I don’t write a lot of love letters. In fact, I don’t write many letters at all, which is a shame, because I love letters. It may have something to do with the fact that I work at a newspaper, or that I write a column that uses the word ‘I’ and blends a public […]
I don’t write a lot of love letters. In fact, I don’t write many letters at all, which is a shame, because I love letters. It may have something to do with the fact that I work at a newspaper, or that I write a column that uses the word ‘I’ and blends a public […]
What does an artist need? A clean, well-lit place? Genius? A tortured soul? Or is the answer less poetic? Cheap rent, time to spare, and a bit of pocket money. Does an artist need theory, training, and genius underneath it all? Or will his art spring like a geyser from the darkest, deepest place in […]
You might have noticed there’s a little tag on the front of our newspaper commemorating 25 years in business. Our company started in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down, signalling an end to the Cold War and the dawning of the age of global capital and ethnic conflict. Cultural barriers, concrete and abstract, […]
When we publish our food listings magazine, Bites + Sites, the restaurant categories are always a bit of a conundrum. What do you do with a Russian-Turkish bakery or a French-owned restaurant that serves Virginia food or an Algerian-Mediterranean fusion joint or a Nepali-Indian place? When I was growing up in the ’80s, the Cold […]
I knew an old real estate boss in Western North Carolina who once offered me a piece of advice about growing a business. “It ain’t hard to make water come out of a pipe,” he said. “The hard part is sizing the pipe to get pressure.” I’ve had other people offer me unsolicited advice about […]
One of my friends in town told me a while ago that he always liked what I wrote, but he wondered why I was not feared as an editor. I told him I was not sure, but that maybe it was because I was more interested in building the framework for conversations than expressing my […]
I’ve been asked many times why I got a divinity degree, and there isn’t a simple answer. When I think about the enduring weight of student loans and the concrete impact it’s had on my professional life (virtually none), I begin to wonder myself. But that kind of hindsight sells short my own path, ignores […]
Every journalist gets into the business because he likes answering questions of one kind or another. Who’s moving the money behind the scenes? What color was the getaway car? When was the last time the budget was short? Where, exactly, does the water end up? Good reporters answer a lot of questions, but the essence […]
In 1965 Ralph Nader published Unsafe at Any Speed, destroying the unimpeachable authority of The Big Three and American manufacturing by tugging on a loose strand, the accident statistics of the Chevrolet Corvair. Nader became the voice of the American middle class and rode a wave of consumer advocacy to national prominence. Maybe for the […]
Widely interpreted as a metaphor for J.R.R. Tolkien’s personal experience during World War I and afterwards, The Hobbit was originally published in 1937 with the alternative title There and Back Again. A comfortable bourgeois man is vacuumed out of his house into a global struggle between good and evil, then returns to the shire changed […]