Carolina Quoted

When national and international media need experts to comment on and analyze news and trends, they turn to Carolina faculty and alumni. Of course, College of Arts & Sciences faculty members often make news of their own with groundbreaking research findings. Here are just a few examples; see more at college.unc.edu.

USA Today

“We are on the verge of becoming a spacefaring species, and I feel privileged to be invited into an extraordinary conversation, pushing the frontiers of science, exploration and discovery at NASA.”

• Lisa Pratt (botany B.A. ’72, geology M.S. ’79) after being named NASA’s planetary protection officer.

The Washington Post’s “Monkey Cage” blog

“Carrying out executions, it appears, requires specialization and practice. Without specializing in it, few counties can do it.”

• Frank Baumgartner, political science professor and the author of Deadly Justice: A Statistical Portrait of the Death Penalty.

HuffPost

“There are many misconceptions about OCD. One is that it is only about germs or perfectionism. People with OCD might have a variety of different types of obsessions and compulsions.”

• Jon Abramowitz, professor of psychology and neuroscience, on what you should know if you love someone with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

South China Morning Post

“The problem is not population size. It’s poor urban management.”

• Yan Song, director of the Program on Chinese Cities, on the risks to Chinese megacities.

The New Yorker

“Unlike the rigid columns of numbers that make up a bank ledger, status is always a moving target, because it is defined by ongoing comparisons to others.”

• Keith Payne, professor of psychology and neuroscience and the author of The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live and Die.

The New York Times

“The only sensible solution — in my view — is to accept the problem and then engage with it, rather than, say, sanitizing the work to remove the problem in the first place.”

• Tim Carter, music professor, on how Broadway revivals can revive gender stereotypes and romanticize problematic relationships.

 The Local Palate

“What would sustained economic development — respectful and meaningful economic development — look like here? We think it would be around traditional foods and foodways.”

• Bernie Herman, American studies professor, speaking about Virginia’s Eastern Shore.