On my first day at work at Jupiter Entertainment in Knoxville, Tenn., my boss told me to “think of a place you’d like to go and find a murder.” I logged on to Lexis-Nexis and typed in: “Montana” and “murder.” Up popped the sad and salacious tale of Ted Ernst, a wheelchair-bound athlete of Olympic […]
David Madison
Posted inMusic
Who is Edgar Graham?
Isaac Brock, the child of working-class Christians who bounced from a hippie commune in Oregon to a “cult church” in Montana to Issaquah, Wash., where he formed the group Modest Mouse, sums up his odyssey through life and music with this remark: “I don’t have a clear view of that shit man. I’m kind of […]
Posted inNews
Mr. December
William Nealy was an artist and a husband, a sportsman and an illustrator who expanded the way his fans thought about the outdoors. He mapped the Haw River, fought to preserve Duke Forest and built a retreat for his wife, Holly Wallace, and himself deep in the woods of Orange County. Everything appeared to be […]
Posted inNews
Out back
The house was a spacious farm number tucked in the woods near Jordan Lake. I was ready to sign a lease when I casually asked to see what it looked like out back. It was dark, around dinner time, so I used a flashlight to scope the yard. Everything looked as it should–small lawn spreading […]
Posted inNews
Life cycles
North Hills Mall in Raleigh lies peacefully in the ICU waiting for someone to pull the plug, and Durham’s South Square is sprawled out on a gurney of its own. Over in Chapel Hill, Hudson Belk’s recent retreat has left University Mall staring blankly at the future–a peaceful stare, like right before the eyes freeze […]
Posted inNews
American Taliban
First come the CIA agents, two of them, playing good cop, bad cop inside the dusty Qala i Janghi fortress near Mazar-e Sharif, Afghanistan. Twenty-year-old John Walker Lindh, an American kid from northern California, listens as Agent Mike Spann and another CIA operative known only as “Dave” threaten to leave him there to die if […]
Posted inNews
Too Little Too Late?
“That’s bad, that’s real bad,” sighs state Rep. Joe Kiser (R-Vale). This ex-sheriff-turned-legislator has just been told the story of Charlie Mason Alston, the next man scheduled to die by lethal injection in North Carolina. Kiser and his fellow legislators didn’t consider Alston’s story before they passed the state’s new Innocence Protection Act last July. […]