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https://indyweek.com/news/voices/drawn-out-the-protege/
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Support independent local journalism. Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.
Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com.
On big lies.
Support independent local journalism. Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.
Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com.
© 2021 INDY Week • 320 E. Chapel Hill St., Suite 200, Durham, NC 27701 • Phone 919-286-1972 • Fax 919-286-4274
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20220401
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https://indyweek.com/news/what-to-do-this-weekend-in-the-triangle/
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There are sunny days ahead this weekend, but come Saturday night, most North Carolinians will be inside. As the NCAA tournament draws to a close, people in the Triangle are only thinking about one thing—the semifinal game between longtime rivals Duke and UNC.
This year marks the first time ever the two college basketball teams will meet in the tournament, a statistical anomaly that has mostly prevented the Triangle from becoming a dumpster fire each March. So if you're a basketball fan, be prepared for chaos. And if you're not, well ... be prepared for chaos.
Clash of the Titans
The Duke v. UNC game airs at 8:49 p.m. Saturday on TBS. Sports bars across the Triangle will be tuning in, so if you plan on heading to Franklin Street, downtown Durham, or downtown Raleigh, be prepared for a loud, crowded, and crazy evening. Locals will remember the legendary car fire back in 2001 after a fan celebration on Franklin Street got out of control. This year, vandalism like that is even more likely, so stay safe and stay sober.
If you're not planning on watching the game, avoid downtown. Even if you are planning on watching the game, I recommend throwing a watch party from the comfort of your own home, where you don't have to search for parking and you can throw down as many beers as you like. You can stream the action on the TBS app, NCAA March Madness Live app, TBS.com, and NCAA.com. And if you're an NC State fan, sit back and enjoy the show. Maybe try and send some bad ju-ju UNC's way beforehand.
First Friday Fundraiser: Support Ukraine
If you're looking for a non-sporting event, head to Gallery C in downtown Raleigh for an evening of Ukrainian food, music, and art—all in support of the Ukrainian people. The guest of honor is Olen Kozlova-Pates, founder of the volunteer network Ukrainians in the Carolinas, which has been working to assist Ukrainians and promote their culture in the Carolinas for the past eight years.
Proceeds from the fundraising event will go toward the nonprofit Revived Soldiers Ukraine, which has been providing medical and humanitarian support to the people of Ukraine since 2014.
With the big game this weekend, there's a lot of appeal for some in getting as far away from civilization as possible. If you want to be unreachable, consider taking a self-guided canoe, kayak, or paddleboarding tour of Falls Lake. A short trip runs two-and-a-half hours, while a long trip will take up half your day, at four hours. The spring weather also means its not yet too hot on the water. Tours are $30-40.
Support independent local journalism. Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.
Follow Staff Writer Jasmine Gallup on Twitter or send an email to jgallup@indyweek.com.
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https://indyweek.com/news/longform/sunday-reading-origin-theories/
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In an absolutely wild story published this week, Vanity Fair contributor Katherine Eban follows Peter Daszak, the president of the nonprofit non-governmental organization EcoHealth Alliance, and the group's risky (albeit government-sponsored) work in the United States and China studying how to identify viruses that could jump from animals to humans in order to prevent a global pandemic.
Drawing on 100,000 leaked documents from Manhattan-based EcoHealth Alliance and interviews with 33 sources, Eban painstakingly traces how the once obscure nonprofit accidentally found itself suspected of starting the COVID-19 pandemic.
Helmed by Daszak, EcoHealth Alliance started out, according to the story, as "a struggling nonprofit with a mission to save manatees, promote responsible pet ownership, and celebrate threatened species," originally operating under the name Wildlife Trust until 2010.
"Constantly on the hunt for ways to close its budget shortfalls," Daszak's organization was, in 2009, awarded $18 million over five years in grant money from USAID to test bats for zoonotic viruses in remote locations all over the world.
From the story:
The money transformed the ragged nonprofit. It increased its budget by half, ending a yearslong operating loss; began a long- deferred rebranding, which led to the new name EcoHealth Alliance; and spruced up its headquarters, even giving its chronically broken air conditioner. Over the course of the grant, it allocated $1.1 million to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, USAID recently acknowledged in a letter to Congress."
Now, Daszak had long been collaborating with the Chinese scientist Shi Zhengli—"known as 'bat woman' for her fearless exploration of their [that is bats'] habitats"—per the story. Shi would eventually become the director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology's (WIV) Center for Emerging Infections Diseases.
More from the story:
In 2005, after conducting field research in four locations in China, Daszak and Shi co-authored their first paper together, which established that horseshoe bats were a likely reservoir for SARS-like coronaviruses. They would go on to collaborate on 17 papers. In 2013, they reported their discovery that a SARS-like bat coronavirus, which Shi had been the first to successfully isolate in a lab, might be able to infect human cells without first jumping to an intermediate animal.
Fast forward to 2014, and Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance received a prestigious, $3.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health titled Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence. Working with Shi and the WIV, as well as a partner laboratory at the University of North Carolina, the grant "proposed to screen wild and captive bats in China, analyze sequences in the laboratory to gauge human risk of bat viruses infecting humans, and build predictive models to examine future risk."
You can probably see what's happening here: not only did EcoHealth Alliance and WIV fail to foresee the COVID pandemic outbreak, but, with "murky grant agreements, flimsy oversight, and the pursuit of government funds for scientific advancement, in part by pitching research of steeply escalating risk," it's not implausible that the WIV's lab work could have had a "possible role" in the pandemic, if not as the origin point itself rather than the Huanan Seafood Market as has long widely been believed.
Anyway, there's your backstory. Dr. Anthony Fauci is involved, and UNC-Chapel Hill's Dr. Ralph Baric, a professor of epidemiology, microbiology, and immunology, and a coronavirus researcher, plays a supporting role in the story, too. It's a deftly reported, if at times convoluted, account of what could have happened in late 2019 or early 2020 that has brought us the global the reality of these last two years—a story that's both maddening and terrifying in its telling of what "shouldn't happen."
Read it all here.
Support independent local journalism. Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.
Follow Editor-in-Chief Jane Porter on Twitter or send an email to jporter@indyweek.com.
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https://indyweek.com/news/northcarolina/volunteers-work-with-ukraine-refugees/
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Eduard and Liliya Chernous of Asheville spent several weeks in March working with Ukraine refugees in Eastern Europe locations like this facility in Poland. | Photo courtesy of Eduard Chernous
Less than two weeks after Russian forces opened fire on Ukraine, Liliya Chernous was on a flight from North Carolina to Poland.
“When I came to the United States, I told myself, ‘I will learn everything that Americans are doing in order to help my country,’” Chernous said. She never thought helping Ukraine, her home, would mean tending to people fleeing war zones.
“It is a different (kind of) help, but I want to do it.”
When Chernous and her son, Eduard, boarded a 12-hour flight to Warsaw, they didn’t have a set agenda.
The Chernous family immigrated to Asheville from Western Ukraine in 1997. Since then, they’ve made annual trips back to visit Ukrainian family and friends—many of whom have fled the country in recent weeks as Russia widened its attack.
Most of Liliya and Eduard’s Ukrainian family has escaped the country safely. Some are choosing to stay and fight, despite Liliya’s pleas otherwise. One cousin, a front-line fighter in the war, hasn’t been in touch with the family in weeks.
The Chernouses didn’t start their humanitarian work in Ukraine when they landed in Europe. Back in Western North Carolina, they helped put on a vigil in Asheville days after the war began.
But this trip to Eastern Europe was different from previous ones. Instead of sharing meals with family or revisiting fond childhood locations, the pair spent the three-week trip in Germany, at Ukrainian borders and in Poland.
They didn’t join humanitarian organizations offering aid at the borders, such as Doctors Without Borders or the International Committee of the Red Cross. Instead, they reached out to people they knew personally through family and church to offer help.
“We found it more effective to be on a personal basis because the turnaround time is a lot quicker,” Eduard said about joining Polish church and community groups in Warsaw, Lodz, Krakow and the border town of Hrebenne. “You can get directly connected to people.”
The mother and son also served in German cities, including Stuttgart, Pforzheim, Neubulach and Bad Liebenzell.
After joining forces with these connections, Eduard and Liliya transported refugees to safe places and registered them for international passports and social services.
Liliya, who was a registered nurse in Ukraine and works as a medical translator in North Carolina, also assessed people for medical issues. Group leaders told her to be cognizant of potential sex trafficking and approach incoming Ukrainians with listening ears.
The Chernouses quickly realized, however, that the biggest task ahead of them while working with displaced Ukrainians was tending to their emotional needs.
“I just tried to hug them and kiss them,” Liliya said. “Ladies were crying constantly and asking, ‘Why? Why has this happened, Liliya? Do you think the world will end soon?’
“They still hope … to go back. They want to rebuild Ukraine, and they were even asking me, ‘Liliya, do you think the world will help us to rebuild Ukraine?’”
During their nearly monthlong trip, Liliya and Eduard heard heartbreaking stories from refugees about their arduous journey across the Ukrainian border.
One refugee family, while passing through a Russian block post, watched soldiers fire at a vehicle carrying a family with small children. Another had a friend who watched his wife die after being shot.
“They lost track of the days of the week,” Liliya said about a refugee who spoke about staying in the basement with her seven foster children for 19 days after Russia invaded.
“This lady … she said, ‘I so appreciate that I can see … light. Everything is different. Everything is much brighter.’
“Sometimes we don’t see colors, but those refugees, they can see colors much brighter than us.”
Eduard and Liliya flew back to Asheville on March 30, but they don’t plan to stop assisting Ukrainians. As soon as it’s logistically appropriate—they had to pay for the trip on their own and with the help of a GoFundMe—the two plan to return to Ukraine’s borders or wherever they’re needed to help their homeland.
In the meantime, they hope that the world outside Ukraine doesn’t become accustomed to the violence saturating the ground of their home country.
“The more identity we give to the (Ukrainian) people, the better,” Eduard said. “We can only hope that people don’t forget about this.”
Support independent local journalism. Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.
Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com.
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https://indyweek.com/news/durham/nccu-professor-chosen-to-research-nina-smith/
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A Durham professor will join a team of scholars tasked with providing national leadership and research on how to best serve African American children and their families.
Nina Smith, an associate professor of human sciences at N.C. Central University, was selected to provide research for the newly-established National African American Child and Family Research Center (NAACFRC) at the Morehouse School of Medicine, the university announced in a press release.
Smith will work as a co-investigator under the leadership of Latrice Rollins, an assistant professor in community health and preventive medicine at the Morehouse medical school, according to the NCCU release.
The two academics plan to work in concert to help provide national leadership on how to best serve African American families in the areas of child development, child care, economic mobility, and fatherhood, according to the university.
Smith’s work will focus on rural research. She previously studied the impact of COVID-19 on African Americans in rural North Carolina.
“When Dr. Rollins decided to apply for these funds, she asked if I’d be interested in serving as a co-investigator given my research interests and the goals she wanted to accomplish,” Smith said in the release. “I said ‘yes’ immediately because I believe this center [NAACFRC] is one of the first, if not the first of its kind, and so I understood the importance of this national research agenda for African American children and families.
“There’s great work being done on African American children and families, but the spotlight isn’t on that work the same as it is with work with majority populations,” Smith added. “This center will spotlight work with African Americans and the need for continued research.”
In the release, Rollins noted that Smith’s “prior work on African American families demonstrates her expertise and ability to lead the NAACFRC research in this area, which will inform policies and programs for these families.”
Rollins said the center will focus broadly on early education, including early head start and head start; child care assistance; social and economic mobility, including Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and poverty alleviation programs; and healthy relationships, including fatherhood and supportive family relationships.
The work will include “specific research themes impacting African Americans,” including those in rural communities and others who have been impacted by health, disability, and criminal justice issues, according to the release.
“One in 10 African Americans lives in a non-metropolitan area; however, dominant narratives about rural America frequently neglect the experiences of African Americans,” said Rollins, who added that African Americans in rural areas “deserve special attention, and those with low incomes face substantial burdens to employment because of extremely limited transportation and childcare options.”
The center’s opening was heralded in a Black History Month press release from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHS). Among the goals of the center is the development of “a community-engaged and high-caliber research program focused on African American children and families,” according to the press release.
“The African American population, like other racial and ethnic populations in the US, is very diverse, and this Center will allow space for scholars, students, and practitioners to learn and share more about the varied experiences and strengths of this population,” according to DHS.
Support independent local journalism. Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.
Follow Durham Staff Writer Thomasi McDonald on Twitter or send an email to tmcdonald@indyweek.com.
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https://indyweek.com/news/northcarolina/postpartum-medicaid-expansion-extended-for-pregnant-people/
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This story originally published online at NC Health News.
Postpartum Medicaid will be extended from 60 days after birth to one year starting today, as a provision included in last year’s state budget comes into effect.
The provision allows pregnant people at or below 196 percent of the federal poverty guidelines—about $34,800 for a family of two—to remain eligible for coverage for 12 months postpartum.
Medicaid coverage for pregnant people had previously ended about two months after giving birth, even though many pregnancy-related deaths occur 43 to 365 days postpartum, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
North Carolina has a maternal mortality rate of 21.9 deaths per 100,000 live births according to the annual America’s Health Rankings report, which uses CDC data. The United States averages 20.1 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births.
“This extended coverage is an important component to help improve the health of families in our state,” Deputy Secretary for North Carolina Medicaid Dave Richard said in a press release. “I hope we can build on this important step by expanding Medicaid in North Carolina to further support maternal health and reduce infant mortality by improving health before the pregnancy.”
Sarah Verbiest, a member of the NC Child Fatality Task Force called the provision “a game changer for new families in North Carolina” before the legislation was passed, at the group’s Perinatal Health Committee meeting in late September.
North Carolina for Better Medicaid said the move “has the potential to make a meaningful difference in the health of new mothers and their families,” in a press release in December.
What it means
The extended coverage applies to all categories of beneficiaries, according to the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. Those who are eligible for postpartum Medicaid will receive a letter detailing the change, according to NC DHHS.
The change comes after the postpartum Medicaid benefits for people who gave birth during the pandemic have continued for months past the 60-day cut off due to a provision in the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, which continues to cover new parents until the end of the federal COVID public health emergency, which is currently due to expire on April 16.
The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 gave states the ability and the money to extend postpartum coverage to 12 months, which the North Carolina General Assembly included in its budget which passed in November 2021 at a cost of $12.5 million in state dollars in the current fiscal year (which ends on June 30) and another $50.8 million in state funds in the coming fiscal year.
Starting April 1, pregnant people on Medicaid for Pregnant Women will have coverage for full Medicaid benefits, meaning they will also have coverage for services such as dental, doctor’s visits, vision and behavioral health care. A full list of Medicaid services can be found here.
Advocates say the extension is important since many postpartum deaths are due to preventable causes, such as substance use disorder, cardiac disease or death by suicide, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
About 12 percent of women in North Carolina experience postpartum depression, according to NC DHHS.
New parents can be vulnerable in the first months after giving birth and may suffer from health conditions from physical health issues to mental health struggles, Verbiest previously told NC Health News.
Advocates for women’s health have argued that extending postpartum Medicaid can help reduce deaths that occur outside of the 60-day window North Carolina had previously used for postpartum Medicaid, especially since 41 percent of births in North Carolina are financed by Medicaid, according to Kaiser Family Foundation.
Extension not expansion
While the state has extended Medicaid for pregnant people, it has yet to expand Medicaid for the remainder of low-income adults. Currently, the Tar Heel state is one of just 12 states that has not expanded Medicaid, something that became possible because of the Affordable Care Act. However, a bipartisan committee at the state Legislature is studying the possibility of expanding Medicaid.
Medicaid expansion has divided North Carolina’s legislature along party lines for almost a decade, with Democrats, including Gov. Roy Cooper, largely supporting expansion and Republicans largely opposing it.
Medicaid expansion would allow households with an income below 133 percent of the federal poverty line to qualify for coverage. Currently, only low-income workers, low-income people with children, people with disabilities and pregnant people qualify up until they give birth and for 60 days thereafter.
Extending postpartum Medicaid was a bipartisan effort. It was originally introduced as a Senate bill by three Republican Sens. Jim Burgin (R-Angier), Joyce Krawiec (R-Kernersville) and Kevin Corbin (R-Franklin).
Both Krawiec and Corbin are on the Medicaid expansion committee. Corbin has been a vocal supporter of expanding Medicaid.
North Carolina Health News is an independent, non-partisan, not-for-profit, statewide news organization dedicated to covering all things health care in North Carolina. Visit NCHN.
Support independent local journalism. Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.
Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com.
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20220405
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https://indyweek.com/culture/page/megan-mayhew-bergman-story-collection-review/
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Book cover and photo of Megan Mayhew Bergman by Nina Subin
Megan Mayhew Bergman readings | Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh | Wednesday, Apr. 6, 7 p.m. | Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill | Thursday, Apr. 7, 5:30 p.m.
Only one of the stories in Megan Mayhew Bergman’s new short story collection, How Strange a Season, takes place in North Carolina: “A Taste for Lionfish,” the story of Lily, a college student employed by a conservation organization, who travels to Alligator, North Carolina, to try and persuade coastal residents to incorporate lionfish, an invasive species, into their diet. It goes about how you’d expect: “You’re trying to tell these poor folks how to fix a rich folks’ problem,” a character bluntly tells Lily.
The other seven stories in the collection cast a wide geographic net, from Italy to Arizona, and lurch back in time; the years 1792 and 1979 both make appearances. But Bergman, who grew up in Rocky Mount and spent years in Raleigh and Durham in adulthood, evidences no shortage of love for the state, and the book bears an affectionate dedication to “My North Carolina Family.” This week, Bergman—who now teaches literature and environmental writing at Middlebury College in Vermont—is back locally in support of the new book, with stops at Quail Ridge Bookstore and Flyleaf Books. In-person readings have been slow to come back, since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, so events like these feel extra special.
Time and setting may vary in these stories but the characters have plenty in common: How Strange a Season is haunted by strong women in search of themselves. Or, maybe better put, the women in Bergman’s stories—strong-willed activists, artists, and athletes—have a grip on who they are but are less sure how to squeeze into a world shaped by men.
