Cover Story
Holiday Gift Guide
As the holidays approach, there’s always a sense of dread for some folks. Gift-giving means shopping and shopping means getting out in the stores with frantic consumers who would as soon as bite your head off than give up whatever sought out item they’ve come in search of. But shopping doesn’t have to be that…
District attorney lays out case in decision to not charge officer in Scott shooting
Report lays out reasons for Murray’s refusal to pursue charges
Today’s Top 5: Wednesday
Here are the five best events going down in Charlotte and the surrounding area today.
Today’s Top 5: Saturday
Here are the five best events going down in Charlotte and the surrounding area today.
Today’s Top 5: Friday
Here are the five best events going down in Charlotte and the surrounding area today.
Moana: See-worthy
MOANA *** (out of four) DIRECTED BY Ron Clements & John Musker STARS Auli’i Cravalho, Dwayne Johnson Better than Finding Dory but not quite reaching the level of Zootopia, the latest Disney animated effort of 2016 adheres pretty much to the formula we’ve come to expect in recent years from the storied studio. And as…
Allied: Romance and World War, Too
ALLIED *** (out of four) DIRECTED BY Robert Zemeckis STARS Brad Pitt, Marion Cotillard Once the bread and butter of the movie industry, the World War II film has become a rarity in today’s Hollywood, tragically going the way of the dodo and the Western. Allied attempts to bring back some of that old-school glamor…
Rules Don’t Apply: Howard be thy name
RULES DON’T APPLY **1/2 (out of four) DIRECTED BY Warren Beatty b>STARS Warren Beatty, Lily Collins Warren Beatty snagged a richly deserved Academy Award for directing the unsung 1981 masterpiece Reds, but he’s never won an Oscar for his acting. Yet for approximately 50 years, he’s delivered a hefty number of dazzling turns, refusing to…
Bad Santa 2: Ho ho ho and a bottle of rum
BAD SANTA 2 **1/2 (out of four) DIRECTED BY Mark Waters STARS Billy Bob Thornton, Kathy Bates The 2003 Yuletide hit Bad Santa remains one of those holiday movies, like It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Story, that’s impossible not to watch over and over (and over) again. Bad Santa 2 is basically like…
Weekly horoscope (Nov. 24-30)
For All Signs: The Sun is now in the crosshairs between Saturn and Pluto. This means that there may be cause for grief at the global level soon. Someone or something that we hold in high regard may be crushed by powers of ill intent. Certainly after this country’s Presidential Election there will be winners,…
With wildfires burning nearby, local scientists continue groundbreaking air quality research
Most Charlotteans would have been content to go through November with just scant knowledge, if any, of the multiple wildfires burning in the western part of our state. Around the second week of the month, however, it became impossible to ignore. Shifting winds brought a wall of low-lying smoke from the wildfires into Charlotte, creating…
Resolved but not resigned to a Trump presidency
“Hush. Be quiet. Get off social media. Process.” This is what I told myself after sitting through the most unprofessional, nasty and incendiary presidential campaign I have witnessed. It was time to face the ugly truth of who would be our next president, a task all too surreal and all too daunting. I had a…
Bizarre crime from Charlotte police files (Nov. 24)
My Two Nuts A thief in north Charlotte last week put in more effort than was necessary for such a small amount of loot. Employees at a food catering company said that an unknown suspect cut through a fence on the business’s property only to steal two lug nuts from two of the company’s trucks;…
Hollywood’s Winter Wonderland
The summer movie season underwhelmed and the fall movie season underperformed, so fingers crossed that the year-end holiday movie season will save the day. Certainly, it’s off to a good start both commercially (the blockbuster Doctor Strange) and critically (the award-worthy Arrival). Here, then, is a checklist of the remaining films coming down the pike…
Winner Winner Turkey Dinner
Two hundred years ago this fall, on Cape Cod, the revolutionary war veteran Henry Hall harvested the world’s first cultivated crop of cranberries. In the preceding years Hall had noticed that the wild cranberries in his Dennis, Massachusetts bog grew larger where sand had blown on them. He began transplanting cranberry seedlings into prepped beds…
Tis’ The Season for Cal Maro
“And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.” – John Steinbeck, East of Eden. Former Charlottean Tyler Brown is using Cal Maro as the moniker for his latest music project. The “Maro” references a derivative of his last name and the “Cal” part was inspired by a character in Steinbeck’s…
Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Nagasaki: Memories of My Son
A good film score can help visualize scenes from a film even though you haven’t seen it. Composer Ryuichi Sakamoto’s score to the film Nagasaki: Memories of My Son, directed by legendary Japanese director Yoji Yamada, is such a piece of work. It is sparse in orchestration yet expansive in creating a visual backdrop to…
Three Questions for Asha Gomez, cook/author of My Two Souths: Blending the Flavors of India Into A Southern Kitchen
In 2008, when the economy crashed, so did Asha Gomez’s luxury spa business. Gomez, an Indian-American mother, wasn’t sure what to do next. But when former clients began calling her in the hopes of attaining a hot meal, she started considering the food industry. “I used to cook a meal at the end of every…
