Prior to every election, newspapers make a pitch to the voters to show up. Given the results year in and year out, it is an act that could be used to certify nearly all editorialists as unhinged. This is especially true in years when local races dominate the ballots and few statewide or federal offices […]
Kirk Ross
Bio: Kirk Ross is a freelance columnist for INDY Week and founded the online news and feature publication The Carolina Mercury. He lives in Chapel Hill.Link: http://www.exileonjonesstreet.comEmail: [email protected]: http://twitter.com/ExJS
Posted inNews
Outrageous
We are not inclined to do the happy dance over the announcement that Tom “The Hammer” DeLay is stepping down for what he claims is the good of his party. With key, close subordinates copping pleas or anticipating charges, DeLay’s fall–whether by push or leap–was inevitable and just another sad indication of how corrupt the […]
Posted inArt
Divine illumination
The Anaconda copper mine at El Salvador is etched in the Atacama Desert on a plateau in northern Chile. On that plain where the mountainsides all around are painted in huge patches of varying minerals and where plants and animals are scarce, science illustrator Ippy Patterson developed a connection to the up-close, and to the […]
Posted inNews
No harm, no foul?
Supposedly the administration at Duke University is mad as hell about the behavior of members of the school’s lacrosse team. That’s the rumor at least, but you wouldn’t know it judging from the university’s slow, tepid response to what could add up, if proved, to be a horrendous collection of crimes by a group of […]
Posted inNews
Creation ‘science’
As Barry Yeoman writes this week, the anti-evolution movement is alive and kicking and, apparently, setting its sights on the youngest among us. This at a time when there is agreement across the political spectrum that we need to double down on science education. It would be easy to dismiss this effort as the work […]
Posted inNews
Remember the Maine
Fifteen years ago, I was standing in the deep end of the swimming pool at Ernest Hemingway’s old place, Finca Vigía in San Francisco de Paula, Cuba, having a typical Yanqui thought. The pool hadn’t held water for years and the house hadn’t seen Hemingway since the early ’60s. It was a tourist spot, and […]
Posted inNews
Shaking the rafters
I remember standing somewhere near the reflecting pool between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial on a hot August day listening to Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech echoing through the Mall. It was the 20th anniversary of that day in 1963 when the world got its clearest glimpse to date of […]
Posted inNews
Something’s fishy
They lay among the shell windrows on the ocean side, dry and silvery from the sun. On the sound side where there’s less wave action they seem wetter, a bit more reddish in color and still a bit bloated. They dot the swash and in some places are mounded several deep. Most are on their […]
Posted inNews
Thirty-gallon racer
Ask any weather geek: It’s hard to predict the likelihood of snowfall anytime, but particularly around Christmas, when Tin Pan Alley has led us ingrained it in our dreams. So consider this a form of holiday preparedness. I am recently returned from the snowy, near Arctic Circle town where I was born. (OK, that’s a […]
Posted inNews
Boom and bus
Now that Wake County schools have announced their reassignment plan, the largest in the system’s history, prepare to hear plenty of complaints directed at the school board and its handling of the unchecked growth of the county’s school population. Parents will line up and weigh in on why their kids shouldn’t move, how the system […]
