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Higher Pay for City Workers, Office of Survivor Care Top Durham Residents’ Wishlists at Budget Hearing
More than 60 Durham residents from a variety of coalitions made their cases for how the city should allocate money in its 2024-2025 fiscal year budget at a public hearing Monday night. City worker pay was a prominent issue going into the meeting. Last September, members of the solid waste...
Raleigh City Council Could Change How Members Are Elected, Add District Seats
For the second time in three years, Raleigh’s city council is looking at changing the way its members are elected. On Tuesday, the council voted unanimously on a resolution to begin the process of changing the city’s charter to allow for four-year staggered terms with nonpartisan primaries beginning in 2026. In 2021, a 10-member study group had suggested that the city switch to electing municipal leaders via this method, which is already used in other North Carolina cities including Durham, Asheville, and Greensboro. The council could also consider adding three seats.
Song of the Week: “Hello” by Shirlette Ammons ft. Amelia Meath
Super Empty’s Song of the Week is co-published every Friday by the INDY and Super Empty. Any time a North Carolina hip-hop act releases a song with a nationally renowned guest feature like Amelia Meath of electro-pop duo Sylvan Esso, it’s going to be noteworthy. Throw in production...
Four Stories We’re Paying Attention to in this Year’s NCAA Tournament
March Madness begins today, with scores of women’s and men’s teams battling to make the national title games in Arizona on April 7 and April 8. The cultural phenomenon grips the nation every year, partly because you don’t need to be a basketball fan to fill out a bracket and enjoy the drama, the heartbreak, and the inevitable “Cinderella” quests of the titans of college hoops.
Duke’s Cook Center Receives Grants to Expand Racial and Ethnic Wealth Gap Study
This story originally published online at NC Newsline. The Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University has received $3.4 million in grants from four institutions to support research on the post-pandemic racial wealth gap in five U.S. cities, including Durham and Charlotte. The other three cities are...
Raleigh Nonprofit Works to Raise Awareness About Ending Female Gendercide
In the late 2000s, Raleigh resident Jill McElya was living in southern India where she witnessed firsthand what she describes as a bias against female births. When she returned to the U.S., she couldn’t shake what she had experienced. So in 2011, McElya, along with her husband, Brad, started...
Backtalk: ‘Public streets and roads in North Carolina are NOT practice tracks for the Richard Petty School of Racecar Driving’
For the web last week, we published a story by Justin Laidlaw on the City of Durham’s plans to get input from residents on the proposed redesign of Roxboro and Mangum Streets in the downtown area. We’re publishing that story in the paper this week, and you can read it on page 6.
Gibson & Toutant Get Weird and Dig Deep on Debut Album ‘On the Green’
As the world turns in an increasingly digital direction, the ragged edges of existence get sanded down. The algorithmic engines humming in our pockets steer us away from strange serendipity. What we see, hear, and consume becomes more and more familiar. Traces of the old weird America fade from view.
15 Minutes: Elena Paces-Wiles, 2024 NC High School Journalist of the Year
Elena Paces-Wiles is a senior and coeditor of the Riverside High School student newspaper, The Pirates’ Hook. There, she has focused on investigative journalism that exposes inequities. She will now go on to represent the state in the National High School Journalist of the Year scholarship competition, where a winner will be announced in April.
In “Could Be Worse,” Choreographer Anna Barker Counts the Cost of Trying To Make a Living in Dance
In a January 27 preview of Anna Barker’s new work could be worse, the choreographer and her artistic partner, Leah Wilks, threw some well-earned brickbats at some of the pandering elements in popular and high-art dance performances that they’d witnessed, over the years. Sinuous, simpering hip and shoulder...
Perfect Lovers Carries On Durham’s Legacy of Scrappy Community Spaces
Walk into Durham’s Perfect Lovers and you might be privy to an impromptu dance performance featuring local professionals. You might stumble across a tattooing pop-up with a dozen clients mid-tattoo. You’ll definitely be able to sip espresso from local coffee brewers Black and White and Joe Van Gogh or Georgia-based Caption Coffee while taking in art hanging on handmade mobile gallery walls.
Chapel Hill’s Vision for Bus Rapid Transit Begins to Take Shape
In Chapel Hill, buses painted Carolina blue shepherd students, residents, visitors, nurses, and workers up and down the town’s roughly eight-mile-long north-south corridor. It’s the college town’s spine, comprising NC Highway 86 and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Like all Chapel Hill bus routes, it’s also fare-free for riders thanks to a partnership between Chapel Hill, Carrboro, and UNC-Chapel Hill. It’s a perfectly fine service, and the town wants to make it even better for commuters with an upgrade to a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system.
Super Empty’s Song of the Week: “Stand Tall,” Rapsody
Super Empty’s Song of the Week is co-published every Friday by the INDY and Super Empty. Given her cerebral nature, it’s fitting that the music video for Rapsody’s personal, soul-searching new single, “Stand Tall,” can’t actually get into the music before engaging in its own bit of meta-commentary. Tucked into a blank studio in the back of a bare, industrial space, the emcee is engaged in an interview with actress Sanaa Lathan— intimately discussing inspirations, risk-taking, the pair’s relationship.
Incumbent Orange County School Board Members to Compete in Runoff Election
Incumbent Orange County Board of Education members Bonnie Hauser and Jennifer Moore will compete in a runoff election on Tuesday, May 14. The winner will not only keep their seat for four more years, but also determine which bloc—progressive or moderate—has a controlling majority on the school board for the next two years.
Open House for Roxboro/Mangum Streets Redesign Sees Large Turnout from Durham Residents
More than 200 residents packed the gymnasium at Global Scholars Academy on Roxboro Street on Tuesday evening for an open house about proposed street design changes in downtown Durham. The City of Durham’s transportation department and North Carolina’s Department of Transportation (NC DOT) invited residents to speak with staff and...
Full Frame Festival Announces 2024 Programming
This April marks the first in-person Full Frame Documentary Festival in five years. It’s also the first without Nancy Buirski, the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker who founded the festival in 1998. Buirski, who directed the festival for a decade, died on August 29 at age 78. On Thursday,...
Terrance Ruth Announces Plan to Run for Raleigh Mayor This Fall
Raleigh voters will see a familiar name on their ballots this fall. Terrance (Truth) Ruth, 41, a professor in NC State University’s School of Social Work and community activist, will run for mayor once again after narrowly losing to Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin in the race for the office in 2022.
In María Magdalena Campos-Pons’ “Behold,” Shared Identity Is a Source of Communal Power
In 2014, the artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons led a procession through the Guggenheim Museum while wearing a tiered dress shaped like the Guggenheim Museum. It was both celebration and protest: Campos-Pons had been invited by her friend, the photographer Carrie Mae Weems, to stage a performance for Weems’ retrospective exhibition—the first for a Black artist in the museum’s 55-year history.
Durham Public Schools Joins Lawsuit Against Social Media Giants
This story originally published online at the 9th Street Journal. Durham Public Schools will join hundreds of other school systems, including 14 in North Carolina, and 42 attorneys general, in a lawsuit against Meta, Google, TikTok, and Snap for the detrimental effects they say the companies’ products have had on students.
‘The Culture War:’ An Ideological Battle at UNC and on Other College Campuses
This story originally published online at UNC Media Hub. When conservative political commentator Candace Owens visited UNC-Chapel Hill on March 6, the building was filled to capacity as soon as students were let into the building. One student received compliments and approving glances as she repped her Ronald Reagan shirt....
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