Spending time in various East Coast airports over the Thanksgiving holiday, I made a disturbing observation. At the gates, whenever we heard a passenger paged by the authorities, it was always someone with a Muslim-sounding name. I heard three such pages while we were en route to Manchester, N.H., and one or two on the […]
Barbara Solow
Posted inGuides
Mother love
It’s dreary and cold on this late afternoon outside the housing project that’s home to the Liberty Street Community Center in Northeast-Central Durham. But inside the concrete-block meeting room, it’s all color and warmth. A banner covered with red, blue, yellow and green handprints is spread across one wall. At a nearby table, a dozen […]
Posted inNews
They’ll leave the light on for ya
When former Chapel Hillians Jenn Barr and John Birkholz heard about an opening for a lighthouse keepers’ job in Corolla a year ago, they thought it would be an experience. Be careful what you wish for. As it turned out, the couple took the job at the height of a hard-fought competition for ownership of […]
Posted inNews
The fight for the light
Soaring 162 feet above a strip of northern Outer Banks marshland that runs from the Atlantic Ocean to the Currituck Sound, the Currituck Beach Lighthouse seems a world away from the culture wars of Washington, D.C. Sheltered by plantings of native red cedars, oaks, pines and wax myrtles, the 128-year-old light even manages to seem […]
Posted inNews
A tale of two programs
Dr. Adam Goldstein, an associate professor of family medicine at UNC-Chapel Hill, settled down with his family Sunday night to watch a television documentary about North Carolina’s “dependence on tobacco.” It had been a long time coming. Goldstein, one of several public health leaders interviewed for the show, had been waiting more than a year […]
Posted inArt
Growing pains
As last weekend’s CenterFest arts celebration was wrapping up in downtown Durham, leaders of the Durham Arts Council, the event’s longtime sponsor, were doing some behind-the-scenes celebrating of their own. After two years of spiraling budget deficits, the nearly 50-year-old arts education and grantmaking organization is nearing break-even status for the current fiscal year. That’s […]
Posted inNews
Talking with a peace prize winner
Interviewing author and Nobel Peace laureate Elie Wiesel is a surprisingly frustrating experience. Maybe it’s the hollowness of the telephone, or the fact that his notoriety as a Nazi Holocaust survivor and international human rights spokesman has made him weary of those tell-us-the-meaning-of-life questions. Whatever the reason, his answers don’t go very deep. Does he […]
Posted inNews
Cyber citizenship
Music-producer-turned-neighborhood-activist Caleb Southern has an idea for encouraging more citizen-friendly government in Durham: Create a single city Web page where residents can register opinions and take action on issues ranging from streetlight repair to gang prevention to recycling. Right now, information about such issues is scattered across a number of official Internet sites in Durham. […]
Posted inNews
Good vs. good
It was presented as one of those impossible choices: good vs. good. UNC-Chapel Hill wants a new cancer center and even in a tight budget year, who is going to say “no” to that? That’s what powerful state senators were banking on when they made a last-minute legislative move to fund the center using state […]
Posted inNews
Why did Blue Cross change course?
On the same day last week that Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina announced it was dropping its attempt to go for-profit, state regulators released a report showing a for-profit Blue could result in a significant rise in insurance premiums and the number of uninsured North Carolinians over the next five years. The […]
