Richard Hart

Introducing Zork. Zork’s a Martian, a creature new to Earth who’s puzzled by much of what it sees. Zork wonders why gambling’s illegal but the government runs a lottery, why the U.S. believes in the separation of church and state but puts “In God We Trust” on its money, and why daily newspapers think the […]

We knew when we ran a photo on last week’s cover of actress Gigi DeLizza about to taste an oyster that we might get some reaction from people concerned about objectification and exploitation (of a lovely woman, not oystersbut you never know). We did get a few reactionsright where we love to see them, in […]

Once again, the ethical contortions inherent in the death penalty are on display as all three branches of state government wrestle with contradictions that simply can’t be resolved. (See “Death penalty issues bounce back to judge.”) A Wake judge delays three executions by lethal injection because a new set of rules has to be written […]

We’ve let policy-making become a spectator sport. We read about the state’s urgent needs, we talk with friends about how bad health care/ oil dependency/ campaign financing problems have gotten, but we think we don’t have time to do anything about it. So I’ll make it easy for you (us). If you look below, you’ll […]

Florence Gray Soltys remembers when there was a plaque at N.C. Memorial Hospital (now UNC Hospitals) that read: “Operated for and by the people of North Carolina.” Soltys, an associate professor in geriatrics at the UNC School of Medicine, has long been a part of that mission to serve all the state’s people. More than […]

There’s plenty of blame to pass around in the Duke lacrosse case: to the lacrosse players, who carried on a tradition of out-of-control partying that led the university in disciplinary actions; to the university, for not taking seriously either the team’s sorry discipline record or the accusations of a dancer who performed at the infamous […]

It appears the president is about to embark on a disastrous course of troop increases in Iraq that makes this war look more and more like Vietnam. So, let’s go back to 1966, when the United States began the year with 185,000 troops there and ended it with 385,000 on their way to a half-million. […]

I’m thrilled to hear that DVDs may be on their way out. That means it’s time to start collecting DVDs. That’s my patternI wait for a technology to become outdated, for the prices to come down, for stores to start unloading their stock, and then I move in. I accumulate the hardware, start collecting the […]