Richard Hart

The game is up. The Bush administration has shown its hand. And it’s a loser. There is no reasonable case for an American war against Iraq. Yes, Saddam Hussein is a vile, vicious dictator. Yes, there is some reason to believe that he still has some capability to use chemical weapons (though no indication of […]

Just hours before the N.C. Actual Innocence Commission holds its first meeting on Friday, Jan. 24, Henry Lee Hunt is scheduled to be executed. Gov. Mike Easley has a remarkable opportunity before then to step forward and show that the state of North Carolina is serious about addressing failures in its criminal justice system in […]

If you’ve ever taken scuba diving lessons, or visited a dive store, or been lucky enough to gander at parrotfish swimming around a coral reef in the Caribbean, you’ve no doubt heard of Divers Alert Network. But if you’re like most people, you’ve probably never heard of DAN, even if you’ve wondered what that foreign-looking […]

Durhamites have a fatalistic attitude toward their police department. They don’t expect much–and with some reason. The department’s crime-solving rate has improved to around 17 percent from a low of 5 percent, but still has a long way to go. And residents have reason to be outraged when it takes investigators six months to identify […]

This is the time of year when editors, scrounging for news while half the staff and most of the talking-head newsmakers are on vacation, resort to a tried and true formula for getting out the newspaper: The List. The News & Observer traditionally runs a variation called “10 People to Watch” in the coming year, […]

Good movie critics are like old friends. They’re people whose tastes and idiosyncrasies we get to know, and when they tell you they really liked a movie, we understand the context. If we know they’re usually wary of pretentious blockbusters and they like one, it must be all right. And if they praise a Woody […]

While most of the follow-up attention from this month’s devastating ice storm has been focused on how long it took local utilities to get the power back on, there’s another failure that’s gone unmentioned. The storm was a public health emergency that went unrecognized far too long. The most horrific result was the deaths of […]

“[T]he self sees its only recourse as an endless round of work, diversion, and consumption of goods and services. Failing this and having some inkling of its plight, it sees no way out because it has come to see itself as an organism in an environment and so can’t understand why it feels so bad […]