Climate change lurks like a specter, though not ornamentally; Bergman is a gifted, observant scribe of the natural world. Sex, regret, and desire run amok. (“It seemed to her that adulthood was a series of mundane years punctuated by transgressions and apologies,” one character thinks to herself.) Money also plays a strong hand, and most characters have the luxury of not wanting for it. (This isn’t a criticism: the affluence of some characters thrusts the needs of others into sharp relief, as with Marie, a Norwegian wet nurse who is drawn, conditionally, into the lives of a dysfunctional old-money family in the story “Indigo Run.”)
What these characters do long for, though, is purpose and home.
In “Indigo Run,” the novella-length story that anchors the collection, the older generation of a family is obsessed with sinking their teeth into the traditions of their ancestral South Carolina plantation, even if it makes them sick, while the youngest woman in the family believes she can only find her own sense of belonging by burning it all down. “Girls understand what home means in a way men don’t,” one character explains.
It’s a Southern Gothic story that takes a few pages to get into—it has no shortage of diversions, especially in the beginning—but once you do get into it you’ll be pulled in deep by its sensual, uneasy current. I was reminded, while reading, of Lauren Groff’s ambitious novel Fates and Furies, with its lyrical Southern sprawl and damaged characters hell-bent on a collision course.
In “Wife Days” a champion swimmer makes dark agreements with her wealthy husband, while in the surprising (and maybe a little uneven) “Workhorse” a heartsick floral artist has already separated from her husband and spends her days crafting an elaborate terrarium while trying to avoid the demands of another man, her father.
It’s the first story in the book, and the rare botanical flowers the artist seeks to cultivate are a perfect stand-in for the book’s rich themes. The flowers are beautiful and expensive but have to be coaxed into their environments. They’re only destined to thrive that way for a little while.
Support independent local journalism. Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.
Follow Arts & Culture Editor Sarah Edwards on Twitter or send an email to sedwards@indyweek.com.
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https://indyweek.com/culture/page/david-sedaris-happy-go-lucky-review/
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David Sedaris: Happy-Go-Lucky | Little, Brown and Company; May 31, 2022
North Carolinians—or at least those of us who enjoy seeing our state through the twisted lens of Sedarian humor—may rejoice: David Sedaris’s latest essay collection, Happy-Go-Lucky, has much more of the Old North State in it.
Happy-Go-Lucky starts with Sedaris and his sister Lisa visiting a Winston-Salem gun range. In following essays, he shares his and his partner Hugh’s fight to restore their Emerald Isle beach house (wonderfully named the Sea Section) after Hurricane Florence and the family’s time spent in their father’s North Carolina nursing home.
In these new essays, Sedaris continues on themes he began to explore in Calypso, namely his father’s aging, his own aging, and the business of maintaining a beach house on a hurricane-plagued piece of coastline. He also spends ample time being concerned for young people and meditating on the nature of comedy, writing, and performance. Oh, and dental work.
If those topics don’t sound like cause for rejoicing, well, fair. But if you’re a devotee of Sedaris’s work, I think you’ll enjoy this collection. He approaches each of these challenges with his characteristic witty ire, but a few of the essays did leave me thinking about more somber topics like the mortality of my parents and the horror of training children to deal with school shootings.
As always, Sedaris is often shockingly candid. He shares his phobia of looking at his own teeth (this checks out: have you ever seen a photo of him smiling with them visible?), a touch of regret about the last words he said to his father, and the immensely uncomfortable tension of being the subject of at least one youth’s sexual awakening. Just a heads up, the most uncomfortably frank essay investigates his father’s consistent sexual comments about his daughters and one daughter’s accusations of sexual abuse.
Sedaris has often relied on the alternate insight and obliviousness of children to highlight the comedy of everyday life. (Well, he uses them to highlight the comedy of his everyday life, which I’ll admit has a higher level of inherent humor than I can find in my own.) Earlier collections focused almost entirely on Sedaris’s own childhood, but he spends a good amount of time in Happy-Go-Lucky focusing on other children, through exercises such as imagining what it might be like to be a child in a time of school shootings. It works well to highlight the whole uneasy aging thing.
Sedaris is often thoughtful, attacking uncomfortable topics in a darkly funny way. But at least one essay, the one about his father’s death, made me feel the way Bo Burnham’s Inside or Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette did: that I’d fallen prey to a bait and switch where I did not get the laughs I thought I would.
Other essays even take a similar path to some of Burnham’s more poignant moments in Inside. Sedaris considers, for example, the fact that he gets to profit off of his own trauma as long as he can frame it in a way that makes people laugh. Sedaris describes both the freedom that can come from turning trauma into comedy gold and into actual revenue and the necessity of an actual audience for what he does. (Zoom just doesn’t cut it some days, does it?)
He doesn’t linger in this place of self-reflection (indulgence?) for too long, though. He also arrives at a different conclusion than many of us when we reflect on varying levels of emotional exploitation in our own careers: Sedaris likes his job. He likes it when you and I are there to laugh at the trials of his childhood. I found myself touched by his gratitude that we continue to support him in that line of work.
And then, there’s the book cover: on it, a small child smiles while leaning on the arm of a truly grotesque clown who’s holding a small white dog—a poodle maybe? As uncomfortable as the artwork might be, it’s fitting for this collection. If you or I sat down and drew a clown face right now, we’d all probably do similar versions of exaggerated features. Double those to get the scope of this clown’s raggedy face, and trim the mouth down to three painted-on teeth in a Joker smile.
I probably wouldn’t allow this snapshot in my house in any form other than as a necessary attachment to Sedaris’s essays, but I couldn’t imagine a better representation of them. Children watch or attack or ignore Sedaris throughout the collection. He uses their innocence to highlight the creeping horror of confronting his own mortality or, more hauntingly, that of the kindergarteners across the country practicing active-shooter drills.
If you’re looking to be entertained by another round of lightly self-effacing elitism and Sedarian “can he really say that?”—well, he did, and in just another month or so, Happy-Go-Lucky can be yours to have and to hold.
Support independent local journalism. Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.
Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com.
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https://indyweek.com/culture/screen/ten-films-full-frame-2022/
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A still from 'What We Leave Behind' | Photo courtesy of Full Frame Documentary Festival
Full Frame Documentary Film Festival | Thursday, Apr. 7–Sunday, Apr. 10, 2022
Due to the perpetual bummer that is COVID-19, the 25th annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival is being held online again this year, April 7-10. But don’t fret: festival organizers have figured out the best possible techniques for watching the films at home on your TV (why not a viewing party?) or on your small-screen device, if you must.
The best way to proceed is via the Full Frame website, which has step-by-step instructions and a thorough FAQ on purchasing tickets and setting up your viewing experience. This year’s festival features 37 titles from 18 countries—22 feature films and 15 shorts. The festival is also hosting several online filmmaker Q&A sessions. Organizers have also announced a plan to present a handful of in-person documentary screenings at Durham Central Park at the end of August.
To watch now, though, browse the full listings at the Full Frame website, and read up on this sampling that suggests the typical breadth of awesomeness at Full Frame’s annual festival.
Among the buzziest of this year’s docs, Stay Prayed Up profiles legendary North Carolina gospel group The Branchettes and singer Lena Mae Perry, celebrating her 50th year as the bandleader. Early reactions suggest this is the film for those of us seeking dramatic renewal of hope. Watch for a special screening event at the Carolina Theatre in May.
Grand Jury prize winner at Sundance, The Exiles follows the 30-year journey of three exiled Chinese dissidents from the Tiananmen Square massacre. Also in frame: notoriously rowdy filmmaker Christine Choy, the documentarian who first profiled the escapees just after the tragic events in 1989. Debut directors Violet Columbus and Ben Klein unknot a very twisty story.
Another big winner at Sundance, this harrowing documentary chronicles the story of now-imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and his mission to find those who poisoned him in 2020. Navalny is square in the middle of the global conversation right now, and it’s one of several films in this year’s lineup to address issues around the war in Ukraine.
Director Jon-Sesrie Goff offers a sustained meditation on the American South through a collage of history, memory, and the tensions in between. Told in flittering scenes of personal narrative, the film observes the Gullah community in South Carolina, stewards of land originally deeded to freed slaves, and their experience with recent hate crimes and gradual gentrification.
First-time feature director Reid Davenport shot the entirety of this remarkable film from his particular physical vantage point as a wheelchair-using documentarian. Toggling between the experimental and the vérité, Davenport delivers a first-person perspective on “spectacle, (in)visibility, and the corrosive legacy of the Freak Show.”
In 1956, Gabor Szilasi arrived by boat from Hungary to his new adopted home in Canada. He’s been taking pictures of everyday life ever since. Filmmaker Joannie Lafrenière follows the 94-year-old photographer as he applies his fiercely humanist philosophy to everything he sees, from Montreal to Budapest and back again. This year’s fest is light on feel-good films, but this is one of them.
Another documentary with alarming relevance just now, Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes features never-before-seen footage filmed during and just after the infamous 1986 disaster. Director James Jones also rooted out additional material from archival news reports, defunct Russian studios, and Soviet propaganda films. Word is that Jones finished his film and got out of Ukraine just before war was declared.
Filmmaker Iliana Sosa’s film is a kind of DIY cinematic ode to her grandfather, Julián, who regularly visits his daughters and their children in El Paso from his home in rural Mexico. Julián has been making that bus trip for decades, nurturing family ties over the border. Sosa’s lyrical, artful film is a reminder that all a talented filmmaker really needs is a story and a camera.
This intriguing feature doc from director Tomasz Wolski depicts the back-room dealings behind a series of violent protests in communist Poland circa 1970, when authorities cracked down on starving workers. Wolski combines archival telephone recordings with stop-motion animation to imagine the conflict from behind the closed doors of the oppressors—angry little men in power, playing with life and death.
Fresh from its world premiere at SXSW, director Jessica Edwards’s new film is being billed as the first feature documentary about the rise of women’s skateboarding. Skate Dreams follows the stories of several women, from the sport’s 1980s pioneers to recent Olympic contenders around the world. There aren’t many rules in documentary filmmaking, but everyone knows this one: skateboarding movies always look cool as hell.
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https://indyweek.com/food-and-drink/features/acme-strike-carrboro/
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On a Sunday in late February, as diners were beginning to warm up again to indoor dining and most restaurants were celebrating one of their busiest weekends in two years, Acme Food & Beverage Co. turned 24 years old to the tune of a silent, empty dining room.
The Carrboro restaurant’s birthday came three days after its front-of-house team announced the end of their three-month strike, with all but one of the 19 striking workers permanently vacating their serving, hosting, and bartending positions.
The strike was brought on by what employees describe as the “willful ignorance of upper management” in addressing sexual harassment allegations they had raised against Acme’s owner, Kevin Callaghan.
During a time of dramatic upheaval in the labor sector—Starbucks workers are currently organizing in more than 150 locations across the country; just last week, employees at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island succeeded in forming the company’s first union—the strike at Acme stands out as unusual for a number of reasons.
“It’s hard not to see that this is something of an anomalous strike,” says Gunther Peck, a Duke University associate professor of history who teaches courses on organized labor. “There’s no wage demand. There’s no union recognition demand.”
Unlike labor movements in recent headlines, the strike at Acme involved a single, independent restaurant in a small college town, with a social-media-centric strategy of organizing that reflected its generation of striking workers, nearly all of whom were under the age of 25. And their chief demand—that Callaghan, Acme’s founder and chef-owner, would not set foot again in his own business—raised questions about what justice looks like in a strike unable to be settled through simple policy change.
It was also an abnormally tight-lipped strike, as employees declined to go into detail to others or the INDY on their allegations. Strike organizer Madison Burns says this was primarily because harassment is hard to enumerate; it can be difficult to convey the impact of a comment, a look, or a lingering touch, she says.
“Sexual misconduct and harassment has a much broader definition than people realize,” Burns wrote in a reply to one Instagram commenter’s request for specifics. “Our coworkers were made to feel very uncomfortable by a man, who is their boss, who is more than twice their age, on nearly every occasion he was in the restaurant. That’s plenty of detail if you ask me.”
Shortly before the strike, employees say, a breaking point came after working a wine dinner in mid-November. According to Burns, Callaghan, 55, had spent the night making inappropriate remarks and being touchy-feely. A few workers expressed their discomfort to Alison Hinks, a recently hired bar manager.
“She was really concerned so she brought it to management’s attention, and she was threatened with her job if she didn’t stop speaking out for us,” says Burns, who started working as a server at Acme in May 2021. “So she quit, and that’s when we decided we should strike.”
In an email to the INDY, Acme’s legal representation wrote that allegations of inappropriate behavior by Callaghan at the wine dinner were false and denied that he had threatened Hinks’s job; after Hinks reported that Callaghan “had engaged in ‘inappropriate sexual language and advancements,’” they wrote, the restaurant requested that she give them time to gather facts, and she subsequently resigned without notice. Hinks declined an interview for this story.
On November 26, several hours before the striking employees set off to deliver their notice, Callaghan used the restaurant’s scheduling app to dispatch a letter to the entire Acme team.
The letter opens with Callaghan asserting that he thought he was “on the right side of things”—or, at least, that’s what he’d “told himself.”
“You think that because you go to marches, host fundraisers, and sign petitions, that you then align with certain goals and beliefs,” Callaghan wrote. “So, it’s incredibly humiliating to find myself complicit in the same power dynamics that I’ve claimed to disavow for my entire adult life.”
Callaghan went on to state he would be removing himself from any involvement in restaurant service for several months; in the meantime, he would be talking with a therapist and Acme’s management team would work to create a new framework for conducting conversations about harassment.
“There is no excuse for my actions,” Callaghan concluded. “I am very sorry.”
The strikers found Callaghan’s apology insincere.
“[It seemed like Acme] knew something was up and were trying to quickly take the wind out of our sails,” says 22-year-old striker Drew Ehrler. “The timing of it felt like too little too late. It just gave this feeling like nothing’s been internalized, very glib.”
Later that day, as planned, the strikers submitted their notice and Acme shifted back to the take-out-only model it had implemented earlier in the pandemic.
After receiving the workers’ demands, the restaurant hired Raleigh attorney Bridget Blinn-Spears as legal representation and Chapel Hill employment law practice Noble Law Firm to conduct an HR audit. With help from the grassroots labor campaign Fight for $15, the strikers brought their own counsel on board, who represented them pro bono.
The strikers’ first demand: that Callaghan “not be allowed to return to the premises.” The notice also called for the appointment of an official human resources officer. Zoë Dehmer—the chief culture officer for Acme’s leadership team and the manager who employees say functioned as Acme’s de facto HR director—had recently gotten out of a six-year romantic relationship with Callaghan. Dehmer, 29, says she started dating Callaghan after being promoted from a front-of-house position to management in 2015. In an email, Dehmer wrote that though they lived together, she and Callaghan kept their personal lives removed from the business during the time.
“I don’t know where they got the idea I was the de facto HR person,” Dehmer wrote. “In Acme’s handbook, which they all signed during onboarding, the policy is clear that employees were welcome to go to any manager to raise concerns.”
The strike notice explained that Dehmer’s involvement with Callaghan “contributed to the inability of victims to come forward against Kevin.”
Twenty-year-old striker Abbey Chewning, who started working at Acme in August 2021, says she was originally drawn to the restaurant because she believed its status as a beloved, critically acclaimed Carrboro institution implied a healthy workplace. But once Chewning learned of Dehmer’s history with Kevin, she says, “there wasn’t a lot we felt like we could do to rectify the issues we were facing.”
Former employee Coco Wilder, who worked at Acme between 2018 and 2019, echoes this sentiment.
“Kevin and Zoë as a unit were impenetrable,” Wilder says. “She was posting pictures of their international vacations together—I’m not going to go to her with an issue against her boyfriend, boss, and owner of the restaurant.”
The notice went on to demand a “formal apology” from Callaghan and upper management—one posted publicly with an acknowledgment of Callaghan’s alleged behavior, not just his position of power—as well as a framework to encourage more diversity in the restaurant staff.
The negotiation was frustrating at first, strikers say, then began to feel futile.
In February, employees received a draft of Callaghan’s apology that Acme representatives said would ultimately be released to the public. Workers were then asked to sign a contract stating that they wouldn’t release the apology or discuss it in detail, Burns says, which Acme also denies. According to the restaurant’s counsel, Acme “requested and received assurances that any drafts would be kept confidential until the apology was finalized and released.”
Ultimately, Burns maintains, it was a document that “didn’t inspire any confidence that if we went back we would experience different treatment.” After the HR audit was concluded, Acme presented the results to the striking workers’ counsel on an “attorneys’ eyes only basis.”
The investigation did not find any instances of Callaghan’s behavior that would constitute a legal claim for sexual harassment, according to Acme, though it did “describe employees being uncomfortable with comments made by Callaghan.”
Speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, five former employees who worked at Acme for three to 10 years, as long ago as 2005—including one who claims to have submitted a testimony to the HR audit—corroborated Callaghan’s history of harassment. Some expressed guilt at not speaking up about the alleged behavior. Acme maintains that management “received no other complaints related to Mr. Callaghan prior to those made to Ms. Hinks.”
Acme also informed the striking workers—who were largely made up of front-of-house staff—that in rehiring employees, the restaurant would be reinstating its pre-pandemic shift availability policy, in which servers and bartenders must have the availability to work a minimum of 15 shifts a month. This, according to Acme, was to ensure that employees have a “deep knowledge of the menu and ingredients,” though some employees—who had previously been hired to work only a few shifts a week—interpreted it as a more direct message from Acme: We don’t want you back.
By the end of January, some advancements had been made: Acme agreed to mandate sexual harassment and diversity training for employees and management, as well as implement a new anti-bullying policy.
And in negotiating their chief demand, Burns says the strikers were willing to compromise; if Callaghan had agreed to take a lengthy furlough and limit his presence during service hours upon his return, that would have been enough. Instead, lawyers offered a 30-day leave of absence from Callaghan.
Several months into this back-and-forth, the restaurant was still posting brightly lit photos of cornbread and wedge salads on Instagram, and most of the workers had moved on and gotten new jobs. Though no demands had been met in full, workers decided it was time to call it. On February 17, they ended the strike.
When Wilder heard that her successors had gone on strike, she says she was supportive but dubious about how it would play out.
