Richard Hart

President Bush made the proper first step Tuesday in taking responsibility for the cataclysmic failure of the federal government to respond to Hurricane Katrina’s destruction of New Orleans. Now let us see if he recognizes how deeply responsible he is. What happened in New Orleans wasn’t unexpected–we all now know about the city’s topography, vulnerability […]

This morning I discovered a decades-old warning about New Orleans’ fate. It didn’t come from FEMA or a satellite photo. It is from the prophetic 1975 album Fire on the Bayou by New Orleans’ greatest funk band, the Meters. Consider: Side One 1. “Out in the Country.” An ode to leaving the city. “Pack my […]

Orrin Pilkey’s mad. The man who’s had more influence on North Carolina’s once-benchmark coastal management policies than perhaps anyone else has seen the protections he inspired slowly whittled away. And he’s not going down easy. In 1979 he published The Beaches are Moving, the definitive work describing the dynamics of barrier islands–and the futility of […]

Our readers don’t just read, they also write. Sometimes they even become columnists. Reader involvement is one of the best traditions at the Independent. There’s the Front Porch, which features short, personal essays about life; the First Person column, where readers expand on an event or a political point they want to make; and of […]

Nowhere is the value of the Web more evident than in the case of the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame by the Bush administration. Bloggers stepped in after the daily press had abrogated its responsibility from the beginning–first by accepting Bush’s lies, then by delivering the political poison served by his operatives, and finally […]

Don’t think of it as art. Think of it as college basketball. Around 60 years ago, nobody cared much about college hoops in the Triangle. Football was king. But N.C. State’s football program couldn’t match the powerhouses at UNC and Duke (!), and the school decided it would make its name in basketball. As explained […]

Little by little, story by story, leak by leak, the truth is coming out about President Bush’s mammoth, tragic blunder in Iraq. And the American people are listening. Sadly, it’s a truth that was apparent during the administration’s deceptions leading up to the war. But Americans, still angry and hurt over 9/11, chose not to […]

Sadly, our call last week for Durham to heal itself hasn’t yet taken hold. While much of the discussion at recent forums has been conciliatory, with vows to fight racism in the wake of the public burning of three crosses, there still is too much anger, mostly over the Durham school board. Even the Durham […]

Yet again, Durham is hanging its dirty laundry out for all to see. And, yet again, the community is responding in a way that reminds everyone who lives here why it’s such a remarkable place. That might not be so obvious to people far away, or even as close as Chapel Hill. But to most […]