Audience members at this year’s Black History Month lecture expected to listen to civil rights activist Bernice Johnson Reagon speak. Instead they got to listen to her sing ­— and join in too.

Books, films, music albums — all have been adapted for the stage. Come Feb. 2, newspaper columns can be added to the list.

A ceremony celebrating a defining victory for free speech held special meaning for the University’s leaders — both past and present — on Wednesday. Those leaders, faculty, students and alumni gathered at the wall between McCorkle Place and Franklin Street to honor the students and faculty members who led the protest against the 1963 Speaker Ban Law.

After full funding to bring Republican pundit Ann Coulter to campus was denied for a second time by Student Congress Tuesday, leaders of the College Republicans said they will likely look for speakers with smaller price tags.

Michael Bloomberg can make it anywhere, including at UNC. The mayor of New York City will give the commencement speech for the class of 2012 in May, Chancellor Holden Thorp said Friday.

On Tuesday, the UNC College Republicans will go before Student Congress for the second time in less than a month requesting about $20,000 to bring conservative pundit Ann Coulter to campus.

The adage “talk is cheap” seems far from applicable when it comes to attracting notable speakers to UNC’s campus. With costs sometimes exceeding $50,000, student groups wishing to sponsor speakers have two sources to look to: Student Congress and miscellaneous donations.

As a boy, E.O. Wilson liked spending time with ants. More than half a century after deciding on entomology as a career path, he is one of the most famous scientists in the world.

Notable figures in the field of collegiate athletics met Wednesday at the Friday Center to discuss impending NCAA policy changes at the 2011 College Sport Research Institute Conference Conference.

With a respected technical excellence and a reputation for being creatively daring, Jennifer Koh has become an internationally renowned violinist.

Several hundred people ate up every word Joel Salatin had to say about organic and sustainable foods Wednesday night. Salatin, owner and operator of Polyface Farms in Swoope, Va., sought to dispel several common misconceptions about such food in a packed Hanes Art Center Auditorium.

Daniel Wallace said turning his novel “Big Fish” into a movie was nothing short of a metamorphosis. After a showing of the film at the Varsity Theatre on Tuesday, Wallace spoke about his reaction to the movie, which he said he never anticipated while writing the book.

Joel Salatin, a local food advocate and author of “The Sheer Ecstasy of Being a Lunatic Farmer,” will speak at an event Wednesday titled “Local Food Talk and Taste.” The event is sponsored by the University’s Sustainability Office. Salatin will speak about the differences between his approach to farming and that of today’s average farm. The event is free and will be held at 5 p.m.

Contrary to what “The Social Network” would have movie-goers believe, David Kirkpatrick said Mark Zuckerberg has no trouble with women.

Thirteen years after the UNC campus featured prominently in the motion picture “Patch Adams,” the real thing arrived at the Student Union and the Medical Biomolecular Research Building.

UNC students can access healthy food on campus — but that hasn’t always been the case, and it isn’t true everywhere. “There are whole communities in our country who don’t have access to healthy food,” Nikki Henderson, executive director of People’s Grocery, said during a lecture Wednesday night.

Ron Prinz, director of the Parenting Family Research Center at the University of South Carolina, will speak about preventing child maltreatment April 20. Titled “Embedding Child-Maltreatment Prevention in a Population Approach to Parenting and Family Support,” it will be the Patricia F.

Five hundred abandoned infants have arrived at John Ondeche’s doorstep since 2002. They come from passersby, hospitals or police stations to find safety at Ondeche’s New Life Home in his community in Kisumu, Africa.

On the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, the University took a step back Wednesday to appreciate the war’s feminine side.

Ten years later, Rye Barcott returned to where it all began.
Barcott came to the University Tuesday to celebrate the release of his first book, “It Happened on the Way to War,” which coincides with an art exhibit meant to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Carolina for Kibera, a group he started as a UNC student.