There are four television sets in the Della Maggiora home, but the screens most often stay blank. For this Durham family, TV is “not a freebie,” as mom, Christine, asserts. Instead, 7-year-old Adam and 9-year-old Max do chores to earn blocks of half-hour “screen time” privileges that also extend to videos, movies and surfing the […]
Barbara Solow
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Where To Get Help
A few years ago, it would have been hard to find information about media literacy outside of scholarly journals. Now, there are numerous Web sites, studies and organizations working to spread the word about this broad-based strategy. In Durham, a forum on Media for Youth that will focus on media literacy will be held at […]
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You Don’t Have to Kill Your TV
When a neighbor heard about the “no TV” rule that Dabney Grinnan established when her kids were young, he told her she was being “Draconian.” But according to the experts, the Chapel Hill mom was doing just what many doctors now order. Based on research linking too much TV to poor grades, obesity and aggressive […]
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Summer reading
When he was coming out, Glenn Grossman went hunting for books and magazines about people who’d been there and done that, “personal stories,” he says. Later, he wanted to read more widely about gay history, politics and society. Now Grossman–who’s a graduate student at UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Public Health–is working to create a resource […]
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Tax Taboo
When the left-leaning Common Sense Foundation recently came out against raising cigarette taxes in North Carolina, health-care activists were dismayed and surprised. Dismayed because at 5 cents a pack, North Carolina’s cigarette taxes are the third lowest in the nation. Surprised because the foundation’s argument–that higher cigarette taxes fall unfairly on the poor–is the same […]
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Hallowed Ground
What is a church? Is it the four walls where parishioners gather every week? The ceremonies that take the community’s pulse: weddings, baptisms, funerals? The ripples of a congregation’s presence in the community? The faces of worshippers? The figure a pastor cuts as he or she leads the congregation in prayer? It’s not a question […]
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What’s worse: the old, uncaring Jesse Helms, or the new, falsely repentant Jesse Helms?
When retiring U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms stood before hundreds of people at a religious conference in Washington, D.C., last week and told them he’d been “too lax too long” in the fight against AIDS, many in North Carolina’s frontline AIDS services community had the same thought: Hell’s frozen over! “When I heard that on the […]
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A Taxing Problem
See also: “An Ounce of Prevention” Given that the core of the industry now makes up only 4.5 percent of the state’s economy, you’d think the answer would be: Not very. But in the political arena, its power lingers like phantom pain after an amputation. As a result, policies seen as harmful to tobacco are […]
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An Ounce of Prevention
See also: “A Taxing Problem” & “Pack O’ Numbers” Sixteen-year-old Ashley Forte was trying to prove a point. “I want y’all to close your eyes,” she said to the roomful of Raleigh high school students sprawled across rows of blue flip-up chairs. “This is an activity that lets you hear how many people tobacco kills.” […]
Posted inArt
Recommended By …
Barbara Solow recommends Honky, by Dalton Conley (Vintage Books, 207 pp., $12 pb.) Dalton Conley’s moving and often hilarious memoir of his New York City boyhood sets out to explain how and why his growing up was not that of “your typical middle-class white male.” His artist parents had no money, so the family wound […]
