Richard Hart

Election Day marked the start of a critical countdown: We’ve got one year to get George W. Bush out of the White House. And this past Saturday night marked as good a launch and pep rally as you could hope for. More than 300 supporters of the Institute for Southern Studies, Southern Exposure magazine, and […]

Remember Michael Bilandic? He was the all-powerful mayor of Chicago who was brought down in 1979 by 78 inches of snow and the arrogance to think it didn’t matter how quickly it was cleaned up. Well, you may be thinking, we’ve had our ice storms and hurricanes and power outages, but nothing that bad, nothing […]

The two stories ran six pages apart, deep inside The News & Observer on Friday, Oct. 17, each overwhelmed by ads. One of the ads, for contact lenses, said: “Are you missing something? See wider. See sharper.” Man, are we ever missing it. One of the stories was a five-paragraph condensation on page 10A of […]

In all our criticism of the way The News & Observer and all the mainstream media swallowed the Bush Administration’s lies about the war in Iraq, we have never given proper due to N&O reporter Jay Price and photographer Chuck Liddy, who were embedded with the 82nd Airborne during the war and risked life and […]

It’s easy to get mad at government, especially local government. They’re the ones who don’t fill the potholes, don’t fix the streetlights, don’t catch the crooks. So when I arrived home Monday evening and saw that my big, brown yard-waste bin–filled with all the leaves and branches the ice storm had loosened and Isabel took […]

Every journalist has stories they wish they could have back–to fix an error, to write differently, to include something they left out. I have several. But one of them goes back to my days as a copyboy at The Times-Picayune in New Orleans (in the days when there were both copy and boys in the […]

A year ago, that was the headline on the Indy‘s issue marking the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The “we” referred to the way many people were thinking at the time–uncritically accepting the Bush Administration’s bait-and-switch of the war on terror for a war in Iraq (and a radically new foreign policy), […]

George W. has left the ranch, his approval ratings sliding as the mishandling of the Iraqi occupation becomes more apparent and the economy continues to sputter. The administration’s so-called solutions: Bring in the United Nations (to Iraq, not the U.S.) but put them under U.S. control (as if the Security Council’s going to go for […]

Everyone likes to be in the know, to be able to tell their friends about the hole in the wall with the best burritos, the coolest old Hawaiian shirts, the cheapest selection of used bookcases. But the Triangle’s a big place, and there are so many holes and so little time. That’s where we come […]

Start another ironic chapter in the history of music in Raleigh. No sooner do Bickett Gallery and a wonderful cooperative of artists and musicians put together 23 HOURS, an ambitious, month-long show to capture the histories of art and music in the capital city, than a handful of neighbors and a tone-deaf City Hall (er, […]