“I was like, that’s gonna be hard, their first demand being that Kevin was not going to set foot on the premises,” says Wilder. “Acme is inseparable from Kevin.”
This particular facet of the strike is part of what makes it so unique, explains Peck.
“It’s unusual for a particularly bad foreman to literally cause a strike,” he says. “Usually it’s company policy, or that all the foremen are doing something wrong.”
It’s also unconventional to use a strike as a grievance procedure, according to Peck. When there’s just “one bad apple creating a toxic work environment,” it’s usually a simple fix—the company fires them. It can even be an easy way for a company to look heroic, Peck says.
“But this isn’t a company—there’s the rub. It’s an individual who owns the damn restaurant.”
But Peck stresses that the demand is important, despite the fact that it’s tricky to meet it in full.
“In terms of getting a story that’s compelling about something that sometimes would be gray in policy terms, to say it’s gray doesn’t mean it’s not impactful.”
They’ve raised difficult workplace questions, Peck says, and that’s a good thing. In Chewning’s words, “When the owner of the restaurant is the biggest issue, it’s like, what are we gonna do? Fire him from his place of business?”
From the outside, the answer may have been straightforward: quit and find another place to work. This is ultimately what most of the strikers did, but not before making a full-court press to change working conditions—not just for themselves but for future employees.
“The employees insisted that the food being served and the efficacy of the restaurant are inseparable from how they’re being treated,” Peck says. “They were figuring it out as they went, so I admire the chutzpah—the courage and the risks that they’ve taken.”
Wilder also applauds the strikers’ ability to both see an issue and act on it.
“It’s a very brave thing to do. They’re new blood, and that may mean that they’re not taken as seriously, but it also means they’re able to identify a problem and take a stand,” Wilder says, in reference to the number of recent hires that were involved in the strike. “In the ‘business as usual’ climate I worked in, I don’t think it would’ve happened.”
This, the strikers say, is part of what enabled them to organize as a collective.
They all started at Acme around the same time and quickly became good friends. Most were in their early twenties, and though Acme’s front-of-house had always been fairly youthful, this new batch was also from a new generation.
And even if the collective’s demands weren’t ultimately met, they say they still feel accomplished in what they set out to do: have their voices heard—if not by Callaghan or management, then by the community.
According to Chewning, the workers didn’t originally intend to go public with the strike. But after almost a month had passed and Acme hadn’t responded to their demands, they took their grievances to the digital realm. They decided to go Gen Z on ’em.
They created an Instagram account,@acmeonstrike, which quickly accumulated more than 700 followers. The strike hashtag—#damngoodstrike—was a sardonic nod to Acme’s business leadership team, Damn Good Food, which is owned by Callaghan and works jointly with Plum Southern Food in Durham, Atlas Bar in Carrboro, and Lumina Theater in Chapel Hill.
“They pivoted really quickly to something called community unionism, where you’re not focused simply on the immediate demand, but you reach and seek out a broader public,” Peck says. “It shows the ingenuity of a younger group on strike.”
The strikers created graphics (complete with their own “Acme on strike!” logo) that stated their demands, a timeline of events, and any updates, and posted them on Instagram alongside captions that provided nuance, addressed commenters’ questions, and cited their role models; one post ends with a quote from Lech Walesa, a trailblazing labor activist who organized his first strike at age 27 and later served as the president of Poland.
Burns has Walesa beat by a few years: she’s 24, the same age as the restaurant she strove to organize.
“Social media has become a really powerful information-spreading tool,” Burns says. “It was a way to get information to folks who maybe aren’t plugged into activist networks otherwise.”
Beyond Instagram, the workers also filmed videos of themselves explaining the strike and its larger context and cut them with B-roll from a rally they held in early January; the videos were then featured on Fight for $15’s TikTok account, which has 100,000 followers.
Sharing social media posts via direct message is straightforward—even reflexive—and allowed the strikers to swiftly mobilize their own community. Online visibility likely played a large role in raising the strikers’ funds to almost $10,000, and also allowed reporters to easily contact strikers for interviews, enabling their story to be shared on other platforms.
The strikers went public with the hopes that it would compel Acme to start talking. But the rally, which attracted Carrboro Town Council member Danny Nowell and more than 50 other supporters, was ultimately what drove the restaurant to start taking them seriously.
That being said, there was a driving force behind those high turnout numbers: they’d promoted the rally on Instagram.
On February 25, Acme posted a note from Callaghan on its website stating that management had been approached with “complaints of sexual harassment and misconduct” in November and immediately took action to investigate the claims. Callaghan wrote that even though the investigation came back clean, he feels he has fallen short in creating an environment where employees feel comfortable and is working to mitigate similar situations in the future.
The restaurant linked the note in a Facebook post and, for several days, in its Instagram bio. The note is not visible on Acme’s site unless users enter specific search terms.
Now that the strike is done, Burns is channeling her energy into forming a Chapel Hill–Carrboro Workers Coalition, which she says will provide workers with a support system and a place to discuss organizing and workplace treatment.
The former strikers held a “victory rally” to promote the new coalition on February 27, huddling under the pavilion at Carrboro Town Commons while rain poured down around them.
At the rally, Council Member Nowell briefly applauded the workers for their efforts, a sign-up sheet for the coalition was passed around, and then the crowd, mostly made up of former strikers and former employees, dispersed one by one. Perhaps due to poor weather and a last-minute venue change, turnout was low, but Burns has taken to the Acme strike Instagram to further promote the coalition, which had its first meeting on March 28. Ten people attended.
In a phone call, Nowell, who also spoke at the mid-strike rally in January, declared that he doesn’t plan on returning to Acme.
“It’s a real shame. I was really looking forward to eating at an organized Acme that had met these demands,” Nowell said. “But under these circumstances, I’ve had my last meal there—I’m not going to be crossing the picket line. Without the workers, there is no Acme.”
Support independent local journalism. Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.
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https://indyweek.com/music/reviews/the-dead-tongues-dust-review/
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The Dead Tongues: Dust | ★★★★ | Psychic Hotline; Apr. 1
For over a decade, Ryan Gustafson has been crafting affectionate roots rock, sharing deeply personal lyrics with a mystical folk hue. Gustafson’s work with The Dead Tongues has become a reliable source of entrancing tunes, and while sometimes formulaic, it’s a formula that works: Gustafson digs deep into his heart and churns out timeless tracks like clockwork.
With The Dead Tongues’ latest album, Dust, Gustafson found himself struggling to push forward as a musician. Like for many of us, the pandemic made Gustafson reevaluate his identity. Instead of tossing out his old notebooks, he used them as inspiration for this stellar fifth record.
While many familiar tropes are explored on Dust, we also find Gustafson at his most adventurous. The record opens with “Pawnshop Dollar Bills” a hypnotic track that nods to classic American jam bands, chooglin’ on with eight minutes of dynamic rustic ruckus. “Pawnshop …” is downtempo but packed full of intricacies, a pervasive theme in this record. While it’s easy to tune out to Dust, an album full of sparse and subdued songs, you’ll find that it’s packed full of brilliant musical moments if you give it your full attention.
“Through the Glass” is an upbeat jaunt with mandolin flourishes from Andrew Marlin (Watchhouse) and harmonies from Alexandra Sauser-Monnig (Mountain Man). It’s a track that follows the fleeting nature of life and the joy found in its minutiae, a theme found frequently throughout the album. The titular track stands out with Gustafson’s harmonica hanging over the mix, lurking like a specter of his pining and desperation. “Little Lies” brings bright pedal steel and upbeat percussion to contemplative lyricism.
Dust is a record that feels like a natural progression for Gustafson. There’s a fine balance between rich production and humble arrangements, all anchored with lyrics that traverse a universal struggle to belong—and to find the balance between the person you were and the person you’ve become.
Support independent local journalism. Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.
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https://indyweek.com/news/15-minutes/15-minutes-musician-john-foley/
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John Foley | Courtesy Photo
How do you feel like your approach to music and the industry has changed and adapted throughout the pandemic?
I haven’t been playing live shows since COVID started. The plan was to move to a bigger city right as COVID hit and then that obviously changed everything. I shifted to Twitch on New Year’s Eve 2020 and started doing live streams two to three times a week.
I might have done that without COVID, because after playing with a band for so long, I wanted to be more self-reliant. [Twitch] made me focus more on a solo act and work on guitar more. There was already a trend toward musicians going digital, and I think COVID expedited things when no one could play for a year. I was thinking how can I make money when my regular revenue streams are gone? What are some new income streams I can put in? How can I connect with people online?
You’re obviously never going to match the energy of an in-person show, but Twitch is really cool because if I was doing this kind of set in-person it would be a restaurant bar, 3 hours cover set and stream from 2-4ish hours, but you can connect with people a lot more on Twitch because you have the chat and can talk to people on-on-one. Whereas if you are doing the same set in a bar or restaurant you can make more money, but no one is really interacting with you that much. Music is growing and Twitch has been making a point to growing their music section.
How does Twitch work for an artist?
The monetization is either subscriptions and for affiliates – you are a streamer and when you reach a certain bench mark you are an affiliate and that’s when you can start monetizing. But it’s really easy to get there. As an affiliate you get half of the subs—so it’s 5 dollars and you get $2.50 and twitch takes the other half. Once you get to partner—that’s 75 average viewers—you can renegotiate and have a personalized deal.
As an affiliate you get money from subs and bits, which is Twitch currency. Each bit is one penny. You can take donations so I have my Venmo linked because it’s direct and you get all of it. In my experience as a small streamer, and this is generally true for most streamers, the money comes in waves. You get the subs and your regulars will donate a little bit every show but there is usually one person who will drop a ton of money randomly. There are raids where when your stream ends you can automatically send all your people to somebody else's stream, it’s a cool way to connect with other people and grow your audience. You can also get money when somebody buys gift subs, which are when you buy subs and give them to other people.
How do you feel your music style and inspiration for writing has developed throughout the pandemic?
I’ve definitely focused more on solo acoustic stuff. I write all my songs with just me and a guitar. The next album I’m working on is more of an acoustic, stripped-down album. There will be full instrumentation on it, but it is more folk singer songwriter than pop rock. It’s stripped back and I’m more self-sufficient as an artist. It’s one thing to have to wrangle a band together, but when you can’t see other people theTe biggest issue is becoming more self-reliant.
The next album is more introspective. All of my music is a bit angsty, but whereas Spirits was existential and feeling lost in life, the next album is more my personal struggles with mental health and stuff like that. A lot of the songs come from when I was really depressed in college and I never thought would show those songs to anybody – they were just my therapy. Now that I’ve gotten out of that, I looked back on those songs and decided to build an album out of them. A little less than half of the album will be older songs from that dark place and the other half is more recent stuff, but it’s all in that same kind of tone.
What are your future plans?
On Twitch you have a song list and you put up every song you know and people can request from it. I’ve gotten that to about 150 songs. I’ll definitely start playing restaurants and bars again because the money is better than Twitch, but i'll keep streaming on Twitch as well. I would also love to do solo acoustic show and play with some other people for an actual show. I have gotten a lot better at finger picking and I have a stomp pad for percussion. I’m excited to build up a set where I can give a quality show where it’s just me and from there I can start working with other people.
Support independent local journalism. Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.
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https://indyweek.com/news/Letters-to-the-Editor/backtalk-indy-role-creating-nimbyism/
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Two weeks ago for print, Jasmine Gallup wrote about how the Triangle’s housing crisis, in Orange County specifically, is displacing residents as landlords increase rents. Reader Rob LaVelle suggests we here at the INDY take a look at our own culpability in contributing to the Triangle’s housing crisis over the years. LaVelle writes:
Thanks for your reporting on the ongoing housing crisis here in the triangle. It did a good job of showing the impact of scarce housing on our citizens. It fell short, however, in shedding light on why we are in this predicament—which is really hard to do with this complex issue. Your article fell into the easy trap of implicitly blaming out-of-towners for our self inflicted wounds.
A great follow up article would be to investigate all the ways local governments have limited supply and slow-walked development over the past 30 years. Relevant to your reporting is the fact that Carrboro built more multi-unit housing in the 1980’s than it did in the 30 years since. “Progressive” nimby citizens of a “progressive” town set the stage for the replacement we are experiencing. That would be an interesting article to read!
An even more interesting article would be to search through the Indy archives of the last 30 years and analyze its role in creating or reflecting the anti development nimbyism that afflicts us. Serious analysis from your newspaper has been sadly lacking over the past decades.
A few guiding thoughts:
• Scarce and valuable products will end up being owned by rich people.
• Displacement is fueled by not building sufficient housing in a hot market.
• “Progressives” have been reluctant to engage seriously [on] housing supply issues.
So … How has Indy reporting added fuel to the housing crisis?
Support independent local journalism. Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.
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https://indyweek.com/news/durham/durham-development-tree-canopy/
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Donna Frederick | Photo by Brett Villena
Donna Frederick has lived in her dark brick home in the Colonial Village subdivision for nearly 20 years.
Frederick retired last year after owning and operating the now-closed Playhouse Toy Store on Ninth Street after more than a dozen years. She enjoys puttering around in the wooden garden plots in her front yard before sitting down with a cup of tea on her home’s screened-in front porch.
She used to enjoy the shade afforded by the massive oak, magnolia, and pine trees that were on her neighbor’s property next door. But in February, developers who purchased the lot knocked down the house and garage before cutting down the hardwood trees.
Those trees were lost under an initiative Durham City Council members approved several years ago with the goal of increasing density to keep up with demand for more housing. In 2019, council members, by a 6-1 vote, amended the city’s Unified Development Ordinance (UDO) in hopes of undoing decades-old vestiges of discrimination that have prevented generations of African Americans from owning homes and amassing wealth.
The update, known as Expanding Housing Choices (EHC), amends zoning rules in neighborhoods near downtown to allow for higher density, which city and county planners believe is key to stabilizing housing prices as the city grows.
But now, some community members think the city’s EHC plan has had the unintended effect of fueling gentrification and displacement that’s taking place in neighborhoods that had “naturally occurring affordable homes,” also known as “NOAH.”
Nate Baker, an urban planner who serves on Durham’s planning commission, described the EHC as a “missed opportunity” during its formative stages that could have enabled the city to retain its affordable housing stock.
“The EHC does the opposite of that,” Baker told the INDY last week. “It spurs additional gentrification and displacement, to a certain extent.”
But city council member Jillian Johnson this week told the INDY she has not seen evidence of gentrification as a consequence of the EHC initiative. She pointed to a late 2020 letter presented to the city council that reported 50 related permit applications have been submitted to the City County Planning Department.
“I do not believe this volume is enough to have been a driver of gentrification,” Johnson said in an email. “Developers do not need EHC to build expensive single-family homes on less than two acres of land. They could do that before EHC and can do it now.”
Among the trees felled by the developer next to Frederick’s property was a giant oak that stood in her former neighbor’s front yard, along with a massive magnolia and several pine trees. Soon after the oak tree was knocked down, Frederick posed beside the fallen hardwood. Frederick stands at about 5 feet, 4 inches. The top of the trunk reached her chest.
“That’s how wide it was,” Frederick told the INDY. “It was a huge oak. You couldn’t get your arms around it.”
A building permit filed with the Durham Planning Department in January shows that the developer, Hayes Barton Homes, is using a small lot plan to build four two-story, single-family homes on the land, which covers less than two acres. The building permit application, which has been approved by the city, also shows plans for the replanting of two trees on each lot.
“These are not start-up homes for most people,” Frederick told the INDY. “The developer says the homes will sell for $350,000.”
For Frederick, living on a fixed income and facing the prospect of higher property taxes is one thing. But she points to a bundle of issues with the ongoing construction related to affordability, health, environmental impact, and the city ordinance that allows builders to construct homes on less than two acres of land without input from community members.
Now, with the absence of trees that shaded her home for decades, Frederick wonders what the impact will be when the weather warms up, especially during the summer months.
As the INDY previously reported, the absence of tree canopies in low-income communities leads to higher temperatures that fuel high utility costs and a higher incidence of health-related issues.
While standing in her yard last month, Frederick points to how the land slopes downward onto East Club Boulevard. She thinks that without the trees’ root systems to hold water from heavy rainfall, combined with the impervious surfaces that are a feature of home construction, stormwater runoff and sedimentation will flow into the nearby Ellerbe Creek.
Frederick also thinks that developers are taking advantage of what she describes as “a loophole” in the city ordinance that exempts them from having to hear neighbors’ concerns if they are building on plots of land that are less than two acres.
In an email to the INDY, Bo Dobrzenski, an assistant manager with the city-county planning department, says that state law exempts from the subdivision construction review process privately owned tracts of land “whose entire area is no greater than two acres [divided] into not more than three lots.”
Dobrzenski added that Durham’s UDO “mandates this exemption.”
“There is no site plan review or preliminary plat submittal required for a subdivision of less than six new lots,” Dobrzenski said.
The planning department official also noted that the exemptions have been in place statewide and locally “for many years.”
As for the wholesale tree removal that took place on the Colonial Village property, Dobrzenski says the city’s UDO also “does not require tree coverage for projects that are less than two acres.”
Allen Wells, the founder and owner of Hayes Barton Homes in Raleigh, last week told the INDY that he’s “trying to do the right thing and build affordable housing because there’s a great need, and I’ve done nothing but get grief.”
“No good deed goes unpunished,” he adds.
Wells says his company did everything the city required in order for him to receive a building permit.
“I did all of the things that I’m required by law to do,” he says.
“It’s not illegal, but it is unethical,” Frederick says.
She thinks the builder will replace the hardwoods that stood for decades next door with landscaping trees—crepe myrtle, perhaps.
“The builder says they are going to replant trees and hedges, but hedges aren’t trees,” she says.
She pointed to the nearly half dozen young cherry trees in black plastic buckets that she intends to plant this spring, and lamented the loss of hardwoods that stood for decades next door.
“That was tree shade for my home,” she says. “It will take 20 years to get that back.”
“The city is encouraging multiple-density units. I get it,” Frederick says. “I get that $350,000 is the average price of a house in Durham. There’s one right up the street selling for $700,000. The problem is that the people who live here have to move out of the [town] where they work.”
Frederick wants the city council to intervene and require developers of small residential projects to seek input from neighborhood residents in the same manner as if they are working on a large development.
