What would it take to make Greensboro a more prosperous, vibrant and just city? Ive been asking myself that a lot lately. Its a sobering thought: Ive lived in Greensboro for more than four years, and for better or worse, the city has claimed me as one of its own.

My girlfriend, who lives in New York City, didnt understand why I spent so much time at a coffee bar downtown. A hip coffee bar in North Carolina, she insisted, could not exist and anyway, the hipsters would be very B-side.

In state government alone, weve got a budget that is catastrophically short of needed revenues, a mental health system that is criminally unequipped to serve our states most vulnerable citizens, and major corporate interests slathering elections...

Desperate times call for desperate measures. Thats the justification behind Gov. Beverly Perdues recent reappropriation of $87.6 million from lottery funds that were allegedly reserved for educational funding. Allegedly, as in the website, nc-educationlottery.

One week before President Obama delivered his first address to both houses of Congress, General Motors and Chrysler announced they were planning to ask the US government for an additional $22 billion in loans to stay afloat for the next three months. The two automakers have already received more than $17 billion in taxpayer dollars.

Welcome home is a phrase usually directed towards war veterans, hospital patients, Extreme Home Makeover families and Roxy Carmichael, but it appears that its been co-opted by the shepherds of the technorati as they beckon the flock to their own digital Mecca.

Why do you want to be a journalist? The question came from a 21-year-old bow-tie-wearing student, with a sneer on his lips and his feet crossed on the wooden desk. I was an 18year-old student, underdressed in a T-shirt. My answer, as I said it, seemed a thousand times too honest and stupid.

About a dozen of us sit in plastic chairs in a circle inside one of the trailers behind Immaculate Conception Catholic Church in Durham, as a handful of parishioners from the Mexican state of Oaxaca earnestly relate their individual accounts of...

It's hard to believe that the month of January has come and gone already, but this is a sublime realization for lovers of the outdoors. As we start the slow crawl out of our dull, wintry dormancy, there are obviously a few things on the horizon to be excited about.

As we mark both the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. and the inauguration of the first black president, Barack Obama, it's impossible to not appreciate the through-line of history between the two men.