This is Lew Margolis. The drumbeat of chilling evidence of brain damage associated with football continues to quicken. The National Football League recently reported that nearly a third of former players develop long-term cognitive problems. These NFL players are a small subset of the over 1 million high school football players, boys who are subjected […]

Unbelievable! Buried in the middle of the paper, in a catch-all section called “Other News,” was the headline: “Grandfather kills 6 children, mother of children, and self.” Folks, this is a major slaughter, and nobody cares? The National Rifle Association has so conned us into thinking that guns are the American Way, patriotic and God-fearing, that we don’t even pay attention when a family implodes because of the easy accessibility of guns?

We who have called Chapel Hill our home for a long time remember the flap over the size of North Carolina National Bank. NCNB, as it was known, liked to be thought of as a friendly, small town kind of place. “We want to be the best bank in the neighborhood,” its commercials said.

This is David Schwartz. The Chapel Hill Town Council recently asked Town Manager Roger Stancil to explain several instances of apparent mismanagement of the town’s finances. The alleged instances included substantial cost overruns for consultants and failure to set aside money to fund the Town’s $56 million retiree benefits liability. In his explanation, Stancil passed […]

With apologies to Willie Nelson, “Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be football players.” Given the growing evidence of the long-term harm of concussions, all the adults involved in the game of football—coaches, parents, boards of education, trainers, and doctors—should halt this experiment in brain damage. Motivated by the National Football League’s concern about maintaining its workforce and its fan base, it has pumped millions upon millions of dollars into research on head trauma and football, not to mention the nearly $1 billion fund to care for former

This is Raleigh Mann. Well, there goes the neighborhood. That has been the concern of the people who are uncomfortable with the thought of homeless men living near them. Yes, I’m talking about the Inter-Faith Council’s new Community House for homeless men that is about to be built on Martin Luther King Boulevard just north […]

This is Lew Margolis. The challenges posed by big-time sports for UNC continue apace, as if on a schedule like weekly football games or daily practices. Four players have just been suspended for one game after an altercation—an assault, a hazing incident, we don’t really know—in a local hotel at the beginning of August.  I […]

This is Lew Margolis. It is the quiet calm of summer on a college campus, but the quiet this year seems heightened by anticipation of the report by Investigator Kenneth Wainstein on the unresolved athletic scandals at UNC. Further, the NCAA, that stalwart institution of educational and athletic integrity, is re-opening its investigation of the […]

This week, Chapel Hill hosts a conference of mayors from around the country. Our elected officials are no doubt eager to tell visitors, constituents and the media about the many wonderful things that Chapel Hill Town government is doing. And some good things have indeed been happening lately, such as the completion of the Morgan Creek trail and the downtown sidewalk improvements. in other respects, however, the town’s development efforts, including our first foray into form-based code, leave much room for improvement.

This is Walt Mack. Hash, weed, pot, grass, joint. You name it – just a few of the hundreds of slang words for marijuana that have come into the American lexicon. And there’s a good reason why. It’s estimated that one in three Americans have experimented with pot or smoke it regularly. That would include […]