According to records filed on August 4 with the county register of deeds, Durham’s Weitz Real Estate purchased the home next to Frederick’s from former owner Ronald Dexter Cates, who could not be immediately reached for comment.
Frederick says she contacted the new owner of the home, and Tyler Weitz visited with her the next day.
Frederick says Weitz walked the lot with her and seemed to understand her concern about preserving the tree canopy in the neighborhood. Frederick says Weitz told her the plan was to build two homes on the lot and preserve the magnolia, oak, and pine trees on the property.
Last week, Weitz told the INDY that Frederick contacted him after the house was removed, and says he thinks Frederick’s “critiques were quite fair,” and he apologized to her “for the lack of notice about my plans.”
But on November 12 of last year, Tyler Weitz sold the property to Hayes Barton Homes for $316,000, according to records filed with Durham County’s register of deeds office.
Frederick says the new developer, who specializes in custom-built homes, “decided to build four houses with no trees.”
“Those of us who live in the community wondered, ‘How can he knock down trees, and without us having a say-so?’” Frederick told the INDY.
Frederick says she understands that Durham leaders have determined to increase the Bull City’s housing stock “by any means necessary.”
“You can’t stop gentrification,” she says. “But the city is saying one thing and doing nothing. It’s unfortunate. It’s not a builders’ problem. It’s a North Carolina General Assembly problem. There’s no incentive for builders to build $100,000 homes.”
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Follow Durham Staff Writer Thomasi McDonald on Twitter or send an email to tmcdonald@indyweek.com.
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More than 1,900 shooting incidents have taken place in Durham since the start of 2020.
They’ve left more than 650 wounded and nearly 90 dead.
“Folks are asking for help,” said council member Leonardo Williams at a recent Durham City Council meeting. “They’re saying, ‘Just do something more, please.’”
That “something more” may be ShotSpotter, a controversial gunfire detection system that the council blocked in June 2019 and September 2020. Now, the council is one step closer to setting aside $197,500 for a year-long pilot of ShotSpotter.
A majority of the council voted last month to move forward with a budget for the 2022-23 fiscal year that would include money for ShotSpotter. The council must vote on the budget before June 30, but during public comment at a council meeting last week, several Durhamites showed up—either in person or via Zoom—to oppose funding for the technology.
ShotSpotter uses microphones placed around a city. When the microphones sense gunfire, police are notified and dispatched. By improving police response times and sending officers to scenes that might otherwise go unreported, ShotSpotter could save lives, proponents say.
Mayor Pro Tem Mark-Anthony Middleton, arguably the council’s most ardent supporter of ShotSpotter, said that last year in Wilmington, two police officers received awards for saving lives after responding to ShotSpotter alerts. (Only one incident involved gunfire; in the other, someone had sustained injuries breaking a window.)
“This is about when someone needs help,” Middleton said. If someone is hurt, even “in the middle of the night, someone will come and see about you.”
But does ShotSpotter work? The MacArthur Justice Center found that in Chicago, 88.7 percent of ShotSpotter alerts were “dead ends”—incidents in which no gun was actually involved.
“What ShotSpotter is effective at is manufacturing consent for increased policing,” council member Jillian Johnson said in an interview. “It increases the number of times that police are called.”
Naana Ewool, who is involved with Durham Beyond Policing, a coalition that advocates for “community-led safety and wellness,” says most cities place microphones only in small areas...or in certain neighborhoods. “And those neighborhoods are often the ones that are majority Black and brown, with a higher number of folks being criminalized.”
“Police who arrive on the scene often escalate situations and introduce violence, so folks are more likely to get injured or killed,” Ewool said. “There’s public health research that shows that regardless of the type of interaction, the more interaction folks have with police, the worse their health outcomes are.”
Danette Wilkins, a health professional and resident of Durham’s Cleveland-Holloway community who works for Johns Hopkins University, implored the council to reject ShotSpotter. She cited a report by the City of Chicago that says “the very presence of this technology is changing the way Chicago Police Department members interact with members of Chicago’s communities.”
Opponents think the $197,500 would be better spent elsewhere.
In general, “we need gun control, we need housing guarantees, we need a living wage,” Johnson said. “That’s how you end gun violence.”
Johnson said the city can “invest as much as we can into prevention and intervention techniques,” like the violence intervention program Bull City United and the We Are the Ones Fund.
Middleton says these reforms and ShotSpotter are not mutually exclusive: “I think the people reject the zero-sum game. It’s not either/or.”
He resisted comparisons to Chicago and Charlotte, which canceled its contract with ShotSpotter in 2016. “I have to govern based on data from Durham,” he said. “But we don’t have that, and so I really want this to be a pilot in the truest sense.”
In an interview, Ralph A. Clark, president and CEO of ShotSpotter, said the technology bridges “a fairly significant public safety gap.” He pointed out that “80 to 90 percent of gun fired events go unreported. So that means guns are fired, there’s no call to 911, which means there is no police response.”
In Oakland, California, Clark said, ShotSpotter technology has saved more than 100 gunshot wound victims. The company also says its sensors detection rate is 97 percent.
Clark added: “It’s very confusing to me to see people have a negative reaction to the idea that police are able to respond to incidents of gunfire.”
Williams agreed. “Give us a chance to try this,” he said. “If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, we’re going to try something else.”
Council member Javiera Caballero, who would prefer that the city fund other violence-reduction efforts, says officials will have six months to collect the data about the gunfire detection technology. After that, the city has to pay for ShotSpotter.
She doesn’t think Durhamites have had enough of a chance to hear about the technology, but she expects it to be funded when the council votes on the budget.
Opponents want the city to keep searching for solutions.
“Communities are dealing with so much grief and so much fear because of gun violence,” Ewool said. “Just offering them something—anything—isn’t fair. People deserve things that are going to provide real solutions and real healing.”
This story was produced through a partnership between the INDY and 9th Street Journal, which is published by journalism students at Duke University’s DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy.
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Volunteers work to rebuild the University of Mosul’s Central Library. The library reopened in February after ISIS fighters destroyed it in 2015. | Photo Courtesy of UNC Media Hub
A couple of years ago, University of Mosul student Nora Al Jadoue wanted to leave Iraq. At the same time, UNC sophomore Eden Yousif wasn’t sure she would ever get to see Iraq.
But thanks to an innovative virtual exchange program between the University of Mosul, UNC-Chapel Hill, and UNC-Greensboro, students are developing new understandings of Iraq and the United States. Despite being over 6,000 miles apart, students in Iraq and North Carolina have found they have much to share with one another and plenty to learn on their weekly Zoom calls.
“We just don’t hate anybody that we don’t know,” said Heba Ezzuldein, a University of Mosul student. “And I think this is really helping in developing a lot of things. Because I think it’s important to share with different people from different languages and different cultures.”
The Islamic State controlled Mosul from 2014 until 2017, during which thousands of civilians were killed, schools were closed, and ancient artifacts and historical sites were destroyed.
“Although Mosul has been at war a lot and has only just got liberated and is still healing, at the same time, if you actually get in touch with the young people here, you will see amazing talents and true accomplishments,” Al Jadoue said. “If you asked me two years ago, I would totally tell you that I want to leave Iraq and never go back and that I don’t have a future here.”
But her classes at the University of Mosul have inspired her to stay. She said her peers push her to be the best version of herself.
“Every week I get surprised more and more about the young generation’s ideas,” she said.
“Mosul is so alive”
Yousif grew up in Goldsboro, in an Iraqi family. She said it was hard to hear stereotypes about Iraq in her hometown.
“I just wanted people to know that there’s so much life there, and people are happy there, and it’s not it’s not some desolate country,” Yousif said.
Yousif has never been to Iraq but is now planning her first visit because of the exchange. For a long time, Yousif said her family assumed it wasn’t safe to go back to Iraq. But one of the Iraqi students helped her family realize that it was time to plan their first trip together.
“He said, ‘Mosul is so alive. There’s no reason you can’t come,’” Yousif said. “I immediately told my grandpa and I said, ‘We want to visit.’ And he said, ‘That’s great. I’ll go with you.’”
Students meet on Saturday mornings for the exchange, which is part of the University of Mosul’s peace-building initiative, one of the first academic peace studies programs in the Middle East. Hijran Al-Salihi, assistant professor in the philosophy department at the University of Mosul, said the peace program prepares students to tackle the problems present in the city of Mosul and Iraq more broadly.
“Security can’t be established with weapons only,” Al-Salihi said.
Noor Ghazi, professor of the practice in UNC-Chapel Hill’s Peace, War, and Defense Department and a lecturer at UNC-Greensboro, Durham Technical Community College, and the University of Mosul, facilitates the exchange, which began in her class on modern conflicts in Iraqi history in spring 2021.
Yousif and UNC sophomore Jasper Schutt were in the class together and have been working on expanding the exchange ever since. Schutt said he believes American students have a responsibility to speak to people whose lives have been affected by the U.S. government.
U.S. forces invaded Iraq in March 2003 on the pretense of destroying Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction and ending Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. There were no weapons of mass destruction. To date, over 180,000 Iraqi civilians have died as a direct result of the U.S. invasion.
“This is something that could be really transformative for a lot of American students,” Schutt said. “There’s a certain responsibility on the part of American students as well, because this is a region of the world—a country specifically—that people shouldn’t be allowed to just speak about in stereotypes.”
Ghazi said the exchange has been eye-opening for American students.
“I tell students, ‘Look at things from different perspectives. There’s always another side to the story,’” Ghazi said.
One Saturday morning, a UNC student asked the Iraqi students what brings them hope. Al Jadoue shared how excited she was about the reopening of the university’s Central Library. In 2015, ISIS fighters burned thousands of items from the library, which housed over a million books, maps, and manuscripts dating back centuries. The loss was immeasurable.
On February 19, after a reconstruction project facilitated by the United Nations Development Programme and the Iraqi government, the library reopened. A slogan, “The Word ‘Impossible’ Does Not Exist in Our Dictionary,” is written on the left wall of the library’s entrance. The university describes the library as a “symbol of triumph of humanitarianism, civilization and peace over terrorism.”
“One of the latest accomplishments that has been in the city was today—it was the opening of the Central Library. Our university is supposed to be one of the biggest libraries in the Middle East, and yeah, we’re actually proud of it,” Al Jadoue said.
Al-Salihi said students and professors worked to clear the rubble of the Central Library and save what was left of the books after ISIS was driven out of the city. Universities across Iraq and the world sent books and resources to Mosul.
“I hope we can invest in this great dream of ours, which was absent for so long by the smoke of wars and was wrapped at some times in the black flags of ISIS. The steps are slow, but this is how we grow a tree, with patience,” Al-Salihi said.
“All I thought about
was my education”
Ghazi grew up in Baghdad but was forced to flee Iraq for Syria in 2006 due to a civil war between Sunnis and Shias. Ghazi’s family—she has a Sunni father and a Shia mother—was in danger of being targeted by both groups. Sunnis and Shias have long clashed over their different visions for the future of Iraq, and the 2003 U.S. invasion of the country exacerbated the sectarian violence.
“Death in Baghdad was just a norm,” Ghazi said. “Every time my dad left the house, we said our last goodbyes because we just didn’t know.”
During difficult years in Syria, Ghazi struggled to understand her identity. Her family was uneasy when they were approved to move to the United States as refugees.
“This is the country that invaded Iraq—do we go there?” Ghazi said.
But the family had nowhere else to go.
They arrived in High Point in 2008, which brought on a whole new identity crisis for Ghazi. She eventually stopped covering her hair after Americans made vicious, racist comments.
“What is my identity? If people here think I’m a terrorist and people back there think I’m a traitor, who am I?” she said. “All I thought about was my education.”
Education was refuge for Ghazi. Little by little, her English improved. She went on to receive her master’s degree in peace and conflict studies from UNC-Greensboro. She married and had a daughter.
But she still dreamed of Iraq. In 2018, she visited Baghdad with her husband for the first time since leaving on her 16th birthday.
Upon her return to Iraq, Ghazi was shocked by what she saw.
“I did not feel home. It was not the same. My parents are not there. My siblings are not there. I’m not there—I’m not there as me when I left,” Ghazi said.
Ghazi visited Mosul shortly after the Islamic State was driven out of the city. Mosul is located on the banks of the Tigris River in a region often referred to as the cradle of civilization. Thousands of years ago, ancient Mesopotamians developed the first systems of writing, agriculture, and cities in the region. But ISIS had destroyed much of the area’s cultural heritage.
“I felt like an entire civilization was being just dissolved right before my eyes,” Ghazi said.
When she arrived back in Baghdad, she sat down with her husband.
“I looked at my husband and I said, ‘Let’s go home.’ And he said, ‘We are home.’ I said, ‘No. This is not home for me anymore,’” Ghazi said.
Ghazi’s experiences led her to begin working on a book and a documentary. The documentary, The Mother of Two Springs, is about life in Mosul under ISIS. She has worked closely with faculty members at the University of Mosul to produce the documentary and begin the implementation of a master’s program in peace studies at the school.
Ghazi always knew she wanted to help Iraqis after she finished her education. She realized the best way for her to help was to become an educator herself, since the education she received under Saddam Hussein’s regime was so restrictive. Teaching peace comes naturally to Ghazi.
“When I heard of the word ‘peace,’ I jumped in right away without even asking,” Ghazi said. “The more we can work with youth on education, the better outcome we can have in the future.”
From Mosul, Al-Salihi said he has a lot of hope for the city.
“There is hope since I enter my classroom and talk with freedom with my students around topics used to be considered taboo and impossible to talk about. Today there is a space for the youth to speak with freedom and rationality,” Al-Salihi said. “There is hope after we broke many of the religious, social, and political taboos in our societies which ruled our societies and framed our thoughts in the past.”
This story was originally published by UNC Media Hub.
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In a historic matchup, UNC’s men’s basketball team toppled its archrival Duke in the NCAA tournament’s Final Four game in New Orleans on Saturday night. As is their custom—and with the days of COVID anxiety largely behind them—elated students and fans flooded Chapel Hill’s Franklin Street for pole climbing, fireworks, and other raucous victory celebrations. The Tar Heels went on to fall to Kansas in the national championship game on Monday, marking the end of an extraordinary first season for head coach Hubert Davis.
Photo by Brett Villena
Photo by Brett Villena
Photo by Brett Villena
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On Saturday night, I found myself rushing Franklin Street for the first time.
I’ve never run to Franklin Street before, much less late at night with a stomach full of strawberry and mango margaritas.
If I’m being honest, I’ve never found sports to be extraordinarily riveting, but my roommate decided to host a watch party for the game and I knew I’d regret not paying attention to the Tar Heels taking on the Blue Devils in the Final Four.
The game against Duke was tantalizingly close. I may not pay much attention to sports, but I am aware of the age-old rivalry. I found myself on the edge of my seat in the living room of my apartment—tight fists formed in my lap creating nail-shaped indentations on my palms, biting my bottom lip right up until the last second. The score remained interlocked. I sat glued with my eyes to the screen—afraid that I’d miss something if I looked away even for a moment—confidence faltering slightly when Armando Bacot limped off the floor with an ankle injury. With less than 25 seconds, Caleb Love scored a three-pointer.
The clock ran out and it was time: 81 to 77. Eighteen lead changes and 12 ties. The Heels came out on top in a historic upset against Duke. My roommate and I ran out the door, through the shortcut in the woods and onto Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, and into a sea of ice blue. Cars honked, people cheered and chanted.
When I transferred to UNC from Wake Technical Community College in the fall of 2020, I was under the impression that school pride would happen naturally. I bought the sweatshirts, baseball caps, and pins and waited for it to overtake me. At times, there were sparks, like when I attended the UNC-Florida State football game last fall or when I walk around the beautiful campus and study under my favorite tree—but never a full-fledged flame.
Flash forward almost two years. I’ll be graduating in December. I thought it was too late for me and that my college experience was just simply going to be different.
But as I ran uphill to join the crowd of thousands of students on Franklin on Saturday night, I was fueled by something I hadn’t felt before. A sense of belonging. A sense of pride.
There it was. That feeling I’ve been missing. I didn’t see any familiar faces as I looked around at other students holding up signs, popping champagne, and congratulating one another as fireworks went off above us, but we were connected on a fundamental level. The feelings rushed over me as it hit me that I go here. This is my team and we won.
I’ve come away from this weekend with a different perspective and a lot of school spirit. I was able to run on Saturday night for the girl who transferred into UNC in the fall of 2020 without friends. I ran for the girl who attended college through her computer screen for nearly two years, unable to form lasting connections with her classmates because of the isolation that has accompanied the pandemic.
I’ll be chasing the high from Saturday night for years to come. I mean, where else am I going to get splashed by champagne from multiple directions?
At the end of the day, I’m thankful that I’m a Tar Heel. I’m proud to sport my college’s apparel and be able to say that my basketball team beat Duke in the Final Four and advanced to the national championship.
And as for finally rushing Franklin Street, if there was ever a time to do it, Saturday night was that time. Let me tell you, it was one hell of a way to catch up on my college experiences.
Brooke Dougherty is a fourth-year student at UNC-Chapel Hill and an INDY Week intern.
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Graphic by Jon Fuller
It’s overtime. Six seconds left on the clock. The NC State University women’s basketball team trails Connecticut by three points. That’s when forward Jakia Brown-Turner made her move.
With a clean pass from senior guard Raina Perez, Brown-Turner got a good look at the basket, and she didn’t waste it. In one fluid move, Brown-Turner sent the basketball swishing through the net, prompting an explosion of celebration from her teammates and sending the game into a hard-fought double overtime.
It was a tough game for NC State, who were hoping to win it all this year after they broke into the Elite Eight. In the end, it was anyone’s game, thanks to the driving force of veteran Elissa Cunane and the talent of young sophomore Diamond Johnson. It simply wasn’t enough to overcome the Huskies.
Still, as the NC State men’s basketball program endures a slow, seemingly unending decline, the top-seeded women’s team is giving Wolfpack fans something to root for. In 2018, while the men were losing in the ACC quarterfinals, the women were making a run to the Sweet 16. They hope to stay on the rise.
There’s a lot of energy around the women’s team, as there always is around a team that’s winning. But despite their success, the players continue to be undervalued, underwatched, and unfairly treated.
