One block from Maurice B. Holland Jr.’s modest 1,500-square-foot frame house, a new development is springing up in the town of Aberdeen. Out his front window, he can see the construction under way on houses that will cost $250,000 to $300,000. Moore County, home to the world-famous Pinehurst golf course and luxury housing, shopping and […]
Fiona Morgan
Posted inUncategorized
Meet Mary Katharine Ham, Bull City native, TownHall.com blogger and darling of the right wing
A couple of months ago, Mary Katharine Ham started getting calls from producers at Fox News and Larry King Live, inviting her to represent the right-wing point of view on the air. Ham, who grew up in Durham and now lives in the Washington, D.C., area, is a full-time blogger at TownHall.com, a conservative multimedia […]
Posted inGuides
Chad Johnston
2006 Citizen Award winners Margie Ellison | Lanya Shapiro & Traction | Chad Johnston | Andrew Pearson | The Pesticide Education Project When he wasn’t working in his office at The Peoples Channel, Chad Johnston spent the better part of his summer at the legislature battling a bill that overhauled the state’s cable franchise laws. […]
Posted inGuides
Indy Citizen Awards 2006
To be thankful is, in some ways, to be humble. That’s certainly true when we think about the winners of this year’s Citizen Awards: We’re profoundly thankful for the work they doto promote peace, voters’ rights, the environment, education, media access and political involvementand humbled by their years of hard work and dedication. The Independent‘s […]
Posted inNews
Design for Democracy head Marcia Lausen visits Raleigh to show how ballots can be made better
Remember the butterfly ballot, that travesty of information design that led Jewish retirees to vote for Pat Buchanan instead of Al Gore? Marcia Lausen has never forgotten it. In fact, butterfly ballots were on her mind even before the Florida fiasco of 2000her hometown of Chicago used them, too. A local election that year deciding […]
Posted inNews
Charles Frazier
Few first novels make the kind of impact that Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain did. Nine years later, the reluctant literary superstar turns his attention from the Civil War to the Cherokee Trail of Tears, while staying in the North Carolina mountains. If you missed Frazier’s recent reading of Thirteen Moons at Quail Ridge Books in […]
Posted inUncategorized
“Hip Happy Prof” teaches over MySpace, bosses protest
MySpace has helped musicians reach their fans, political activists spread the word and made average people feel popular. Now, it’s being used to teach–but not without controversy. N.C. State Professor Tom Hoban is offering Sociology 395-M, “Social Movements for Social Change,” on the popular social networking site that claims to have 100 million active users […]
Posted inBooks
Still life with monkeys
What makes a story interesting? Is it character, plot, setting? Or is it the creation of a world unique to that story, ruled by its own internal logic and full of its own possibilities? I tend to think it’s the latter. Perhaps that’s why Sock Monkey Dreams won me over. The world created by authors […]
Posted inArt
What are you reading now?
Furtively, in between work and sleep and domestic chores, we pick up that novel we’ve been eager to get back to. Sometimes there’s only time to scratch the surface of the latest New Yorker, or 10 minutes at lunch to catch up on Daily Kos. Then there are the books, articles and digital media we […]
Posted inGuides
The 2006 Indies
When you do something you love, you make it look easy. But love can be hard work. In 1990, the Independent decided to honor artists, arts groups and arts educators doing exceptional work in the Triangle with annual Indies Arts Awards. The people we recognize might be volunteers or professionals; the organizations might be nonprofits […]
