This was before the pandemic, so the first season of

Omisade Burney-Scott, creator of the Black Girl’s Guide to Surviving Menopause

PHOTO BY ANGELICA EDWARDS

the podcast, I thought it was going to be a finite podcast and then I’d go back to work somewhere. I did not think that I was laying the foundation for a culture, a narrative of reproductive justice and menopause. I interviewed Chass Grissom, who is an ancestor now, in that first season.

Then I said, “We’ll host a couple of events,” right? The first was in Washington, DC. I knew I wanted to co-facilitate this event with a millennial—each event in 2019 was co-facilitated with a millennial, so that way it would intentionally feel [like] an intergenerational conversation. So we co-facilitated [the first event] with [community organizer and consultant] Aja Taylor and [did it as] a “calabash tea and tonic.” It sold out.

Events cost money; [these] were all free of charge, but we had space limitations. [So I] came back to Durham and we said we’re going to do one at NorthStar [Church of the Arts]: Young, Gifted, and Broke with [curator and creative director] Marcella Camara. I worked with a diverse group of people throughout the podcast and event curation. I had also connected with [creative strategist and artist] Angel Dozier and [influencer] Mariah Monsanto. I asked for advice and they offered it, and they also volunteered and they helped me get this thing started. People like [community connector] Aidil Ortiz and [author] Erica Moss, people like my cousins Cheyenne and Charla, like the community again as it always has done since I’ve lived in Durham. The last five years, we have grown because I believe there’s something particular about how Durham sits at the intersection of liberation and creativity, of social justice and the arts. There’s a really beautiful way that we sit at that space where we figure out how art is an innocent.

How is the conversation around menopause evolving post-pandemic?

When I first started, I just wanted to see how people were talking about menopause. The vast majority of the organizations or institutions were coming from a very technical or medical perspective, or a medical or research perspective.

Then there were people discussing it from a peer perspective, but they were white, cishetero, middle-class women. I wanted to see what was in the multiverse. I say “multiverse” because there are infinite possibilities of how someone born with a uterus can have different experiences. The menopausal multiverse has been unmapped for marginalized people. So it’s a very solitary experience. [In] 2019, not a lot of people were

talking about it from a queer, intergenerational perspective. There was one explicitly queer menopause platform, it’s called Queer Menopause by Tania Glyde. They’ve done tremendous work.

There were these white, cishet groups that you had to pay to participate. Conferences, resources, retreats, there was a paywall. It was not accessible. I got a lot of gratis invitations, but those dried up quickly. When I got there, I realized they were looking for a particular cishet, lighter-skinned person [with] a particular class and background. They wanted someone who talked about diversity but not liberation.

What we have seen is a proliferation of podcasts, yogis, nutritionists, mental health professionals, dietitians, psychologists—and what we have with Black Girl’s Guide is a reproductive justice platform on the vanguard. We are the only [platform that is] Southern-based, Black-woman-led, Black-people-centered, explicitly and exclusively, through a reproductive justice and Black feminist lens. From 66 to 24 years old, we have survivors, cis people, trans people, nonbinary, queer, survivors of cancer, divorce, bad credit, bad decisions, mothers, daughters, neurospicy— we run the gamut! We also self-published a zine, which many think [of] manuals of how to navigate menopause, but they’re more than that. The first one was illustrated by Tema Okun, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Eden Segbefia. Gina Breedlove did contributions to that one. The second was about mothering, designed by Assata Goff. There was a poem by adrienne maree brown. The last one was in 2022, around folklore. Gemynii did the artwork for that with a contribution from Arielle Sankey.

What’s next, and what’s continuing?

We have so much work to do. We are now working with currently incarcerated people. There’s a large population who likely come in as a menstruating person, and they will become a menstruating person inside of a carceral system that already has the worst health care on the planet.

I really feel held and supported in this community. I consistently have people who lean in and say, “Are you free? Are you sure?” And it makes me say, “Are you free? Are you sure? Do you want to sit with me and tell your story?” It’s such a delicious invitation. I know you have a story, would you like to tell it to me? Because I have time. And you are the expert in your story. W

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

WED 10/30

THURS 10/31

MUSIC

All Y’all Halloween Ball 8 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

Racine Nago 7:30 p.m. Hayti Heritage Center, Durham.

