This is Raleigh Mann. I confess it: I’m a big fan of Carolina sports. Right now, I am very excited as basketball season gets under way. When I was teaching, some student athletes found their way to my courses. They had to work, and the grading was tough. I was impressed by how many of […]

Well, it’s finally out there – the whole dirty story for the entire world to see.

This is Raleigh Mann. In the 36 years the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Y has occupied a building on MLK Boulevard south of Estes Drive, it has grown to serve more than 7 thousand active members. That’s a thousand more than the entire population of Hillsborough. Every day, 465 members now use the building to stretch, lift, […]

A local realtor writes yet another editorial calling on us to make it easier for new real estate projects to get approved. A Town Council member returns from a trip sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce and encourages us to build more meeting spaces. The Town Manager recommends that the taxpayers subsidize road construction for a large new apartment building on Elliot Road. A local real estate developer asserts that adding 1000 new residents to the Town’s population at Obey Creek will not cause our taxes to increase, when it almost certainly will. What’s going on here?

Domestic violence and child abuse have stunningly supplanted betting lines, rushing statistics, and Monday morning quarterbacking for the National Football League. The league’s commissioner recently announced that the NFL would revise its personal conduct policies and provide resources for community domestic violence prevention and treatment. America’s sport, which apparently has tolerated such abhorrent behavior for years, seems to be making an effort to shine a light on the problem of domestic violence, a problem where light is an important antidote to the secrecy, shame, and ignorance that allow this violence to flourish.

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