A gender equality scandal in the NCAA
The differences between the men’s and women’s tournaments got a lot of attention last year as they played at the same time in two COVID bubbles: the men in Indianapolis and the women in San Antonio. Women’s players and coaches shared videos of their accommodations, which fell far short of the men’s. While male players were treated to a fully equipped weight room, buffet, and a shower of gifts, the women had a mostly empty workout room, prepackaged meals, and paltry gift bags.
“You could really compare amenities on a one-to-one basis, and that put into stark contrast how little the women’s tournament was cared about,” says Lindsay Gibbs, author of Power Plays, a newsletter about sexism in sports.
“Because the NCAA makes the majority of its money off the men’s tournament … all of its focus and energy was on the men’s tournament. The women’s tournament had to jump through hoops just to get approval [to play].”
This year, things haven’t changed much. The NCAA has made some cosmetic changes, including offering better perks to women, expanding the tournament from 64 to 68 teams, and allowing teams to use “March Madness” branding, but there are still systemic inequities.
“All of these [changes] are positive, I don’t want to diminish them,” Gibbs says. “But ultimately, I think there’s a lot more structural issues within the NCAA. There’s a long way to go. They solved the easiest problems to solve, but the real work is systemic, as it always is.”
Who’s watching?
In Raleigh, the conversation about basketball revolves around the men’s tournament: Who’s going to win? Would Duke beat out UNC? Wolfpack fans didn’t have much to cheer about this year. The former championship men’s team didn’t even qualify for the postseason—unsurprising, given they’ve failed to get into the tournament for the past four years and ended the regular season with an 11-21 record, the worst since 1993.
For most Pack fans, watching the tournament is an exercise in futility and has been for the past 30 years. Nostalgic alumni dream of the Pack’s glory days—the 1980s under Coach Jim Valvano, when a team of greats came from behind to win it all. Frustrated State fans console themselves with the fact that, well, at least the women’s team is doing well.
The fan conversation reflects the historic disparity between media coverage of men’s and women’s sports. In the world of television, men’s sports are the focus of 95 percent of stories, while women’s sports are the focus of just 5 percent, according to a 2019 study by the University of Southern California and Purdue University.
The study found similar disparities in social media posts and sports newsletters, which covered women only 9-10 percent of the time.
“Men’s sports—especially the ‘Big Three’ of basketball, football, and baseball—still receive the lion’s share of the coverage, whether in-season or out of season,” researchers state. “When a women’s sports story does appear, it is usually a case of ‘one and done,’ a single women’s sports story obscured by a cluster of men’s stories that precede it, follow it, and are longer in length.”
That pattern is especially apparent during the NCAA tournament. During a three-week span in 2019, ESPN’s SportsCenter ran 27 stories on the men’s tournament, for a total airtime of two hours and 13 minutes, according to the study. The women’s tournament was the focus of just two stories, for a total of three minutes and 43 seconds of coverage.
A nationwide sample of local TV stations found that stations aired 56 stories on the men’s tournament, for an hour and 14 minutes, compared to eight stories on the women’s, for only three minutes and 16 seconds.
Newspaper coverage is equally biased. In one week during last year’s Final Four, men received nearly twice the amount of newspaper coverage as women, according to an analysis done by Gibbs. Overall, men’s sports got 86.6 percent of coverage, while women’s sports got 13.4 percent of coverage.
Despite the lack of media coverage, the NC State women’s basketball team has a strong fan following. In the women’s league, NC State home games were among the top 10 most attended games during the 2021-22 season. In the men’s league, NC State ranked 27th in attendance.
The NC State women’s team also has no problem filling Reynolds Coliseum, which seats 5,500. On average, 85 percent of seats were filled during the women’s games, while only 61 percent of the seats at PNC Arena were filled during men’s games (although PNC is much bigger than Reynolds, seating more than 19,000).
During the Pack’s home games last month, “Reynolds [Coliseum] was absolutely packed, it was deafeningly loud,” Gibbs says. “The fans really love this team, they really support this team, and as a North Carolinian, it was thrilling to see.”
Camille Hobby, a junior who plays center for the team, echoed those sentiments in a pre–Sweet 16 press conference. She went on to say women’s games should get more airtime.
“We’ve seen in the past that when women’s games are on TV, people watch them. So more games need to be on TV. Not ESPN+, but ESPN,” she said. “Have us on there and give us a chance to perform and show that we’re great. That we’re some of the best athletes that there are, that there can be.”
Hobby said that the NCAA is doing a better job of being inclusive, but the changes they made are just the first step.
“Sometimes women’s sports don’t get the same respect as men’s,” she said. “This is a step, but I think there could still be more things in the future for us.”
Players Jakia Brown-Turner and Elissa Cunane also said that while the treatment of female athletes is improving, they expect even greater things in the future.
“The buzz around women’s basketball is growing, and it’s because people realize that we are full of talent,” Cunane said during a March 25 press conference. “I think in the future everyone just continuing to speak out and stand up for themselves is going to help us continue to move forward.”
A cycle of devaluation
When it comes to the women’s tournament, the NCAA has created what Gibbs calls “a cycle of devaluation.” Because the organization invests less money in women’s basketball, it makes less money from the sport. It then becomes easy to justify investing even less money in the future.
“[The women’s tournament] is not where the NCAA makes its money, because the NCAA has decided not to turn it into a money-making property,” Gibbs says. “[It has decided] not to give it the investment it deserves.”
Last year, the women’s championship game drew about 4.1 million viewers, an increase of 9 percent over the 2019 championship. The men’s championship game drew about 16.9 million viewers, a decrease of 8 percent from 2019. So while the men’s tournament did get more views, interest is decreasing, while interest in the women’s game is rising steadily.
In addition, while the men’s tournament drew four times the viewers as the women’s, its broadcasting contract is worth 20 times as much. The broadcast rights for the men’s tournament sold for $850 million last year, compared to the rights for the women’s tournament, which sold for $42 million.
“The proportions that we’re looking at are just completely out of whack,” Gibbs says. “Four million viewers for any television network is a lot these days. Just because it’s not 16 million doesn’t mean it’s not valuable. It’s been really sad to see this go on for so long.”
Sports media professionals estimate that the women’s basketball tournament alone will be worth $81 million to $112 million per year, starting in 2025, the first year after the NCAA’s current contract with ESPN expires.
“A new eight-year, $909 million [broadcasting] deal would be worth an average of about $114 million per year; a 10-year, $1.2 billion agreement would average $118 million per year,” states a gender equity analysis conducted by consulting firm Desser Sports Media.
The NCAA commissioned the report following last year’s gender inequity scandal, and the results were far from favorable. In addition to devaluing women’s basketball, the structure of the broadcasting contract discourages sponsorships and ads for the women’s tournament.
That lack of money at the top also trickles down, ultimately discouraging colleges and universities from investing in women’s basketball programs.
When a men’s basketball team makes the tournament, their college’s conference gets a payout from the NCAA. The more games the team wins, the bigger that payout is. Women’s teams, on the other hand, get nothing.
“So of course schools are gonna want to pour more money into their men’s programs than their women’s programs, because it makes them so much more money if their men’s team makes it to the tournament,” Gibbs says.
“These kinds of issues, that stem from the NCAA internally, devaluing and deprioritizing women’s basketball, these are the decisions that really trickle down and impact everything.”
Support independent local journalism. Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.
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https://indyweek.com/news/orange/documents-show-new-details-in-sweeping-faculty-investigation/
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This story originally published online at NC Policy Watch.
A UNC-Chapel Hill investigation of its own faculty was much wider and deeper than previously disclosed, according to new documents released under state open records law .
Documents released last week show the probe went beyond reading faculty members’ emails to searching backup systems on their computers. It may have included as many as 22 separate faculty members.
As Policy Watch reported last August, UNC-Chapel Hill launched an investigation into a leaked donor agreement that included examining faculty member emails without their knowledge and asking them to sit for questioning.
At issue: the agreement between the university and Walter Hussman, the wealthy Arkansas media magnate whose $25 million pledge to the university’s journalism school led to it being renamed for him.
Hussman was at the center of the controversy over a tenure vote in the university’s failed attempt to hire Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones. When it was revealed Hussman lobbied against Hannah-Jones’s hire behind the scenes and had confidential details of the hiring process students, faculty and alumni began asking larger questions about his relationship with the university.
The Hussman contract, which the university considers confidential, was published by the News & Observer on July 14. The university announced an investigation two days later, seeking to determine how the paper got the document.
The university argues any leaked donor agreement endangers the confidentiality of all such contracts, which could in turn have a chilling effect on donations.
By the time the university launched its investigation, the Hussman document had been shared widely, including on a faculty email listserv where dozens of faculty members could access and forward it.
As Policy Watch reported, the school asked to question at least two professors in the journalism school Deb—Aikat and Daniel Kreiss—as part of its investigation. Kreiss declined. As part of his questioning, Aikat learned the university had accessed his university emails without his knowledge.
The revelation led to swift condemnation from staff, open government advocates and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which sent a letter to Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz warning the investigation appeared violate the First Amendment rights of faculty members.
“I have been at this university for 27 years,” Aikat told Policy Watch Wednesday. “I have never seen such illicit overreach. And for what?”
The new documents, released last week in response to public records requests filed seven months ago, show the investigation went well beyond Kreiss and Aikat and beyond the reading of faculty email.
In an email to fellow faculty Wednesday, Kreiss said what they reveal has “sweeping and disturbing implications for faculty, staff, and research at this institution.”
“As a reminder, all of this was ostensibly in pursuit of an inquiry into a leaked donor agreement that the University later admitted was a public record,” Kreiss wrote. “As reporting and a letter by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has made clear, the University has never presented any evidence, nor has there ever been any evidence produced more generally, that these Hussman faculty had access to the donor agreement before the media.”
The university’s accessing faculty data without their knowledge has worrying implications beyond this donor agreement, Kreiss said.
“I run a center that works on extremism,” Kreiss said. “I have a lot of data that is sensitive, that includes data under NDAs from major platform companies, stored on my computer. I was not aware that data would have a lot more touch-points.”
Kreiss said experience of being targeted in this investigation, and the disrespect with which faculty has been treated throughout this controversy, has had real consequences for faculty morale and confidence in the university’s commitment to its mission.
“I’m one of the initiative co-leads for the UNC Strategic Plan around promoting democracy,” Kreiss said. “I resigned from that today.”
The revelations of these new documents had a direct impact on that decision, Kreiss said.
“If we don’t have basic principles of transparency and due process in faculty governance and public justification and accountability with our faculty and staff, how can I in good faith promote democracy on campus?” Kreiss said.
Ryan Thornburg, an associate professor at the university’s journalism school, is part of a collective that requested the documents along with a number of reporters and organizations seven months ago.
Though the documents were highly redacted by the university before their release, they show that former university provost Bob Blouin repeatedly signed off on the widening of the investigation shortly after it was announced. The extent of Blouin’s involvement was not revealed by the university during the initial investigation.
The email chain in the new documents shows communications between Blouin, General Counsel Charles Marshall and senior university counsel Kara Simmons. Everything Marshall wrote was redacted from the newly released documents, but the emails show Simmons asking to add names to the list of those being investigated and for access to their Microsoft Office 365 cloud storage space and a separate backup system. Blouin repeatedly approved.
Using a formula taking into account the number of characters redacted from emails requesting access to specific accounts and the average length of faculty members named, Thornburg said he was able to estimate that as many as 22 faculty members may have been targeted in the probe.
“In my mind, it’s important to understand when a government agency is using its power to monitor communications of academics and journalists,” Thornburg told Policy Watch Wednesday.
“It’s too bad the University took seven months to respond to the records request, but it is not unusual,” Thornburg said. “I do think this is in some part due to the volume of requests, but I also believe it is part of the University’s strategic communication plan. That plan may be very effective in the short run, but in the long run I worry that it erodes the public’s trust and patience.”
Thornburg said that when he files a public records request, he doesn’t assume anything about the response except that it will be timely and complete. In this case, he said, the university’s response—seven months in coming and highly redacted—was neither.
Policy Watch recently received documents from UNC-Chapel Hill and the UNC System pertaining to public records requests filed as long as two years ago. Those requests were handled at the UNC System level.
“It’s also too bad they finally got around to sharing this information during what was supposed to be a week of major celebration for the School,” Thornburg said. “We are inducting new members into our halls of fame and dedicating a new building that caps years of work by a lot of generous and hard-working people. But, perhaps, we can see this effort to improve transparency and accountability of an important and powerful government institution as a celebration that we live the values we teach here.”
The university swiftly launched an investigation into how the Hussman agreement was made public. But no comparable investigation appears to have been launched into how Hussman, an alum outside of the hiring process, was given access to confidential information and documents in Hannah-Jones’s hiring process. That same information, part of a confidential personnel process, was not available to reporters or the general public.
Thornburg, who has been part of hiring processes at UNC-Chapel Hill, said he always keeps such information confidential. It isn’t clear why Hannah-Jones’s information was not similarly kept within the process, Thornburg said.
“You want our alumni to be engaged, but you also have to draw a line at some point,” Thornburg said.
That line generally does and should include things like details of hiring decisions and research, Thornburg said.
“We’re obviously still working on where that line is,” he said.
It’s possible, Thornburg said, that university administrators did communicate to Hussman that confidentiality should limit their communications with Hussman on Hannah-Jones. If that happened, no such documentation of it has yet been found.
“I do worry about the inability of our leadership to draw lines where I think they should be drawn,” Thornburg said.
Kreiss agreed.
“If you are really concerned with anything that is corrosive, with making public private information, you would start with confidential personnel information being given to someone outside of the personnel process,” Kreiss said.
“I have to assume that these same practices, policies and informal agreements are still in place in terms of donors and donor influence in various aspects of the university’s life, because I haven’t seen any indication that’s changes,” Kreiss said. “I’ve seen far more resources and time devoted to going after faculty members around the supposed leak of information on a donor agreement than has been put into questions about our tenure and hiring processes, who has access to that information and whether it is in fact confidential.”
Aikat said both the investigation into faculty and Hussman’s access to hiring and tenure information set terrible precedents.
“If we are not told when investigators may be accessing the information in our e-mails and on our computers, without our knowledge and without any warning, if we don’t even know who has this access, how can we have confidence that we can keep confidential the things that should be confidential?” Aikat said. “And if donors can be given access to information they tell us should be confidential without our knowledge and without any consequence or investigation or anything, how can anyone who applies for a position or undergoes the tenure process believe that it is confidential and that it is fair?”
Support independent local journalism. Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.
Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com.
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https://indyweek.com/news/wake/raleigh-residents-keep-the-pressure-on-for-property-tax-relief/
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More than 100 Raleigh residents turned out at the Wake County Board of Commissioners meeting Monday to ask officials for relief from skyrocketing property taxes.
The cohort were all members of ONE Wake, a grassroots community group calling for a program that offers payments to people who have owned their homes for at least 10 years and earn less than 80 percent of the area median income. The program would cover any and all property taxes that exceed 2 percent of qualifying homeowners' annual income.
That goes much farther than existing relief programs, which limit aid based on both income level and age, disability, or veteran status. In a discussion last month, some commissioners seemed reluctant to commit to a tax grant program, which would offer the kind of direct aid ONE Wake is asking for. Commissioners asked staff to explore other options for keeping housing affordable, such as the creation of a community land trust, a homeowner care fund, or a foreclosure prevention fund.
Many residents who spoke at the meeting Monday reflected on their circumstances in detail, describing how existing programs are not helping them. Leslie Fox, who (for now) lives on Haynes Street in Raleigh, spoke about how health problems cut her career short in 2012, leaving her with a house that had expenses greater than her income.
Fox was "livid" when she found out she was ineligible for the state's existing relief program because of her disability benefits, she said. Without disability, her taxable income is $8,500 a year.
"I have had to rent out a portion of my house to take care of my house and stay in my house, and meanwhile my property taxes have skyrocketed," she said. "There's not gonna be any way I can stay in it without property tax relief. I expect that my property taxes are gonna go up, probably another $3,000 with the next valuation."
Elaine Peebles-Brown, a fourth-generation Wake County resident and leading ONE Wake advocate, talked about how she wants to keep her home in the family.
"My granddaughter would like to move here from Maryland and continue her career in education. She would be the sixth generation of the Peebles family. But the escalating property taxes are making it extremely difficult," Peebles-Brown said.
She added that she would be happy to work with the commissioners to help "craft a solution" that works for everyone.
Members of ONE Wake were optimistic and positive when speaking to the commissioners, talking about how they wanted to bring the community together and support their neighbors. So far, commissioners seem willing to work with them.
Also Monday, the board voted unanimously to again rename the public library in the Village District south of Wade Avenue, the largest in the county.
Commissioners changed the name from Village Regional Library to "Oberlin Regional Library," taking another step toward racial equity.
Most people know the library by its earlier name, Cameron Village Library. The name of the shopping center and library was changed last year after it came to light that the Cameron family for which the center was named were slave-owners.
Cameron Village was rechristened simply "The Village," a name that is innocuous at best and meaningless at worst. At the time, some North Carolinians questioned why the owners of the shopping center hadn't taken the opportunity to recognize nearby Oberlin Village, a historic Black community.
Oberlin Village was originally founded in the late 1860s when former slaves, freed during or after the Civil War, settled there. It soon grew into a thriving African American community that today is home to some of the area's oldest homes and churches.
Now, library staff will develop an exhibit inside the institution to educate visitors about the history of Oberlin Village and why the library's name was changed, according to a news release.
“By honoring this community and the people who lived there, we are recognizing and celebrating a very important part of Wake County’s rich history,” said Commissioner Matt Calabria in the release.
Support independent local journalism. Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.
Follow Staff Writer Jasmine Gallup on Twitter or send an email to jgallup@indyweek.com.
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https://indyweek.com/culture/page/2021-whiting-recipients-named/
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Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Ina Cariño | Photo courtesy of Broadside PR
In a Wednesday night ceremony in New York City, the Whiting Foundation announced the honorees of its 2022 Whiting Award, which is presented annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama. Awards are $50,000, one of the most substantial awards sums to exist for emerging writers.
