“What Is Really Going On With Charlotte the Stingray?” by Emily Cataneo, The Assembly

The Assembly published a story about Charlotte the stingray of Hendersonville, which mysteriously became pregnant despite the fact that there isn’t another stingray in her aquarium tank. This isn’t impossible—there is a process called parthenogenesis in which stingrays can reproduce asexually—but the Aquarium & Shark Lab by Team ECCO’s owner had declared that another possibility was that Charlotte mated with a shark, and that we might get some shark-ray babies. That is impossible, scientists say. Either way, the story was weird enough that it went viral and global.

A few things about that. One: Going viral is generally a bad thing, because it’s basically like putting up a giant flag that says “Hey everyone, immediately scrutinize every single bit of my words or video, and also please review everything else I’ve ever said or done.” Or, in Twitter terms, once you become the main character, eventually you get milkshake duck’d. If you make an outlandish claim, like, say, that a shark and stingray are gonna have babies, you can’t really ever take that back in the internet’s eyes (even if you do take it back, which is what the aquarium did). Finally, if you go viral by saying something is going to happen, then people are going to check to see if that thing, uh, happens.

Like journalists! Emily Cataneo wondered why Charlotte hadn’t had her stingray babies by now, and so she started asking questions as journalists are wont to do. That eventually led to a trip to Hendersonville. Nobody from the aquarium would do an interview, so Emily asked if it was okay to just buy a ticket and just take a look. That was fine, staff said, so she did. Afterward, she hung out on the sidewalk, looking to talk to a few people. That’s when the police came and told her that they’d gotten a call that she’d been harassing people. She could stay on the sidewalk and respectfully talk to folks, but that was it:

You should read the whole story, because it’s a damn journey. I can only add a few more things here. Back in 2016, I went to Hendersonville to write about how the town had sorta become a tourism suburb for Asheville. It was less crowded, had some of the same charm, and really did have some interesting things! Like an aquarium! I rolled up on it as a elderly couple was marveling at a pair of South American red foot tortoises. They were out on the sidewalk in front of the aquarium, and clearly trying to escape from the plastic baby pool they were in. I didn’t go inside, but it seemed like a regular small storefront downtown.

This place billed itself as North Carolina’s only “inland” aquarium, and it’s wedge in between the Mast General Store and a gift shop. There’s no rule against having sharks and stingrays in a smallish mountain town. But again, it’s not something you’d expect.

“Warren Buffett: It’s Not a Wonderful Life” by Lorraine Ahearn, Triad City Beat

I spent most of Tuesday in downtown Greensboro working remotely, where I discovered a few things:

I also walked by the News & Record’s former building, which is currently being turned into rubble. Lorraine Ahearn, the paper’s former metro columnist, wrote a wrenching, angry remembrance as she watched her former workplace come down. Of note: Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway bought the News & Record when everyone knew that newspapers were having a hard time, then sold them and stands to make a lot of money off of interest payments from the paper’s new owner. It still owns the land that the newspaper once sat on, which is now prime real estate.

One more note: The paper has an amazingly deep and easily searchable online archive. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to look for something from the 1990s, and Google sends me a link from greensboro.com. It’s amazing! That’s, obviously, the work of some dedicated archivists from way back in the day. I’d love to know why this was a priority for the paper back then, but it’s been incredibly helpful for me over the years.

“Black residents in North Carolina county sue to remove racist statue” by Gloria Oladipo, The Guardian

In Tyrrell County, the people outnumber the bears, but not by much. The human population there was, at last count, 3,365. There are, in eastern North Carolina, a few thousand bears. They are very large. Hunters occasionally shoot black bears that weigh upwards of 600 pounds.

Back in 2015, some bears ate a woman in Tyrrell County named, appropriately, “The Bear Lady.” She’d died in a swampy and forested area where she’d lived near U.S. 64. She’d dedicated her life to protecting the animals from hunters, and had been fairly litigious during that time. I was researching a potential story about her, and stopped in at the Tyrrell County Courthouse to pull some old court files. The entirety of all litigation in the entire county since 1985 fit on a mere five shelves.

Outside, there was a Confederate statue. This, in itself, wasn’t all that unusual, and so I didn’t go take a closer look. Had I done so, I would have seen this phrase on the side: “In Appreciation of our Faithful Slaves.”

Last week, some Black citizens in Tyrrell County sued to get the whole thing removed:

Years later, Republican lawmakers made it harder to remove Confederate statues on state property, but the North Carolina Supreme Court said those rules didn’t apply to county property, so we’ll see how this goes. Maybe some bears can pull it down.