Truth Club / Skirts / Wished Bone 8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

PAGE

Maggie Cooper: The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies 6:30 p.m. Letters Bookshop, Durham.

STAGE

Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play by Anne Washburn Oct. 30–Nov. 3, various times. Frank Thompson Hall, Raleigh.

What the Constitution Means to Me Oct. 16–Nov. 3, various times. PlayMakers, Chapel Hill.

MUSIC

A Halloween Dance Party: Presented by Mamis & the Papis 9 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

Rick Wakeman: The Final Solo Tour 8 p.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham. Slow Teeth 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

Teens in Trouble / Teenage Halloween / Kerosene Heights / BANGZZ 8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Tinashe: Match My Freak World Tour 7 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.

WXYC Presents: Halloween Night Dance Party 10 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

SCREEN

Nosferatu with Radiohead: A Silents Synced Film Various times. Shadowbox Studio, Durham.

Racine Nago performs traditional Haitian Vodou music and dance at Durham’s Hayti Heritage Center on Oct. 30. PHOTO COURTESY OF DUKE ARTS

FRI 11/1

SAT 11/2

MUSIC

Concert Singers of Cary: The Best of Broadway 8 p.m. Cary Arts Center, Cary.

Livingston: A Hometown Odyssey Tour, Part 2 8 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

Lolivone de la Rosa

7:30 p.m. Sharp 9 Gallery, Durham.

NO VISA presents: Dance Parties R 4 Dancing 10 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

North Carolina Symphony: Holst’s The Planets Nov. 1-3, various times. Raleigh and Chapel Hill.

Rob Gelblum 6 p.m. Lanza’s Café, Carrboro.

Rock en Español: The Latin Rock Invasion 9 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

Richy Mitch and the Coal Miners: The October Moon Tour 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

Surfer Girl / Coyote Island / Beach Fly 7:30 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

SCREEN

ADF: Movies By Movers Film Festival Nov. 1-3, various times. Shadowbox Studio, Durham.

STAGE

The ComedyWorx Show Fridays at 8 p.m. ComedyWorx, Raleigh.

Griot Poetry Slam 7 p.m. The Fruit, Durham.

The Harry Show Fridays at 10 p.m. ComedyWorx, Raleigh.

Jeff Arcuri 7 p.m. DPAC, Durham.

MUSIC

APP AID Fundraiser for Community Foundation of Western NC 6 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

The Cajammers 7 p.m. Succotash, Durham.

Dreamroot / SMYA 7 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Grum 9 p.m. The Fruit, Durham.

Hockey Dad / Remo Drive 8 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

Schooner: You Forget about Your Heart 20th Anniversary 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

SPELLBOUND: A GOTH DANCE NIGHT 10:30 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

SUN 11/3

STAGE

Carolina Ballet: Jekyll & Hyde 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Fletcher Opera Theater, Raleigh.

David Sedaris 8 p.m. Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

Harold Night 8:30 p.m. Mettlesome Theater, Durham.

ART

NCMA Teen Day: Samurai: The Making of a Warrior 12 p.m. North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh.

MUSIC

Butler Knowles Trio 7 p.m. Sharp 9 Gallery, Durham.

Drug Church / Modern Color / Soul Blind / Pony 7:30 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

Mac McAnally 8 p.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.

Melt / MARIS / Galloway 7:45 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

Pigeons Playing Ping Pong / Kendall Street Company

7:30 p.m. The Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

The Raleigh Flute Choir: Musical Portraits 3 p.m. Glenaire Theater, Cary.

STAGE

Carolina Ballet: Jekyll & Hyde 2 p.m. Fletcher Opera Theater, Raleigh.

Indie band Melt performs at Cat’s Cradle on November 3. PHOTO COURTESY OF CAT’S CRADLE

MON 11/4 TUES 11/5

MUSIC

The Dear Hunter / Reign of Kindo / Redwood 7 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

SCREEN

The Apprentice 7 p.m. Shadowbox Studio, Durham.

MUSIC

Election Day Benefit for WNC 7 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

Jeremy “Bean” Clemons Tuesdays at 8 p.m. Kingfisher, Durham.

