Richard Hart

Imagine, for a moment, that you bring your car in for the annual safety and emissions check required by the state, and a mechanic tells you one of your brake lights is out, your muffler has a hole in it and your emissions are over the pollution limit. Under North Carolina law, you’ve got four […]

Jaume Plensa. Georges Rousse. Spark Con. Suddenly, art is on the mind of communities across the Triangle. I caught the bug Saturday night in downtown Raleigh. It started with the image slam at Spark Con, the four-day creative class get-together where a friend was among the more than 80 artists selected to have their work […]

As the Triangle’s creative class gets together at Spark Con this week to discuss ways to make the most of the region’s arts and high-tech potential, they should look for inspiration to an 80-year-old Durham woman who died last month. Lucie Lee Abramson Wing was a musician, communications visionary and political activist who joined all […]

Maybe it was the bright, early morning light beaming through the trees onto the railings of the front porch. Sitting there reading The News & Observer on Saturday, a few insights became clear: “Political deal let optometrists do eye injections, records show”: House Speaker (and optometrist) Jim Black kept an eye on negotiations to get […]

Like tens of thousands of other Katrina refugees, Alison Aucoin has a story that will bring you to tears. “I’m glad it’s Aug. 29, 2006, and not 2005,” she said Tuesday, “because this time a year ago, I thought I was going to die.” Aucoin (pronounced o-QUIN, in a typical N’awluns corruption) is a grant […]

How soon we forget. Now that the federal government has forced the Triangle Transit Authority to pull the plug on its request for continued funding to complete the long-planned commuter rail line, we’re looking for private development to pay for much of it. But it hasn’t been that long since Raleigh and Durham took over […]

There were two pieces of good news from downtown Raleigh this week, one all over TV and the front pages and another–perhaps more important–further back on the business page. The first, of course, was the massive turnout to celebrate the opening of Fayetteville Street. “I’ve never seen this many people in downtown Raleigh–ever,” marveled Collette […]

When the Raleigh Parks, Recreation and Greenway Advisory Board met last Thursday night and bucked public opinion to recommend making Horseshoe Farm Park into an active community park rather than a nature preserve, Indy reporter Bob Geary was there. And he wrote about it the next day–but not for the newspaper, which wouldn’t come out […]