Claire Boyles, Rita Bullwinkel, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Anthony Cody, Anaïs Duplan, Megha Majumda, Jesse McCarthy, Nana Nkweti, Ina Cariño, and Claire Schwartz were all named as awardees.
Two recipients are local: Ina Cariño, who is based in Raleigh, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, who is based in Durham. Cariño is a Whiting poetry awardee and received their MFA in Creative Writing from North Carolina State University. Previous poetry recognitions include a 2021 Alice James Award for the poetry collection Feast, forthcoming in 2023, and recognition as one of the four winners of the annual 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest. They also founded a local reading series, Indigena Collective, which centers marginalized voices. (You can read an INDY interview with Cariño about their work here.)
“It’s been both amazing and surreal to be in such a talented cohort of writers, and I’m humbled to have had my work read and reread by the anonymous judges," Cariño told the INDY. "I’m grateful that my words are reaching people; this award will allow me to keep working on poems that I hope will continue to resonate with others.”
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, a nonfiction honoree, holds a PhD in English, African and African American Studies, and Women and Gender Studies from Duke University. She is the author of Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals; Dub: Finding Ceremony; M Archive: After the End of the World, and Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity. She has also previously been a Voices columnist for the INDY Week; you can read those columns here.
“I’m overwhelmed with gratitude," Gumbs says. "Especially as I learn more about the legacy of these awards. For example, the late Randall Kenan, one of our most beloved North Carolina writers and a personal mentor of mine, was once a Whiting Award winner! I’m excited to continue living inside the practice of writing as freedom.”
The Whiting Award was founded in 1985. Previous recipients like Colson Whitehead, Jeffrey Eugenides, Tony Kushner, Mary Karr, and Tracy K. Smith have gone on to become household names.
Support independent local journalism. Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.
Follow Arts & Culture Editor Sarah Edwards on Twitter or send an email to sedwards@indyweek.com.
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https://indyweek.com/news/ninth-street-journal/stone-brothers-moves-locations/
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George Davis has owned and managed of Stone Brothers & Byrd since 1976 | Photo by Milena Ozernova — The 9th Street Journal
Step inside, and you’ll feel like you’ve been teleported back to the 1920s.
Racks of fertilizer and seed line the aisles. An assortment of gardening hats lies directly in front of the entrance. Step into a smaller side room, and the bags of mulch are impossible to miss. Locally owned stores like this one are not as common anymore, but don’t tell that to George Davis, the owner of Stone Brothers & Byrd.
On a recent Friday, Davis, wearing a classic gardener’s hat, was helping customers left and right. Even after 46 years of ownership, his dedication is still evident.
“I think ’91 was the last farm mechanic that I had, and that was the end of that,” Davis said. “So from ’90-’91 to the present, we’ve been lawn and garden.”
For 108 years, Stone Brothers has been a staple of the Durham community, providing gardening resources to local farmers and families. From Moss Out! to Cardinal food, from flower pots to gardening gloves, Stone Brothers could always be relied upon, and that’s not about to change.
What has changed, though, is where that reliability can be found.
For over 50 years, Stone Brothers sat at 700 Washington Street, where the business and its longtime location became intertwined.
But in line with recent development trends in Durham and the Triangle region, that’s changing. Last May, Beacon Street Development announced it had bought the land from Stone Brothers and laid out plans to build a seven-story complex with 40 luxury condos. With construction set to begin this month on The George, named for Davis, Stone Brothers has moved down to 937 Washington Street, a two-minute drive from its previous spot.
The new development is one of several changes coming to a historic section of the city. Just across from the Durham Athletic Park—the 1926 ball field where the baseball movie “Bull Durham” was filmed in the 1980s—the land is on the corner of West Geer and Washington, with longtime Durham staples like King’s Sandwich Shop just up the road.
Neighboring businesses say they’ll miss Stone Brothers. The Durham Distillery, for instance, relies on Stone Brothers for the molasses for its liqueurs.
“Now we have to walk a little bit further,” said Josh Dixon, the distillery’s marketing coordinator.
utside Stone Brothers’ former location, signs reflect the former business and the new condos that are coming | Photos by Milena Ozernova — The 9th Street Journal
Meanwhile, Durham Distillery is also facing a second development in its backyard, a six-story mixed-use project headed by Florida-based Ram Realty Advisors. Right behind the distillery, a train trestle butts up against the loading dock, with enough space for backdoor deliveries. But not for long.
“This new building that is coming in will be building a retaining wall where that train trestle is,” Dixon said. “As it currently stands, that retaining wall will keep us from being able to use our loading dock. Which means that we’re going to have to figure out our entire operation.”
That’s disappointing, Dixon said.
“The spirit of Durham has always been about caring for each other, giving to each other. This parking-land agreement, those agreements have been just historically such a big part of being a small business owner in the Durham area.”
Still another condo project is in the works a few blocks down Geer Street. Dixon is concerned that so much development may disrupt the character of the neighborhood.
“The people who’ve been here, who’ve been traditional Durhamites, are being pushed out,” Dixon said.
Some of Stone Brothers’ former neighbors, though, are philosophical about the changes.
Bill Whittington owns the Blue Note Grill, across the street from Stone Brothers’ old location.
“Ten years ago, you wouldn’t want to be down here,” Whittington said. “There was nothing going on, very little business, just buildings and warehouses or industrial-type stuff.”
Stone Brothers did not go too far—since February 26, it has been in its new location further north on Washington Street—but it still occupies a different space for the first time in decades.
Davis, who has been the sole active owner of Stone Brothers since he and a few family members bought the business in 1976, said he had a lot on his plate with the move.
“It was a lot of planning,” said Davis. “My right arm came up here and laid out a bunch of displays, had done measuring down [at the old location] then came up and measured spots up here…. We started a month ago moving warehouse merchandise ourselves.”
Debbie Swanner has been shopping at Stone Brothers since the 1980s. On a recent Friday, she was in the store searching for starter plants for her flower bed.“You don’t have to buy everything packaged up, you can say, ‘I want an ounce of cucumber seeds,’ and if you have a small garden, that’s great,” she said.
A customer browses in Stone Brothers’ new store | Photos by Milena Ozernova — The 9th Street Journal
Swanner sees pluses to the store’s spacious new location.
“If you have a garden center, you need sun to put your plants out for people to look at it,” she said.
Davis also sees some benefits from the move.
“We sort of have more parking space, which we think will aid our customers quite a bit,” he said.
Davis doesn’t envision any changes to the mission of the business. Being able to adapt to the ever-evolving needs of customers is “what keeps us going,” he said.
Fertilizer to seed. Avid gardeners to families simply looking for some outdoor supplies. It might have packed up and moved down the road, but 108 years later, Stone Brothers keeps on keeping on.
This story was produced through a partnership between the INDY and 9th Street Journal, which is published by journalism students at Duke University’s DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy.
Support independent local journalism. Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.
Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com.
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https://indyweek.com/news/northcarolina/state-lawmakers-allocation-of-11-million-to-trosa-is-raising-questions/
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TROSA’s on-campus auto body workshop. Advocates, researchers, and some former employees and participants of TROSA say the program uses an outdated model that takes advantage of participants by making them work without pay. Photo credit: Taylor Knopf
This story originally published online at NC Health News in partnership with Kaiser Health News.
An addiction treatment facility, highly regarded by North Carolina lawmakers, sits in a residential neighborhood here and operates like a village in itself. Triangle Residential Options for Substance Abusers, better known as TROSA, hosts roughly 400 people a day on a campus with rows of housing units, cafeterias, a full gym, and a barbershop.
The program, which began in 1994, is uniquely designed: Treatment, housing and meals are free to participants. And TROSA doesn’t bill insurance. Instead, residents work for about two years in TROSA’s many businesses, including a moving company, thrift store and lawn care service. Program leaders say the work helps residents overcome addiction and train for future jobs. Of those who graduate, 96 percent of individuals remain sober and 91 percent are employed a year later, the program’s latest report claims.
Impressed with such statistics, state lawmakers recently allotted $11 million for TROSA to expand its model to Winston-Salem. It’s the largest amount in the state budget targeted to a single treatment provider and comes on the heels of $6 million North Carolina previously provided for its expansion, as well as $3.2 million TROSA has received in state and federal funds annually for several years.
Keith Artin is the president and CEO of Triangle Residential Options for Substance Abusers, better known as TROSA. The program provides free treatment, housing and meals to residents who work for about two years in one of TROSA’s many businesses, including a moving company, thrift store and lawn care services. Photo credit: Taylor Knopf
This latest influx of taxpayer dollars—coming at a time when overdose deaths are surging and each dollar spent on treatment is crucial—is drawing criticism. Advocates, researchers, and some former employees and participants of TROSA say the program takes advantage of participants by making them work without pay and puts their lives at risk by restricting the use of certain medications for opioid use disorder. Although those who graduate may do well, only 25 percent of participants complete the program—a figure TROSA leaders confirmed.
“If I had known about this funding, I would have been the first person on the mic to [tell lawmakers], ‘I don’t think you all should do this,’” said K.C. Freeman, who interned at TROSA in 2018 and later spent two months on staff in the medical department. “You can’t look at the small number of people who had success and say this works. It’s not the majority.”
The dispute over TROSA’s funding comes amid national conversations about how to allocate billions of dollars available after landmark opioid settlements with drug companies. Two flashpoints in the North Carolina debate may provide a window into heated conversations to come. First: Are work-based rehabs legal or ethical? And second: Should every facility that receives public funding allow participants to use all medications for opioid use disorder?
Work as treatment
Work-based rehabs are widespread across the country. The investigative news outlet Reveal identified at least 300 such facilities, including some that place participants in dangerous jobs at oil refineries or dairy farms with no training and exploit workers to bolster profits.
Many of these programs use a portion of their revenue to sustain the rehab and offer residents free housing or meals. That can make them attractive to state legislators, said Noah Zatz, a UCLA law professor who specializes in employment and labor law.
“Because essentially they’re running businesses off of people’s uncompensated labor, there is a built-in funding mechanism,” he said. “If the state doesn’t have to pay full freight to run a program … that might be a reason to like it.”
TROSA’s annual reports indicate more than half of its multimillion-dollar budget is funded through its businesses at which residents work, as well as goods and services that are donated to the program. About 30 percent of its funding comes from government grants and contracts.
Although TROSA and its leaders report no significant campaign donations, they spend upward of $75,000 a year on lobbying. In presentations, they often share a 2017 study—conducted by an independent research institute at TROSA’s request—which found TROSA saves the state nearly $7.5 million annually in criminal justice and emergency care costs.
The program’s self-financing aspect is part of its appeal for North Carolina Sen. Joyce Krawiec, a Republican who represents part of Forsyth County, where TROSA is building its new site.
“The good thing about TROSA: They raised most of their own funds,” she said in a phone interview.
It’s reasonable that residents don’t get paid for their work, she added, since they’re already receiving free treatment and housing. Other rehabs can be prohibitively expensive for many families, so TROSA provides a much-needed option.
But being a bargain doesn’t necessarily make it legal, Zatz and other labor experts said. A previous U.S. Supreme Court ruling suggests nonprofits that run businesses without paying employees could violate the Fair Labor Standards Act.
But TROSA administrators say they are not an employer; they are a therapeutic community. Clear policies guard against the exploitation of anyone, said Keith Artin, president and CEO. The jobs provide residents with structure and an opportunity to change their behaviors.
“The work-based element is essential to recovery,” Artin said. “We’re teaching people how to live.”
Toward the end of residents’ two-year stays, TROSA assists them in job-hunting and allows them to live on campus for several months while they work at a newfound job and build savings.
Diverging work experiences
TROSA’s model has widespread support among lawmakers and families affected by addiction. Benjamin Weston said it was “a blessing.”
Weston said he started using cocaine as a teenager and struggled with addiction for years. At 22, he entered TROSA. He said he was grateful for two years of free treatment.
After brief assignments in TROSA’s thrift store and moving company, Weston transitioned to the development office, where he solicited donations from local businesses. “It was meaningful work that also taught me a lot of good job skills,” he said.
Since graduating in 2016, Weston has worked in development for Hope Connection International, a nonprofit his mother started to support survivors of abuse and addiction.
Other graduates interviewed for this article talked about using the moving skills or commercial driving licenses they gained to obtain full-time jobs. Some said they’re buying houses and starting families— successes they credit to their experience in the program.
But not every resident finds the work model therapeutic. Several described working 10 to 16 hours a day, six days a week, in physically demanding moving or lawn care businesses. Several said there was little time for therapy and, with only a handful of counselors for hundreds of residents, wait times for a session could span weeks.
Freeman, the former TROSA employee who has a master’s in social work, said he thought residents rarely had an opportunity to process the trauma that made them use drugs in the first place. Although Freeman did not counsel clients—his role at TROSA focused on ordering and stocking medications—he said he noticed many graduates returned repeatedly to the program, struggling to stay away from substances once they left campus.
Richard Osborne first heard of TROSA while incarcerated on drug and theft-related charges. Like 38 percent of TROSA residents, he chose to attend the program as a condition of his probation.
One day in 2017, Osborne and other residents working with the moving company were unloading large boards of plywood from a trailer, when a board fell and smashed him against the trailer, he said. His vision became blurry and he worried about having a concussion, he said.
As he remembers it, no one suggested medical care. “The next day, they told me I had to get back to work,” he claimed.
That’s when Osborne said he decided to leave.
Today, Osborne, 31, said he has not used drugs in about four years, holds a steady job, and has a loving family. But it’s no thanks to TROSA, he said.
“They’re taking advantage of people at their low points in life,” he said. The moving company brings in $4 million a year, yet residents who work for it are not even allowed to keep tips, he added.
TROSA leaders confirmed the tips policy but said they could not comment on an individual residents’ experience. In general, CEO Artin wrote in an email, “when a resident is injured we ensure that they receive immediate medical attention and would never knowingly put a resident at risk.”
As a nonprofit, TROSA funnels revenue from its businesses back into the treatment program, he added.
The program’s 2020 tax documents show its top five employees combined earned over $750,000 in salary and benefits.
Medication hesitancy
TROSA provides psychiatric care through a contract with Duke Health and offers group or individual counseling to residents who request it. The program employs four full-time counselors and partners with local providers who donate physical therapy, dental care, and other medical services.
But TROSA does not provide access to some of the most effective treatments for opioid use disorder: methadone and buprenorphine. Both medications activate opioid receptors in the brain and reduce opioid withdrawal and cravings. It’s been well documented that these medications greatly reduce the risk of opioid overdose death, and the FDA-approved drugs are considered the “gold standard” for treatment.
Right now, TROSA leaders say the only medication for opioid use disorder the program offers is naltrexone, an injectable medication that works differently than the other two because it requires patients to fully detox to be effective. Because of this, some experts are hesitant to use it, saying it puts people at higher risk of overdose death.
About one-third of TROSA participants report opioids are their primary drug of choice.
TROSA leaders said they’ve discussed adding the other addiction treatment medications but face logistical barriers. All medications at TROSA are self-administered, and leaders worry about diversion of oral methadone and buprenorphine, which are classified as controlled substances. They say they’d consider injectable buprenorphine, but it’s costly for their mostly uninsured participants.
“People choose to come here because it is a behavior modification program,” said Lisa Finlay, lead clinical counselor at TROSA. “They know that we don’t offer buprenorphine or those medications. We have people who have tried those medications in the past and believe that they actually led them back to using.”
Evidence suggests that people using medications for opioid use disorder have the best outcomes when they have access to other recovery support services, such as housing, employment, counseling and a community. But while clinicians across the country have embraced these medications, leaders of residential treatment programs founded in the more traditional 12-step, abstinence-based recovery model have pushed back.
Some old-school recovery leaders claim the use of medications is simply replacing one drug with another, which has created stigma around this form of treatment.
A 2020 study found that about 40 percent of residential programs surveyed in the U.S. didn’t offer opioid use disorder medications and 20 percent actively discouraged people from using them. In North Carolina, there are 62 licensed long-term residential treatment facilities, according to the SAMHSA treatment locator, and fewer than half accept patients who take these medications. Only 12 facilities are licensed to prescribe buprenorphine.
This has resulted in tough conversations with patients for Kate Roberts, a clinical social worker on a UNC Health team that treats people with severe IV drug-related infections. Once patients are stabilized, many start buprenorphine, she said. Some say they want to go to a residential program for structure, job training and to learn coping skills. Roberts recalled one patient saying to her: “I need to go to residential treatment and I need this medication because I fear I’ll die.”
“That’s really heartbreaking to hear a patient clearly articulate what it is that they need … which is in line with the [research] literature,” she said. “And that you know there are very few places in the state that offer that.”
Doctors and public health experts nationwide are pushing for lawmakers to fund rehab facilities that allow these medications, saying they’re the best way to combat the opioid crisis.
Some medical and legal experts have said it’s in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act to deny recovery services such as housing to people using medications for opioid use disorder. Health experts say that funding abstinence-based addiction programs could also inadvertently cause more overdoses if people leave the program and return to using drugs with a much lower tolerance, especially as fentanyl is rampant in the street drug supply.
These conversations will become only more important as opioid settlement funds arrive, said Bradley Stein, director of the national Rand Opioid Policy Center.
“The goal isn’t just to get people into treatment; it’s to get people doing better,” he said. “You want to make sure that you’re using the money effectively.”
The conversations have begun in North Carolina. When Rep. Graig Meyer (D-Durham) tweeted his support for TROSA late last year, clinicians reached out to him explaining their concerns about the program not allowing participants to use methadone or buprenorphine.
Although Meyer still believes it’s an effective program, he said, “I also have concerns from what I learned about TROSA’s approach to treating opioid addiction in particular. I’d like to see TROSA consider what their current practices are.”
This story first published online at North Carolina Health News. North Carolina Health News is an independent, non-partisan, not-for-profit, statewide news organization dedicated to covering all things health care in North Carolina.
KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.
Support independent local journalism. Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.
Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com.
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https://indyweek.com/news/voices/time-will-tell-a-story-rodney-king-officers-acquittal-30-years/
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Thirty years ago this month the city of Los Angeles went up in flames after a jury acquitted three police officers of criminal charges for the beating of Rodney King one year before.