WED 11/6

MUSIC

andmoreagain presents: NOUN / BANGZZ / Weird God 8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Blues Traveler 7 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.

Kitchen Dwellers / Shadowgrass 8:30 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

STAGE

Curse of the Starving Class Nov. 6-17, various times. Theatre Raleigh, Raleigh.

Whose Live Anyway? 7:30 p.m. Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

ART

Small School Artist Talks: Ellen Harvey 6 p.m. North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh.

THURS

11/7 FRI 11/8

MUSIC

andmoreagain presents: Outer World / Entrez Vous / Future Fix 7 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham.

The Devil Wears Prada: IS ETERNAL Tour 6:30 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.

Leela James 8 p.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.

Obskür 10 p.m. The Fruit, Durham.

Six Organs of Admittance 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

Tedeschi Trucks Band: Deuces Wild Tour Nov. 7-8, 8 p.m. Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

Tenebrae 7:30 p.m. Duke Chapel, Durham.

STAGE

Changing Same: The ColdBlooded Murder of Booker T. Spicely Nov. 7-10, 7:30 p.m. Swain Hall Black Box Theater, Chapel Hill.

PAGE

Megan Goodwin and Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst: Religion Is Not Done with You 5:30 p.m. Flyleaf books, Chapel Hill.

Miller Oberman: Impossible Things 6:30 Letters Bookshop, Durham.

MUSIC

andemoreagain Presents: Certainly So 7:30 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham.

Clem Snide 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

iDKHOW: iMPENDiNG GLOOM Tour 8 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.

Keith Ganz Quartet 7:30 p.m. Sharp 9 Gallery, Durham.

Layton Giordani 9 p.m. The Fruit, Durham.

Radical Healing Benefit w/ Sylvan Esso, Shirlette Ammons, HC McEntire, and Femi the Femme 7 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

Machine Girl / Kill Alters / Snooper 8 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

Mellow Swells / Frut / DJ SMALLPAWS 9 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Catch NOUN at the Pinhook on November 6.

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE PINHOOK

STAGE

The ComedyWorx Show Fridays at 8 p.m. ComedyWorx, Raleigh.

The Harry Show Fridays at 10 p.m. ComedyWorx, Raleigh.

Nick Swardson: Toilet Head 7:30 p.m. The Carolina Theatre, Raleigh.

Sarah Silverman 8 p.m. DPAC, Durham.

SCREEN

Swan Lake Nov. 8-10, various times. Marbles IMAX, Raleigh.

MUSIC

Ashley Kutcher 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

Benefit Show for WNC w/ Sluice, Slow Teeth, T Gold, Dunums, MEGABITCH

6 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

Ciompi Quartet: Vienna to L.A. 7:30 p.m. Baldwin Auditorium, Durham.

Dawes: Oh Brother Tour 7:30 p.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.

Erie Choir / The BQs / Carpenter/Cohen 8 p.m. Shadowbox Studio, Durham.

G-Eazy: Freak Show World Tour 8 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.

Morrissey 8:30 p.m. DPAC, Durham.

Sam Barber: Restless Mind Tour 8 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

TV Moms / Franky and the Slight Incline 7 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

STAGE

Golden Age Comedy 8:30 p.m. Mettlesome Theater, Durham.

MUSIC

Anne Malin / Ravine / Abby Johnson 7:30 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Anthony Raneri 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

Knock on Wood: A Stax Records Tribute 2 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

Live Jazz with Cy Salmonson and Friends 11 a.m. Lanza’s Café, Carrboro.

North Carolina Opera: Ernani 2 p.m. Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

Will Mcbride Group with VCT Radio 7 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

PAGE

GWAR: Age of Entitlement Tour 6:30 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.

Second Sunday Poetry Series: Fred Joiner and Paul Jones 2:30 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill.

MUSIC

Allie X 8 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

Cavetown Live in Concert 7 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.

P!nk / KidCutUp 7:30 p.m. PNC Arena, Raleigh.

Them Coulee Boys 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

MUSIC

André 3000 7:30 p.m. DPAC, Durham.

Jeremy “Bean” Clemons Tuesdays at 8 p.m. Kingfisher, Durham.

Slowdive 8 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.

