Another year, another round of winners in the INDY’s much-imitated, never-replicated Best of the Triangle contest, where you tell us who’s the best of the best in our beloved region. While Best of the Triangle has been running for two decades now, astute readers and INDY fans will notice that we’re doing things a little differently. Instead of presenting all winners in all categories, ranging from restaurants, bars, and yoga studios to hair salons, museums, and preschools, all at once, we’re running individual contests and presenting winners in different categories...

On a busy summer afternoon at 205 West Main Street in Carrboro, Crystal Silva, a photo technician, is helping usher magic into existence. She’s processing color film, and slowly pictures begin to emerge—maybe a graduation or road trip, a visit to the zoo or a quiet moment at home. It’s 2024, so Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter are playing inside the photo lab. Thirty years ago Salt-N-Pepa or Mariah Carey might have been playing during this timeless process, but otherwise, this scene would’ve looked much the same. The store, owned...

It’s an 86-degree summer day in late June. Open the painted door of the refrigerator—this one set next to the garden bed at Lakewood bulk store Part & Parcel—and you’ll find stacks of rainbow chard, a few cantaloupes, two pints of blueberries, and a drawer full of beets. Fresh produce is abundant this season, but on another given day you might find the refrigerator stocked with premade sandwiches, containers of soup, loaves of bread, and much more. In October 2022, new local organization Durham Community Fridges (DCF) launched with its...

It happened almost a decade ago, but Mariela Hernandez still remembers the scene when a woman from her free Zumba class invited her and her four children out to Buns, a burger restaurant. “Oh, no thank you. We have food at the house,” said Hernandez. “Anthony, let it go. We have to go home.” “You never let us do this!” “Anthony, shut up. We ain’t getting it. Get in the freaking car.” She pushed the kids inside her 2003 red Nissan Altima, which had a history of breaking down, and...

Duke graduate students are demanding that the university increase wages for graduate workers from $38,600 to $50,000 a year, decrying the disparity between Duke’s stipends and stipends of other universities in its cohort. The Duke Graduate Students Union (DGSU) spelled out the demand in a February petition that has garnered more than 1,000 signatures from graduate students, faculty and staff, and community supporters as of July 9. The petition cites the current living wage in Durham County—$49,531 a year for a single adult with no dependents; $85,292 for an adult...

Thanks to this week’s sponsor: Pollination is vital to life on Earth, but it isn’t easy! Slip into the wings of pollinators like bats, bees, beetles, and butterflies and embark on an unforgettable survival quest in “Amazing Pollinators.” Hi! Happy weekend. Growing up, the local library’s summer reading challenge worked me up into something of a spiritual…

Chapel Hill’s police headquarters at 828 Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard is built on top of a pit of toxic coal ash, the waste product of decades of energy production at the University of North Carolina’s still-active coal power plant. This month, Chapel Hill and the NC Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) released a draft agreement to officially designate the area as a brownfields site, taking a step towards possible future redevelopment of the abandoned property. The draft agreement is new, but the issue is not. The roughly 46,000 tons...

On Thursday, U.S. transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, Durham mayor Leonardo Williams, Gov. Roy Cooper, and several other local leaders walked the half-mile stretch along Holloway Street from Antioch Baptist Church to The Village Shopping Center. Nearly the entire path was a treacherous hike over gaping holes, giant tree roots, and makeshift gravel walkways with almost no sidewalks—a vivid illustration of much-needed investment in local infrastructure.

Over the past few years, Gino Nuzzolillo has been packing up his car and hitting the road to help put on town halls across the state. Nuzzolillo, 26, works with the nonprofit Common Cause North Carolina; the town halls—which touched down in 25 different counties—first began their push when Moore v. Harper, a case about redistricting in the state, reached the U.S. Supreme Court. In town halls sprawling from Greenville to Sylva, Nuzzolillo and his Common Cause colleagues regularly laid out the stakes of the gerrymandered congressional maps that the...

Over the past few years, Gino Nuzzolillo has been packing up his car and hitting the road to help put on town halls across the state. Nuzzolillo, 26, works with the nonprofit Common Cause North Carolina; the town halls—which touched down in 25 different counties—first began their push when Moore v. Harper, a case about redistricting in the state, reached the U.S. Supreme Court. In town halls sprawling from Greenville to Sylva, Nuzzolillo and his Common Cause colleagues regularly laid out the stakes of the gerrymandered congressional maps that the...