When I watched that brutal police assault on television with my mother, she told me about a brutal attack her father had endured at the hands of police in Rockingham in 1953. Born 110 years ago on April 15, 1912, my maternal grandfather died in 1962. Happy birthday Gran’Daddy Willie Horne.
Time will tell a story.
The Leak Street Colored School in Rockingham, North Carolina opened in 1924, and Black families began migrating into town from nearby sharecropping fields to give their children the opportunity for an education they never had.
They came from places like Wolf Pit, Steele’s Township, Piney Grove, Beaver Dam, Galestown, and Tabernacle, along with Roberdel. That’s where my momma’s parents lived in a wood-frame house, while sharecropping on land owned by a man named Clyde Marie.
My Gran’daddy Willie Horne found other means of getting paid besides tenant farming.
Say my gran’daddy built himself a liquor still, opened up a liquor house, and in between selling moonshine and running card games, he was about as free as a poor colored man could be in the 1940s South.
Still, my Gran’daddy Willie Horne and his little family moved into town, where his children could go to school and he could help his brother, Tom Horne, whose life was in the gutter and headed straight to hell in a whiskey bottle.
My gran’daddy got his family settled into a white wood-frame house with black shutters at 709 Armistead Street. A pecan tree with a massive trunk that squatted like a cheerful wrestler stood guard in the front yard.
My Gran’daddy Willie Horne opened up another card house. This one sat atop of a red-dirt hill just above his house.
It wasn’t nothing but a shack, that card house: a bucket of blood really, a place where Black men could gamble and drink away the skin of their coins, because the meat was used to keep babies fed and a roof over their heads.
The police busted in on the men one day and rounded ‘em all up.
My Gran’daddy Willie Horne hauled ass.
I imagine he ran like a runaway slave, kicking it on an ill-fated North Star night.
The police caught him underneath that pecan tree that stood in his front yard. Then they pulled out their billy clubs and beat the audacity out of him for trying to escape.
They beat him down right there in front of his wife and children, including his 12-year-old daughter, who would become my mother.
Years later, during the early spring of 1991, whenever the Rodney King beating came on TV, my momma’s eyes would explode with memory.
She say, “Tommy, boy, the police beat your gran’daddy so bad, they made Rodney King look like a picnic.”
My momma would repeat that over and over while staring at the TV as the LA police billy clubs rained down cold-hot metal all over Rodney King’s body.
A church litany. A near-forgotten prayer. A Kodak moment. A revelation of lost faith, while remembering the softness of her father’s head.
“Boy, they beat your gran’daddy so bad, they made Rodney King look like a picnic.”
She say my gran’daddy Willie Horne wasn’t the same after that beating.
Seizures.
He couldn’t hold down a steady job.
My momma say, one day my Gran’daddy Willie Horne looked at her and my Aunt Peggy, and told them, “Y’all ain’t my children.”
“Yes we is, Daddy,” they cried. “Yes we is your children.”
“No you ain’t,” he answered. “Cause if you were mine, I’d be able to feed you.”
There was never any official acknowledgment from the town of what happened to my grandfather. Last year, my child AJ found his death certificate. On May 12, 1962 he literally died of a broken heart—a myocardial infarction—a heart attack at his home on Armistead Street. He was 50. His occupation was listed as “janitor.” The medical examiner determined that his heart failed him because he had been diagnosed with heart disease 12 years before, right around the time the police beat him like a dog.
The pathologist also listed his being “epileptic” as a contributing factor. I guess that’s about as close to an acknowledgement of police misconduct that a poor Black man could expect from the 1960s South. There certainly wasn’t an official investigation, or indignant town officials decrying excessive police violence. Black lives hardly mattered. My mother’s siblings don’t even have a picture of the man I’ve been told all my life by those who knew him that I resemble.
Soon after my mother told me that story about my gran’daddy, I walked up the now asphalt-paved hill where his card house once sat. That hallowed patch of ground is now the home of the Church of God in Christ. As a kid I was afraid to race down the hill on my Big Wheel to my grandmother’s house. I never knew my gran’daddy once ran down that hill from the wickedness that defined his time on Earth.
I knelt down and kissed that bitter earth.
I figured it was still damp, you know.
Wet, with the blood-stained memory of my grandfather.
Support independent local journalism. Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.
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https://indyweek.com/food-and-drink/news/starbucks-fires-raleigh-worker-unionizing/
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The Midtown East Starbucks in Raleigh. | Photo by Brett Villena
On February 13, while washing dishes in the back room of the Raleigh Starbucks she works at, Sharon Gilman says that the three-compartment sink separated from the wall, falling toward her. She stepped backward and called for her shift supervisor. The two documented the damage, taking photos and videos, and the shift supervisor called in a work order. Then Gilman went home.
On April 9, Ed Harvey, a Starbucks manager, showed up at the 2901 Sherman Oaks store that Gilman works at, called her out from her shift, and fired her.
In a notice of termination reviewed by the INDY, Starbucks cited "intentional miuse of store equipment" by Gilman that generated a "concern for personal safety."
"Ed sat me down and asked, 'Were you upset? Did something happen that night? Maybe you were frustrated'? I was like, No. First of all, this was literally a month and a half ago," Gilman says. "It just broke off the wall."
Gilman, 20, is one of the seven employees at the 2901 Sherman Oak Place location in Raleigh to put their names on a letter declaring intent to unionize. The letter was submitted to former Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson—who has since been replaced by Howard Schultz—on February 15.
As reported in a feature by the INDY Week in mid-March, workers at the 2901 Sherman Oaks Starbucks location are the first Starbucks workers in North Carolina to file for a union election. Ballots for the company's union election are supposed to go out this week.
Over the phone, a Starbucks spokesperson maintained to the INDY that the termination is "unrelated to current unionization efforts at the stores."
"This is an extreme example of retaliation by Starbucks," says Chris Baumann, Southern Region Director of Workers United, an affiliate of Service Employees International Union (SEIU). "Instead of firing her, the company should have been apologetic that equipment in their store was in such disrepair that a sink almost fell on an employee."
Gilman, a student at North Carolina State University, says that she was surprised to be fired and agrees that the termination feels like retaliation.
"My name was on the letter," she says. "My name was in a news article, in the press release."
Since the first Starbucks store in Buffalo, New York, went public with a union campaign in August, an unprecedented organizing fever has swept through the company, with workers at more than 175 stores in 25 states filing for union elections as of early April. There are roughly 9,000 stores nationwide.
The company—which has largely enjoyed a progressive reputation since its 1971 founding—has responded strongly to organizing efforts with a full-court anti-union press, sending senior officials to stores, holding meetings with workers, and firing several workers in prominent organizing roles.
Gilman is at least the tenth unionizing Starbucks worker to be fired from the company. Last week—the same day that Howard Schultz started his role as interim CEO of the company—Laila Dalton, an outspoken Phoenix barista and union leader, was fired from her job for recording co-workers' conversations without their permission.
At a forum that day Schultz told employees that “we can’t ignore what is happening in the country as it relates to companies throughout the country being assaulted in many ways by the threat of unionization.”
The most high-profile store firings occurred at a Memphis Starbucks in early February, when seven unionizing employees were fired for violating company safety rules; earlier this week, NLRB officials determined that the Memphis worker terminations were illegal and announced intent to issue a complaint unless there is a settlement.
Baumann says that SEIU is planning to file charges with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) first thing on Monday morning requesting that Gilman be reinstated at her job.
"I love the people I work with," Gilman says. "They're some of the best friendships and relationships that I've formed. I'm not from Raleigh, I'm actually from Virginia, so when I moved down here for school they took me under their wing."
In a text message, Alyssa White, another barista at the 2901 Sherman Place store, told the INDY that organizing employees plan to protest at the store on Monday.
"Starbucks is determined to try to crush this union drive that's being led by Starbucks partners across the country," says Baumann. "Now that Howard Schultz the old CEO has come back, it sounds like it's his mission to destroy this union drive. He keeps trying to make it sound like it's this effort that's coming from outside the company. It's very much the reverse."
Support independent local journalism. Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.
Follow Arts & Culture Editor Sarah Edwards on Twitter or send an email to sedwards@indyweek.com.
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Congratulations to over 1,000 local businesses and people who have been nominated by the community as the "Best of the Triangle!" The final round of voting begins today through May 8. The top four vote-getters (plus ties) made it to the final multiple choice ballot. Take 10 minutes to support your favorite dives, healthcare providers, and museums from across the Triangle by clicking the banner below.
Winners will be announced in the June 15 print edition of INDY Week. The top vote-getters will receive an INDY branded "Best of" poster to proudly display, while all finalists will receive a window decal for rising to the top. *
For Businesses:
The finalist ballot receives over 500,000 votes from readers, and June 15’s "Best of the Triangle" issue is the most-read issue of the year. Reach out now to reserve your spot and thank your supporters in this memorable edition.
For promotional opportunities on the ballot, please take a moment to watch this video, and click here to download our rate card. For information on all print and digital advertising opportunities, please email sales@indyweek.com.
Click here to download additional resources to reach your customers and patrons, both in-person and online. You can download posters and images for your newsletters, social media platforms, and front doors. Share far and wide using the hashtags #bestofthetriangle #bestof2022 and #indyweek. Got questions? Please email sales@indyweek.com.
Lastly, consider joining the INDY Week Press Club. Support like yours allows us to continue to provide you with free local news coverage in both print and digital formats, as well as special issues like the “Best of the Triangle.”
*Note: Businesses that made it onto the finalist ballot will likely receive phishing attempts via whatever public-facing communication channel you use. Any offer to sell you a plaque, poster, sign or any other "Best of the Triangle"-related product should be handled as a scam. INDY Week provides window decals to all finalists, and winners receive a poster to proudly display. If you are a previous finalist or winner and have not received these for previous years, please contact sales@indyweek.com.
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https://indyweek.com/news/durham/four-people-killed-11-wounded-in-three-days-of-gun-violence-/
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Durham’s elected officials, law enforcement leaders, activists, and others have deployed an array of resources that aims to stop gun violence.
The past weekend was disheartening.
Police say 11 people were shot and four died between Thursday afternoon and Saturday night.
The gunfire started Thursday at about 4:30 p.m., in the 300 block of Avon Lake Drive.
Police found two people with gunshot wounds at an apartment complex in the neighborhood.
Investigators say Emily Montes de Oca, 22, of Durham, died at the scene. Paramedics also rushed a 27-year-old victim to the hospital with serious injuries.
Nearly two hours after the shootings police announced that the incident was “ongoing,” and remained “an active situation” because the shooting suspect, Erick Ray Hudson of Durham had “barricaded himself inside one of the apartments and refused to come out for several hours,” police reported.
Durham Police Chief, during a late afternoon press conference that took place near the apartments where Hudson was still barricaded, said there had been previous reports of gunshots fired in the community.
According to WRAL News, Hudson and the slain woman were roommates.
It was about 10:30 p.m. when members of the police department’s selective enforcement team made their way into the apartment and took Hudson into custody.
Police have charged Hudson, 26, with one felony count each of murder and assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill inflicting serious injury.
Two days later police were alerted to a second shooting at West Durham’s Avon Lake Drive.
It was about 1:30 a.m. on Saturday when police were dispatched to the 3000 block of the neighborhood. When investigators arrived they found three people wounded by gunfire. One of the victims was pronounced dead at the scene.
Paramedics rushed the surviving victims to the hospital where they were treated for non-life threatening injuries.
A little over three miles away in the 3000 block of Auto Drive in West Durham, police were dispatched to another shooting that happened just after 1:30 a.m.
When the officers arrived, they were told three people had been shot. Police on Monday said one victim, Daniel Slack, 22 died at the scene. The other two people were transported to a local hospital with what appear to be non-life threatening injuries.
Again, investigators did not make public details about the shooting, or report a motive. However, they think the shootings were not random.
The gun violence in West Durham continued into the early evening when dispatchers alerted police to another fatal shooting on West Woodcroft Parkway.
It was shortly after 7:30 p.m. when Durham officers arrived at the 100 block of West Woodcroft Parkway and found three gunshot victims.
Police on Monday said one victim, Tylen Wesley Baldwin, 21, of Durham, died at the scene. The other two victims were taken to the hospital for treatment of non-life-threatening injuries.
Police have not filed any charges in the deaths of Baldwin, Slack or the third, unnamed victim.
Support independent local journalism. Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.
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https://indyweek.com/news/ninth-street-journal/durham-school-of-the-arts-may-move-to-northern-durham/
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Photos of Durham School of the Arts by Milena Ozernova
Durham School of the Arts is grappling with the choice between holding onto history and beginning a new era.
The arts magnet school, a fixture in downtown Durham since 1995, has been a source of pride in Durham for years. Now it may be relocating to a new campus in northern Durham.
That has left parents and community members with lots of unanswered questions.
Jeannine Sato, a DSA parent and PTSA volunteer, has been active with the school for two years. She supports the move and funding a new campus for DSA but says that parents she has spoken with have mixed feelings about the relocation.
“Part of the charm of DSA is its history, its location in downtown, and its connection to a lot of the arts downtown,” she said. “But I do have concerns about how we could safely renovate it with students in session.
“It just seems logistically challenging, very expensive, and there will probably be lots of unforeseen challenges. Building a campus seems like the most logical solution.”
Others, such as Karalyn Colopy, a DSA parent and Trinity Park resident, favor keeping DSA right where it is.
“I love that there’s a school in downtown Durham,” she said. “It would be a big loss if we lost a school campus right in the heart of the city.”
The current sprawling campus of eight buildings stretches across three blocks of Durham, housing 1,655 students from grades 6 to 12. The school boasts rigorous academics in addition to a focus on visual and performing arts.
The campus, previously home to Durham High School, includes some buildings built in 1922. Durham High was struggling in the 1990s, before DSA opened in 1995. DSA transformed the campus into a vibrant school attended by students from around the county, who gain entrance to the arts magnet school through a lottery system.
The concept of a new campus for DSA has been under discussion for some time. The county provided design and discovery funds for the project in early 2021. In May of 2021, the school board hired a third party to assess the viability of the current DSA campus. The consultant concluded that the campus was not adequate to house a school of the arts.
The Board of Education decided in October to pursue funding for a new DSA campus in northern Durham County and submitted the proposal to the Board of County Commissioners. The commissioners will decide this month whether or not to include the new DSA building as part of an upcoming fall bond referendum.
If funding for the new campus is approved by the county commissioners, Durham residents will have the opportunity to vote on funding for DSA as part of the proposed bond referendum on November 8.
If approved, the Board of Education anticipates that construction will begin in June 2023. They hope that the campus will be completed by May 2025.
The proposed location for the new campus, a 58 acre-site on Duke Homestead Road, was purchased in 2010 from Duke University. Unlike the current campus, it is isolated from major thoroughfares and provides opportunity for future expansion, said Julius Monk, deputy superintendent of operational services for Durham Public Schools.
Photos of Durham School of the Arts by Milena Ozernova
In a February 23 Board of Education meeting, Fredrick Davis, director of capital construction and planning for the Durham school system, highlighted the historical significance of the current campus, but also pointed to flaws with the building.“The current structure limits the class sizes, limits natural light and really does not lend itself to the modernizations that we need in order to attract the best and brightest,” he said.
Sato also cited several structural and maintenance issues with the campus, including electricity outages. “There are definitely some basement classrooms that feel like a dark dungeon,” she said.
In a recent interview, Monk highlighted accessibility issues with the current campus, and the age of the building. He also raised concerns about the size of the campus , explaining that DSA was designed for about 1,200-1,400 students.
Parents and administrators are also concerned about the traffic generated by the school’s location on two major thoroughfares. Traffic backups often cause significant bottlenecks through the campus and into the city streets beyond, inconveniencing drivers and posing a danger to schoolchildren, some said.
Natalie Beyer, a Board of Education member, said new North Carolina Department of Transportation regulations would require the entire car line to remain on the DSA campus and not overflow out into the roadways. “That site is landlocked and there’s not a possibility for us to afford more land or close city streets,” she said. “Those roads are major arteries.”
Beyer stressed the importance of receiving input from the community throughout the relocation process. She says as soon as the board knows if the county has approved funding for the new school, the school board will revisit the issue and welcome public comment.
A big concern shared by parents and community members is what will happen to the current DSA buildings if the school moves.
Allen Wilcox is a Trinity Park resident who lives one block away from the current DSA campus. He says DSA has been a source of pride for his neighborhood.
“I just hope that the old buildings are used in a way that still benefits the community,” he said.
Both Beyer and Monk said that the board is considering moving New Tech High School, which currently shares a campus with Hillside High School, to the current DSA campus.
As Hillside expands, Monk says, “it’s becoming harder to run both of those programs on the same campus.”
New Tech High School has a student population of only 285 students. Given that, Monk said the current DSA location could also potentially accommodate central office space or student testing facilities.
Colopy wants reassurance that the older DSA buildings will be preserved if the school moves to a new location.
“We don’t have that much history here in Durham,” Colopy said. “This is our history and what makes us Durham.”
This story was produced through a partnership between the INDY and 9th Street Journal, which is published by journalism students at Duke University’s DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy.
Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com.
Support independent local journalism. Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.
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Photo of Durham Bulls Athletic Park by Henry Haggart — The 9th Street Journal
When the City of Durham was asked to spend twice as much as expected to make improvements to Durham Bulls Athletic Park, the result was never really in question. But that didn’t keep the council from debating the question when it met on Monday.
The city leases the Durham Bulls Athletic Park to the Durham Bulls team, and is required, under an agreement with Major League Baseball, to make upgrades to the Bulls’ stadium by April 2025 in order to keep the Bulls in Durham.
With that in mind, the Durham City Council voted 5-0 Monday to spend an extra $5.35 million to renovate the ballpark, on top of the original $5.22 million it approved in June 2021, for a total cost of $10.57 million. The Durham Bulls are contributing $1 million in renovation costs but it’s up to the city to cover the other $9.57 million.
During a work session in March, John Paces-Wiles, senior project manager with the city’s general services department, relayed that the upgrades will include renovations to player locker rooms, coaches’ offices and a new batting tunnel.
Prior to Monday’s meeting, Skanska, the company that won the bid for the project, reported to city officials that the higher costs resulted from the coronavirus pandemic, which has affected the entire construction industry. Costs for construction materials went up an average of 45 percent since March 2021, the company reported.