The Staves 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room Carrboro

STAGE

Black Power Rangers Comedy Tour! 8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

PAGE

Lloyd Kramer: Traveling to Unknown Places 5:30 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill.

Electronic duo Machine Girl plays at Lincoln Theatre on November 8.

PHOTO COURTESY OF LINCOLN THEATRE

SU | DO | KU

© Puzzles by Pappocom

Difficulty level: MEDIUM

There is really only one rule to Sudoku: Fill in the game board so that the numbers 1 through 9 occur exactly once in each row, column, and 3x3 box. The numbers can appear in any order and diagonals are not considered. Your initial game board will consist of several numbers that are already placed. Those numbers cannot be changed. Your goal is to fill in the empty squares following the simple rule above.

If you’re stumped, find the answer keys for these puzzles and archives of previous puzzles (and their solutions) at indyweek.com/puzzles-page or scan this QR code for a link. Best of luck, and have fun!

U Z Z L E S

Los Angeles Times Sunday Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Patti Varol

EMPLOYMENT

IT Professionals

IT Professionals:GRAIL, LLC. seeks the following position in Durham, NC: Senior Netsuite Engineer (job code 16829812): Design/implement NetSuite solutions according to business & stakeholder requirements from various depts. BS + 5 yrs. Local telecommuting permitted. Salary for new hires in this role: $154,482 - $190,000. Senior Software Engineer (job code 4556761): Set up/maintain/ automate code or test application platforms, such as Mobile, Desktop, & Web, Salary range for new hires in this role: $107,619- $180,000.Send resumes to grailjobs@grailbio.com, must refer to job title and job code. Employment and background checks may be required.

EMPLOYMENT

Salesforce Developer

Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings in Durham, NC seeks a Salesforce Developer to analyze, design, develop, unit test & implement computer software applications using Salesforce, Salesforce Lightning, Apex & Visualforce for Salesforce Service Cloud & Sales Cloud. Reqs BS+5 or MS+3yrs exp.; To apply, send resume to: Labcorphold@labcorp.com ; Ref #240913.

Senior Quality Test Analyst II

Senior Quality Test Analyst II sought by LexisNexis USA in Raleigh, NC to be responsible for quality/ integrity of data moving from one database to another for SaaS based application. Compare large volumes of transformed data from different sources (ex: databases, flat files, etc) using automated/ manual testing. Minimum of Bachelor’s degree or foreign equivalent in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, or rltd + 5 yrs exp in job offered or rltd occupations required. Employee reports to LexisNexis USA office in Raleigh, NC but may telecommute from any location within US. Interested candidates should apply via following link: https://relx.wd3.myworkdayjobs. com/relx/job/Raleigh-NC/Senior-Quality-Test -Analyst-II_R85110.

Software Engineer IV

Software Engineer IV, F/T at Truist (Raleigh, NC) Deliver highly complex solutions w/ significant system linkages, dependencies, associated risk. Lead & perform dvlpmt efforts such as analysis, dsgn, coding/creating, & testing. Must have Bach’s deg in Comp Sci, Comp Engg, or related tech’l field. Must have 8 yrs of progressive exp in s/ ware dvlpmt or IT consulting positions utilizing/ performing the following: applying in-depth knowl in info systems & understanding of key business processes & competitive strategies related to the IT function to identify, apply, & implmt IT best practices; applying broad functional knowl in reqmt gathering, analysis, dsgn, dvlpmt, testing, implmtn, & deployment of applications; planning & managing projects & solving complex problems by applying best practice; providing direction & mentoring less exp’d teammates; & utilizing exp w/: Banking Deposits Eco System Applications, incl: Deposit Systems, Investment Systems, Time Investments, SafeBox, ChexSystems, COBOL, Changeman, Connect Direct, ESP, Document Direct, Mobius, SQL, Windows, CICS, JCL, VSAM, DB2, CA-Easytrieve Plus, Xpeditor, File-Manager, & SPUFI. Position may be eligible to work in a hybrid remote model & is based out of & reports to Truist offices in Raleigh, NC. Applicants must be able to work onsite at Truist offices in Raleigh at least 3 days/wk. Apply online (https://careers.truist.com/) or email resume to: Paige.Whitesell@Truist.com. (Ref Job# R0094615)