Now that the Christmas shopping season has begun in earnest, we are about to witness the ritualistic burning of a straw man. Call it one of many pagan-inspired traditions of the season. Just watch: some sly journalist or humorless scold will assert that the exchange of Christmas gifts is a lose-lose for our economy. The...
As the year draws to a close and the holiday season envelops us in its festive glow, I’m reminded of Charles Dickens’s timeless sentiment from A Christmas Carol: “I have always thought of Christmas time as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; when men and women seem by one consent to open their...
This week most of the staff and audience of Carolina Journal will sit down with friends and family for a Thanksgiving feast — an enduring American tradition that celebrates all we have to be grateful for in this country and in this state. But the truth is, contemporary American culture is not about feasting at...
Temper the alarmism. Free speech on college campuses is not “dead” — though the culture of free speech certainly needs a makeover. Unless you have lived under a leaden rock for the past five years, you have undoubtedly heard stories about the decline of open dialogue on college campuses. One only has to look at...
As usual, Phil Meyer got there first. In 2005, the veteran journalist and professor spoke at an academic conference in San Antonio. “The demassification of the media did not start with the Internet,” he told a room full of people who’d long assumed otherwise. As early as the 1970s, a proliferation of broadcast outlets and...
Credit where credit is due: Gov. Roy Cooper scored a major win in his recent travels to Japan, securing a deal with Toyota to build one of the largest electric-vehicle battery plants in the world. The Japanese auto giant had already planned on investing $6 billion to build EV batteries in the Triad area, creating...
Public discourse suffers when one side in a debate refuses to listen to the other side's arguments.
