Moogfest announced its daytime programming today, dubbed “Future Thoughts,” which will include interviews, workshops, master classes, and film screenings led by some of the festival’s top acts and leading “technologists.” The day portion of the fest, which happens May 19–22 in downtown Durham, will feature interviews with GZA (Wu-Tang Clan) and Laurie Anderson, a panel […]
Paul Blest
Posted inNews
Fun Fact: HB 2’s Gonna Cost Us Tons of Money! Hooray!
This afternoon, after the House voted 84–25 to legislate discrimination in North Carolina, businesses started coming out against the law—even before the Senate passed its own version of the bill. Red Hat CEO and president Jim Whitehurst, Biogen, and Dow Public Policy all tweeted their opposition to the bills on Wednesday. Whitehurst called it a […]
Posted inNews
ACLU: North Carolina Could Lose $4.5 Billion in Title IX Funding over Bathroom Bill. Nice Work, General Assembly
If North Carolina moves ahead and passes the bill the special session is considering today, the state could lose billions in Title IX funding. Title IX is a provision of the 1972 Education Amendments law that says: “no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be […]
Posted inGuides
Drinking with a Bartender: A Day Out in Durham with Nana’s Adrian Lindsay
At some point during a day of drinking with Adrian Lindsay, I ask the Durham bartender if he studied history in college. Through the course of the afternoon, Lindsay, a forty-eight-year-old father, speaks fluently about the lineage and geography of various types of alcohol, making offhand remarks about the eighteenth-century Caribbean origins of a particular […]
Posted inNews
The General Assembly’s Potty Protectors Move to Keep Transgender People Marginalized
Fiscal champions Tim Moore, the state House speaker, and Lieutenant Governor Dan Forest will convene a special legislative session on Wednesdayat the cost of $42,000 a dayto override a Charlotte ordinance that, among other things, allows transgender people to use the bathroom of the gender they identify with. This “radical” provision endangers “young girls and […]
Posted inNews
Legislature Set to Destroy Local Governments’ Ability to, You Know, Make Laws
A draft version of the bill that the legislature is set to consider during the special session confirmed the worst fears of the LGBT community and anyone remotely interested in civil liberties, or even municipal governance, in North Carolina: Speaker Tim Moore and the Republicans are going to destroy the ability of local governments to […]
Posted inNews
LGBT Leaders Denounce Objectively Dumb and Bad Special Session
The day before the North Carolina legislature entered a special session to deny more forward-thinking governments the ability to provide protections for the LGBT community, leaders in that community came together to talk about their experience dealing with the exact kind of discrimination the Charlotte ordinance in question was designed to stop. On an ACLU […]
Posted inNews
Could Donald Trump, Who Loves the Poorly Educated, Take Richard Burr Down with Him?
As Donald Trump has inched closer and closer toward the nomination, the possibility that he could take the whole damn Republican Party down with him in November has become even more likely, so much so that archconservatives like Erick Erickson are plotting to drum up support for an “independent conservative” to keep Trump from winning, […]
Posted inNews
Senator Josh Stein Resigns to Focus on the Attorney General Race
In a Facebook post published on Monday morning, state Senator Josh Stein, D-Wake, resigned from his seat in order to focus on the attorney general race, where he won the Democratic primary last Tuesday. “Last Tuesday, hundreds of thousands of voters across North Carolina gave me the honor of being the Democratic nominee for Attorney […]
Posted inNews
This Week in the Carolina Comeback: Unemployment Shoots Up All Over the State
The “Carolina comeback” stalled earlier this year, according to the January unemployment numbers the state reported this morning. State officials found that all one hundred North Carolina counties saw a rise in unemployment from its lowest point during the December holiday season. The state unemployment rate is 5.8 percent, down slightly from 5.9 percent in […]