Our diversity is our greatest strength.
While some county residents are yet dealing with the aftermath, now that Hurricane — a la Tropical Depression — Florence is largely in our rear view, what can be said?
Like all North Carolinians I am worrying about the flooding causing heart-rending damage throughout our state following Hurricane Florence.
So much of our reasoning about race is both emotional and faulty. In ordinary, as well as professional, conversation, we use terms such as discrimination, prejudice, racial preferences and racism interchangeably, as if they referred to the same behavior. We can avoid many pitfalls of misguid…
I’ve been thinking a lot about priests lately. In truth, I often do, as some of my best friends do happen to wear Roman collars. Of course, you know why I’d be thinking about them even more lately.
The beginning of another academic year brings the certainty of campus episodes illustrating what Daniel Patrick Moynihan, distinguished professor and venerated politician, called “the leakage of reality from American life.” Colleges and universities are increasingly susceptible to intellectu…
Wealthy North Carolinians pay a higher share of their incomes in taxes than do middle-income North Carolinians, who in turn have a higher effective tax rate than the poor.
The campaign to overturn the 2016 election and bring down President Donald Trump shifted into high gear this week.
One of the best statements of how the framers saw the role of the federal government is found in Federalist Paper 45, written by James Madison, who is known as the "Father of the Constitution": "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. …
We as a nation, we in North Carolina and especially we in the High Country are no strangers to the arrival of emergency situations.
How did Carrboro writer and teacher Georgann Eubanks become the leader of the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association?
“When you get where you’re going, don’t forget; turn back around. Help the next one in line. Always stay humble and kind.”
The link below is a three-question survey about Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh that we are sharing with a variety of newspapers across the country to get reader opinion. We hope to show results next week. It's quick. We promise. The link: www.bit.ly/CourtPoll.
Thumbs-up, or down, you decide: Is it the summer season or winter that captures your High Country imagination? The passing of Labor Day, our nation’s unofficial end to summer, is a time for reflection or elation depending upon your personal view. At any rate, we still have a few weeks of won…
Anna Beer could cost North Carolina taxpayers millions of dollars.
South Africa has been thrown into the news because of President Donald Trump’s recent tweet that he instructed his secretary of state to “closely study” alleged land seizures from white farmers in South Africa.
In the Book of Lamentations, written about the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 587 B.C., you can find heartbreaking descriptions of loss and grief, betrayal and absolute despair. “Hear how I am groaning; there is no one to comfort me. All my enemies hear of my misery and rejoi…
This summer, the sex scandal that has bedeviled the Catholic Church went critical.
My wife is angry at the government. No surprise there, I suppose — we do have a great deal in common.
Is the pen mightier than a two-ton vehicle barreling down a narrow, unpainted, unsigned roadway in the rural High Country?
As elementary and secondary schools open their doors across North Carolina for the 2018-19 academic year, the cumulative effects of some 20 years of school-choice initiatives are impossible to miss.
“If anyone is looking for a good lawyer,” said President Donald Trump ruefully, “I would strongly suggest that you don’t retain the services of Michael Cohen.” Michael Cohen is no Roy Cohn.
He is like the houseguest who stays too long, and then when he’s finally gone, you miss him a little bit.
“I intended to be anything but Catholic,” Dawn Eden Goldstein remembers. She grew up in a Reform Jewish household but “fell into agnosticism” in her late teens, later becoming a rock-music historian in New York City. In 1999, she says she “encountered the love of Jesus Christ” and became a n…
According to a recent Gallup poll, 57 percent of Democratic voters view socialism positively, more than the 47 percent who view capitalism positively. If that sounds utterly bonkers to you, join the club.
If ex-CIA Director John Brennan did to Andrew Jackson what he did to Donald Trump, he would have lost a lot more than his security clearance.
Turning a rural and largely agricultural community into a tourist mecca is no walk in the park — but it just might be a roll down the hill.
“This may be the last time we get together like this.”
With the continuing hysteria about Donald Trump’s presidency, a few questions come to mind. The first: Can a bad man become a good president? The second: Does one’s being a good man guarantee he’ll be a good president? Third: Does having a good president require a good man? Is there any evid…
“I cannot let my selfishness stand in the way of your whole well-being.”
If critics of Confederate monuments truly want to accomplish their goal of removing such objects from the public square, I’m a good example of the kind of person they ought to be trying to persuade.
Is it any of Canada's business whether Saudi women have the right to drive?
With myriad road bicycling events during a High Country summer, Ashe County residents know how narrow and hectic the roads can become during this time of the year — last weekend’s Blue Ridge Brutal was an example. Even as finely run and executed as was that bike race — and a shout-out here t…
The Great American Read, a PBS series, is in the process of selecting America’s best-loved novel.
During the weekend of Aug. 4-5 (and the preceding Friday night), 12 Chicagoans were shot dead, and 62 others were shot and wounded, the Chicago Tribune reported (https://tinyurl.com/yde7jb83). Before last week’s mayhem, 1,718 Chicagoans had been shot since the beginning of the year and 306 h…
Have you seen the Nature Valley (the granola bar people) ad out of Canada? It has been making the social-media rounds lately, because it seems to capture something that is well within our power to fix. It portrays different generations of families talking about their childhoods. Scripted or …
I’d have structured it a bit differently and combined it with budget cuts. But even as is, the federal tax reform enacted by Congress and signed by President Donald Trump will enhance economic growth for the nation as a whole and for North Carolina in particular.
“Adoption is a beautiful thing. But it is also a terrifying thing. It is a maddening thing. It is a mystifying thing.” Emily Stimpson Chapman was writing about the woman who would make her dream of being a mother come true.
Many of the nation's colleges have become a force for evil and a focal point for the destruction of traditional American values.
A war with Iran would define, consume and potentially destroy the Trump presidency, but exhilarate the neocon never-Trumpers who most despise the man.
What once upon a time would have been unimaginable — school systems training and preparing for the possibility of a personal attack on its students, staff and educators — is now the reality for our children.
“Make America Great Again!” will, given the astonishing victory it produced for President Donald Trump, be recorded among the most successful slogans in political history.
Poverty is no mystery and it's easily avoidable. The poverty line that the Census Bureau used in 2016 for a single person was an income of $12,486 that year. For a two-person household, it was $16,072, and for a four-person household, it was $24,755. To beat those poverty thresholds is fairl…
When conservatives advocate lower taxes and less regulation, their critics often retort that conservatives are just advancing the interest of business.
We don’t use our mailboxes the same way we used to. And now, with the advent of increased small package delivery and the increasing amount of time our mailboxes are not monitored, law agencies across the nation and in Watauga County are reporting a growing concern of mail theft.
Dick Spangler, who died last week, changed my life dramatically and forever. That makes it hard to write an objective and proper tribute to the Charlotte business leader and former president of the University of North Carolina System.
“I will not lose my children at any cost. ... That’s my mother’s heart.”
Mona Charen had me hooked at the dedication of her latest book. It’s to her husband, and comes from the Song of Solomon: “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.”
“Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
While we await an even more-detailed blueprint to the governmental fulfillment of public record requests from N.C. Attorney General Josh Stein, there is much to applaud in the updated guide recently released by Gov. Roy Cooper’s office.
In 1965, Terry Sanford left the governor’s office and moved down Fayetteville Street from the Capitol into law offices in the BB&T Building. Political insiders started referring to that structure as the Bert Bennett and Terry Building.
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