Though the council voted 5-0 to approve the additional expenditures, members were divided on whether the deal to keep the Durham Bulls, which was brokered with the council back in 2014, was truly worth the money.
Prior to the meeting, At-Large Council Member Jillian Johnson and Ward 3 Representative Leonardo Williams debated the topic on social media. The debate continued Monday as each member weighed in on the issue.
Johnson lamented that the council had committed itself to paying for upgrades to the stadium, and pointed out that the baseball league requires many cities across the nation to pay for upgrades to their stadiums. Durham’s lease with the Bulls expires in 2033. She urged the council to broker a better deal with the league at that time.
“I hope that we can have a little more equity in the future for how the city, the Bulls, and maybe even Major League Baseball can split the costs,” Johnson said. “I’m disappointed that it’s falling all on our residents.”
Paces-Wiles and the general services department provided information regarding the Durham Bulls’ cultural events, revenue and overall contributions to the community, statistics which Leonardo Williams reiterated in arguing that the Durham Bulls were, indeed, worth the monetary investment.
Williams pointed to the Bulls’ direct economic impact on the city, which included generating $48.5 million in revenue last year. In addition, the Bulls’ presence in Durham directly supported 23,130 jobs and indirectly supported over 25,00 jobs last year, according to the report from the general services department.
Williams and Mayor Pro-Tempore Mark-Anthony Middleton lamented that there was debate about whether to pay the money.
“This is a real city, and we got to put our big pants on,” Williams said at the council meeting. “Which means we need to have assets to welcome people to the city to spend so we can generate the revenue to address the social issues that we have.”
Mayor Elaine O’Neal echoed Williams’ statements, pointing to the Durham Bulls’ history in her life, and the life of Durham.
The Durham Bulls moved from Durham Athletic Park to the team’s current downtown home, Durham Bulls Athletic Park, in 1995.
Durham Bulls Athletic Park hosted 70 home games in 2021 and dozens of other events, including the city’s Fourth of July celebration.
Williams and O’Neal also mentioned the fame generated by the film “Bull Durham.” The Durham Bulls are at the center of the 1988 movie, which was filmed at Durham Athletic Park.
Elaine O’Neal’s family home is just three blocks down from Durham Bulls Athletic Park, and she recalled her father’s pride when “Bull Durham” was released.
“For my father’s 103rd birthday, he wanted to go to a Durham Bulls game, and we have a photo of him and the Bulls mascot up in our home,” O’Neal said. “The Durham Bulls…will never ever go away, if you have been a part of this community for as long as I have.”
Despite the lively conversation, the motion to fund the ballpark renovations passed unanimously.
Opening Day for the 2022 season is set for April 12, when the Bulls will face the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp.
This story was produced through a partnership between the INDY and 9th Street Journal, which is published by journalism students at Duke University’s DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy.
Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com.
Support independent local journalism. Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.
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The restaurant parking lot where Pro-Life advocates stand. All photos by Kathryn Osygus.
This story was originally published by UNC Media Hub.
On this Saturday, two groups of people stand watch in the 20-space parking lot of a Japanese steakhouse, each staking out their own territory.
When a car pulls in, often with a woman driving, each group springs to action.
Those wearing rainbow-colored vests motion in the direction of the abortion clinic, guiding drivers to the proper place to park. Others, dressed in navy Sidewalk for Life hoodies, wave, smile, and put their hands in a praying position. Some wield signs, such as one reading “God loves you and your baby. We can help.”
While there’s no shouting or screaming, the scene is no less jarring for those arriving at the abortion clinic for the first time.
I felt overwhelmed when I drove in, and I had no life-changing decision to make. I was there to watch what happens outside the abortion clinic.
The restaurant parking lot is contested ground—an unusual place for actions so significant. Both pro-life advocates and pro-choice clinic escorts are represented there, and both sides are aware it can overwhelm those who come.
But both sides stand their ground outside a Woman’s Choice of Greensboro for hours at a time, five days a week. They feel compelled to be there. Both sides believe they are helping the women who come. I spoke to both.
***
Lauren O., 26, is one of about 50 people who serve as volunteer escorts.
Escorts serve as a friendly face when patients pull in. They offer to walk patients inside the clinic. They speak gentle, reassuring words. They play music over a speaker to dull the volume of the pro-life advocates’ words—a request made by patients.
Escorts are essential to the clinic, helping to reduce confusion and ensure patient safety. Wearing rainbow-colored vests, they position themselves on clinic property as well as the adjacent restaurant parking lot.
Because the clinic is not visible from the main road, patients sometimes miss the turn and enter the restaurant parking lot, which is consistently occupied by pro-life advocates. If this happens, pro-life advocates can be quick to approach the car and initiate conversations about the patient’s reproductive decisions.
“If we weren’t there to contextualize this and tell folks these are protesters, not random well-meaning citizens, not just kind Christian folks, people would be confused, more likely to be misdirected, and have a harder time accessing care,” said Lauren, who did not want her last name used to protect her personal security.
Escorts view their role as being there for patients’ needs, not influencing patients’ decisions.
“We’re here to make sure everyone's safe. That’s the priority, not that everybody gets a procedure,” said Ten H., 24, an escort who did not want their last name used for the same reason.
But Lauren said pro-life advocates perceive them differently. She said they push a narrative that escorts want to make the clinic money and force people to have abortions.
Saturday is the clinic’s busiest and most crowded day. As a result, 10-15 escorts are usually present, with about as many—and often more—pro-life advocates.
The crowd can be intimidating, though the protesters are rarely effective in halting an abortion. Escorts are there to combat their words with understanding and reassurance.
“It's given me the opportunity to be the person who looks them in the eye and says, ‘I believe you're a good person. I believe you're a good parent,’” Lauren said. “Seeing the relief and the weight roll off their shoulders when they hear that first encouraging word to then have the strength to go into their appointment and do what they need to do is so meaningful.”
Although the clinic may be calmer on weekdays in terms of volume, Ten said that pro-life advocates can act more boldly when escorts are in smaller numbers. Generally, there are three to five escorts during the week and a similar number of pro-life advocates. The clinic does not allow the pro-life advocates to come on its property
Ten, who is one of the few escorts of color, has heard explicitly racist insults.
“They choose to target me,” Ten said. “I expected that going into this because a lot of times I've seen that pro-life or anti-abortion people often have similar beliefs as white supremacists. And so I was anticipating that, but it was just alarming.”
Ten often wears sunglasses and Bluetooth headphones to tune out pro-life advocates as much as possible.
Similarly, Lauren said the name-calling has taken a mental toll. She’s been called evil, selfish, and “the demonic one.” In therapy, she discusses how hearing these repeated comments affects her sense of self and how she must resist internalizing the insults.
Bobby Singleton, co-founder of Triad Coalition for Life, an organization that compiles pregnancy resources and coordinates a daily presence outside the clinic, said name-calling is not allowed by anyone affiliated with his group. Each of the group’s pool of about 50 volunteers has agreed to a code of conduct he strictly enforces that prohibits verbal abuse of patients and escorts. It also bans obstructing entry to the clinic.
Singleton said there used to be a group outside the clinic unrelated to Triad Coalition for Life that was combative and shouted at patients and escorts. He said they haven’t been there for months.
Escorts keep coming back, despite the mental toll.
“I think it's essential that people know that they're supported when they go to a clinic because of all of the shame and stigma and all of the misconceptions about abortion and about the people who get them,” Ten said.
Lauren O., 26, is a volunteer escort at the clinic.
***
Positioned just beyond the trespassing boundary is a group of pro-life advocates. This is their preferred terminology, rather than the label of “protesters” the clinic and escorts use.
Before a wooden cross, they use a microphone and speaker to promote resources for single mothers and urge those entering the clinic to choose life.
“Remember you don’t have to do this,” Becky, a pro-life advocate, who did not want her last name used to protect her privacy, said on the mic. “We love you and are praying for you. We don’t want you to be harmed either through this. And this is harmful to you.”
At 10 a.m., about 30 people wearing turquoise Love Life shirts arrive at the parking lot. Love Life is a national group whose goal is to establish a consistent Christian witness at every abortion center across the country. Every Saturday, during its 40-week campaign, the group walks about a half-mile from Destiny Christian Center to the clinic to pray for the abortion providers, escorts, and women terminating their pregnancies.
“This is a business—a business that is making money off death,” a male Love Life leader said. “It's a place that has a culture of death, and we're praying that people would choose life. We pray that repentance would happen and people would choose life in Jesus’ name.”
A pink ultrasound bus from the Pregnancy Network, a Christian, multi-denominational organization seeking to serve Triad women facing unplanned pregnancies, is parked prominently. It’s available for free pregnancy tests, ultrasounds, and STD tests. The mobile unit started coming to the clinic in 2018. The organization also has its information plastered overhead on the closest billboard to the clinic.
For the past two and a half years, Becky, 38, has spent nearly every day at the clinic during its operating hours. She said it’s what God has called her to do and that he gives her the words to reach out to women.
“Any of the tough information that we tell women is because we want them to know now while they still have a choice instead of them finding out after they no longer have a choice, so any of the tough information is said in love,” Becky said. “We're here in love. We're not here in judgment.”
Shanda, 45, who also did not want her last name used to protect her privacy, started coming to the clinic more than two years ago. She said her first experience was confusing as she came by herself and was mistaken as a patient.
As a Black woman, she said she looked like most of the people who go into the clinic. That observation highlighted the need for her to represent her pro-life viewpoint. Black women in North Carolina have the highest rates of abortion, at a rate of 21 per 1,000 people, according to 2019 data from the NC State Center for Health Statistics.
Shanda comes to the clinic about three times a week. She tries to talk with patients about choosing life, but she doesn't scream at them.
It’s easy to get discouraged by the number of people going into the clinic, she said. On average, she said maybe one in 25 women will stop on their way into the clinic, but it’s always a guessing game.
“You can go all week and not have a single connection or you can go the following week and have like three or four a day,” Shanda said.
While pro-life advocates’ efforts may not stop many abortions, Shanda easily recalls success stories that inspire her to keep showing up in the hopes of adding to her list of patients who didn’t have abortions.
“When you start going through your phone and you're looking at the pictures of babies that are actually here because of you, the moms that call and say thank you for either walking me through this or thank you for referring me to post-abortive counseling—that's all the reward there is,” Shanda said.
Becky also said she’s held babies born after a mom continued a pregnancy to term, even thrown baby showers for them.
Both said it’s not their place to change someone’s mind, but they feel it’s important to be outside the clinic to offer an alternative viewpoint or be a sign that they don’t have to terminate the pregnancy.
“We stay as long as we can to reach out to as many women as we can, because we don't want to miss that one,” Becky said.
Safety, both in-and-outside the operation room, is a top priority for clinic employees and escorts.
***
The abortion clinic wasn’t always this fraught scene. Located just back from the main road, the 2,772-square-foot building with two operating rooms was known only to employees and those seeking its services.
But that all changed when pro-life advocates started having a daily physical presence outside the clinic.
“They have signs. They yell racially charged really disgusting language and say really inaccurate and harmful things to our staff and our patients under the guise of sidewalk counseling,” said Amber Gavin, vice president of advocacy & operations at A Woman’s Choice, in reference to the environment seen across the independent abortion provider’s clinics. “It's a challenge that we constantly see.”
The rise of activity outside the abortion clinic emphasized the need for escorts to help ensure patients could enter the clinic safely and prevent confusion from crowds unaffiliated with the clinic and lacking medical credentials.
Now, a scene of pro-life advocates and escorts is common outside clinics across the state and country.
In addition to the abortion clinic in Greensboro, A Woman’s Choice operates clinics in Raleigh, Charlotte, and Jacksonville, Florida. The independent abortion provider has had a presence in North Carolina for 14 years. In 2017, the Charlotte facility opened to expand access, specifically locating near the airport to facilitate easy travel.
Fifteen clinics offer some form of abortion services in North Carolina. They are located in Wake, Mecklenburg, Orange, Durham, Guilford, Buncombe, Cumberland, Forsyth, and New Hanover counties.
In 2019, the most recent year for which complete data exists, 143,004 pregnancies among North Carolina residents were reported to the NC State Center for Health Statistics. Of the known pregnancies, about 16 percent were terminated through an abortion procedure, amounting to 23,495 abortions performed.
“The history of violence against abortion providers, clinic escorts and abortion nurses is well documented and it's not that far in the past,” Lauren said. “It's not that far removed and it's still very present in my mind.”
A Preferred Women’s Health Center in Charlotte received a bomb threat credible enough to evacuate patients in January 2021.
Gavin said operating abortion clinics is a challenge in the midst of passionate pro-life advocates, employee recruitment, strict state regulations requiring mandated scripted counseling and a 72-hour waiting period and the looming threat of Roe v. Wade being overturned by the Supreme Court.
“Whatever the outcome is will have a huge effect on abortion care throughout the United States,” Gavin said. “And so I think it's fair to say that we're all anxious and that Roe has the potential to become decimated and so it really will be left up to the states, which is scary.”
The procedure room.
***
At age 20, Lauren terminated an ectopic pregnancy, one in which the fertilized egg grows outside the uterus. It was a vastly different experience than patients encounter at a Woman’s Choice of Greensboro’s clinic. Instead of going to an abortion clinic, she received a shot of methotrexate, a drug used to medically induce miscarriage, at the hospital.
“I was catered to as a white woman having an abortion for what society labeled a medical reason,” Lauren said.
She made her decision in consultation with her doctor and free from encounters with pro-life advocates. Without a crowd second-guessing her, she was able to feel at peace with her decision.
But spending days outside the clinic as an escort reveals that most women don’t get to have her experience, though she wishes it were the norm.
The recovery room, where patients go post-operation.
Lauren and Ten both dream of a day when clinic escorts aren’t needed and there’s cultural acceptance around abortions, so everyone feels safe and confident in their decisions.
Becky and Shanda dream of a day when abortion is no longer legal and practiced. They no longer wish to see abortion promoted or funded by the government, and instead want the emphasis to turn to pregnancy centers and adoption.
But, for now, the action and noise in the parking lot outside the clinic will continue to ebb and flow with its operating hours, as onlookers continue to take a special interest in the decisions being made inside. Neither group plans to go anywhere.
A cross posted outside the restaurant parking lot, right across from the clinic.
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Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com.
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In the annual State of the County address Monday night, Durham County Board of Commissioners chair Brenda Howerton foregrounded the silver linings of the COVID-19 pandemic and laid out a plan to expand funding to transit, broadband, and crime reduction initiatives.
For the first time in three years, the address was delivered in person.
“While the pandemic has brought challenges, it has also released a newfound success and sense of collaboration and innovation,” Howerton said.
She applauded the resilience of the community and noted the county economy’s recovery to pre-pandemic levels.
“Durham County is attracting new businesses and expanding existing ones,” Howerton said, pointing to companies like Smart Wires, Beam Therapeutic, and Google Cloud Hub.
Howerton went on to discuss how the 2021 budget allowed for the formation of several new initiatives—the Long-Term Homeowner Grant Program, the City-County Racial Equity Commission, and the Safety and Wellness Task Force—as well as the hiring of a Refugee and Immigrant Affairs Strategist.
Looking ahead to this year’s budget, Howerton said the board is prioritizing an expansion of transit investments and displayed an accompanying visual of the Triangle Bike Study’s recommended 17-mile shared-use path, which connects Raleigh, Cary, Morrisville, Research Triangle Park, Durham, and Chapel Hill.
She also said the board hopes to allocate more money to supporting crime reduction and intervention initiatives.
Due to the county’s recent uptick in gun violence, Howerton said the board has reinstated the former Crime Cabinet to “develop new ideas that can be implemented to significantly reduce the impact of violent crime.” She added that Mayor Elaine O’Neal has called on citizens to volunteer five hours a week to help those experiencing violent crime in their neighborhoods.
Howerton also mentioned that the pandemic has illuminated the need for broadband expansion; the new budget will aim to increase broadband in rural areas to improve education and increase telehealth availability.
“While this list is not all our priorities, I feel it represents our current goals moving forward,” Howerton concluded.
The public hearing for the 2022-23 budget will be held on May 23.
After the address, the board proclaimed April 2022 as Fair Housing Month in Durham County and called local realtor Pete Eisenmann to the stand.
Eisenmann serves as co-chair of the Durham Regional Association of Realtors’ Diversity and Inclusion Committee, which was formed in 2020 to advocate for equal housing opportunities.
He said his interest in preventing housing discrimination came after the Durham association called the murder of George Floyd an “untimely death.”
“I absolutely blistered them with an email, I told them they were self-righteous racist bigots and I was embarrassed to be part of this profession,” Eisnemann said.
He challenged them to create a committee that would retrain their realtors, he said.
“I’m a 60 year old white man. I’m the hand grenade that goes in the room, because I can go anywhere in the white boy’s club. I’m welcome. Look at me,” Eisenmann continued, spreading his arms. “I sit in the middle of the room, I pull the plug, and they are in trouble.”
Citing data that the vast majority of appraisers are white men—and that Black households are undervalued by $48,000, on average—Commissioner Nimasheena Burns asked Eisenmann if the committee has plans to increase diversity among the association’s appraisers.
“There’s an initiative from the federal level; the new director of HUD is particularly interested in making [appraisals] non-personal,” Eisenmann replied. “We know discrimination takes place with people’s names, with people’s color, with people’s location.”
Eisenmann said he foresees the federal initiative bleeding down to the local level.
Eismann added that the committee recently released a diversity pledge and toolkit, which local brokers are required to sign—or not sign—as a commitment to both promote inclusion and provide clients with a document that outlines steps they can take if they experience harassment or discrimination. The committee has also invited an Elon professor who teaches Critical Race Theory to instruct the association on inclusive practices later this year.
Eisenmann wrapped up his remarks by stating that when he was growing up in Levittown, Pennsylvania in the ‘60s, the government would only guarantee federal loans to homebuilders if the deed stated that the house would not be sold to a Black person.
“It is systematic, it is institutional, and it is—excuse me, it’s just a white boy’s club and it’s been that way for years,” Eisenmann said. “I can’t wait to see it burn to the ground.”
Support independent local journalism. Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.
Follow Staff Lena Geller on Twitter or send an email to lgeller@indyweek.com.
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