Apex Mayor Jaques K. Gilbert’s personal app, launched in 2025, appears to be the only such effort by a North Carolina municipal official. In addition, the mayor runs Facebook and Instagram profiles that reach more followers than those of Raleigh’s, Charlotte’s, and Greensboro’s mayors combined—even though Apex’s population is less than a twentieth of those cities’ total. Over the past month, his posts have ranged from a video of squirrels wrestling to ordering the first milkshake at Apex’s new Cook Out to a sober analysis of the town’s budget.
Gilbert’s knack for charismatic digital communications has helped raise his political profile since his election in 2019. According to a Q&A with The Line, he was recently appointed chair of the N.C. Metro Mayors Coalition. But the mayor’s freewheeling approach to blending official business with personal platforms has created tension with staff and raised questions about his adherence to state public records law.
Read more at the link in our bio.
Written by Daniel Walton
Photo by Matt Ramey
One of the flashiest critiques to emerge from the recent firestorm over Jeff Bezos cosponsoring the Met Gala came from Raleigh resident Mary Hill, a 72-year-old Amazon worker.
On the eve of the gala—an annual display of wealth that critics found particularly grating this year with Bezos and his wife Lauren at the helm—an anti-billionaire activist group projected a video onto the side of the Bezos’ palatial Manhattan penthouse that showed Hill addressing Bezos directly.
Read more at the link in our bio.
Written by Lena Geller
Photos by Wini Lao Photography/SEIU
“We are hereby providing formal notice to all residents of Chatham Estates that their mobile home and all personal property must be removed before June 30th, 2026,” the letter, from the property’s owner, read. “For relocation assistance, please see the attached flyer.”
Dawah knew this had been coming ever since the owner announced he was putting the property—home to some 144 mobile homes—up for sale in 2023. “But after two years, we kind of got used to it, and felt like maybe, just maybe, it’s not gonna sell, or it’s gonna take longer,” she told the INDY.
Once she got the letter, the clock started ticking, counting down to the day she had to be out.
With less than two months to go until the move-out deadline, two-thirds of residents have not yet relocated, and some feel just as lost as ever.
Read more at the link in our bio.
Written by Jasmine Gallup
Photos by @mattrameyphoto
n the fall of 2021, three seasoned musicians gathered for a jam session under a triple-wide carport in Chapel Hill.
Jaime Fennelly, Joe Westerlund, and Nathan Bowles had been orbiting each other for years; Fennelly had previously jammed with Westerlund, and Westerlund had performed with Bowles, but the three had never played together as a group. Detecting a shared sensibility, they decided to meet up and improvise. Beneath the canopy of Westerlund’s carport, open to the autumn air, their trio unwittingly became a quartet. “I have a very specific memory of a leaf blower being the fourth member,” Bowles told me.
Noise pollution notwithstanding, that first session was “spacious” and “free,” Bowles said.
Read more at the link in our bio.
Written by Tasso Hartzog
Photo by Graham Tolbert
One day in 2009, Jane K. Callahan picked up the phone and learned that her mother was dying.
Callahan, then 27, hadn’t spoken to her mother, whom she had a complicated relationship with, in two years. Suddenly, she was thrust into the position of coordinating urgent medical decisions and flipping through her mother’s address book, making goodbye calls on her behalf. She felt wildly unprepared.
“I can tell you the awful writhing of my spirit, the systemic pulling apart of my very core, as I sat alone in my room and watched my mother’s hands and feet turn purple,” Callahan writes in A Death Doula’s Guide to a Meaningful End, her new book out this month from Chicago Review Press.
The experience set Callahan, who now lives in Durham, on the path to becoming a death doula.
Read more at the link in our bio.
Written by Sarah Edwards
Photos courtesy of Jane K. Callahan
Get ready for a celebration of African and African American culture and community at this year’s Bimbe Cultural Arts Festival on Saturday, May 16 at Rock Quarry Park in Durham, presented by Durham Parks and Recreation. Local vendors, Southern and Caribbean Food, arts and crafts, and so much more, there’s something for the whole family to enjoy! The stage will be headline by the winner of the 2014 BET Hip Hop Awards "I Am Hip Hop" Icon Award the 2019 American Beatbox Championships Lifetime Achievement Award, Doug E. Fresh!
For more information, check out dprplaymore.org or follow on social media at @DPRplaymore .
If you Google the jazz pianist and composer Yusuf Salim, one of the first results is a grainy 1979 clip from a program called Arts in Durham. The interviewer begins with a question: “Why Durham, North Carolina?”
“That’s a beautiful question. I didn’t choose Durham. Durham chose me,” says the wiry Salim, known broadly as Brother Yusuf. His answer wasn’t merely a sentimental or rhetorical flourish: Salim’s 1974 move from Baltimore to the Bull City was a dramatic catalyst that ushered in a new chapter of his life, one filled with music, spirituality, and friendship.e
That interview is preserved through DigitalNC’s North Carolina Sites and Sounds Collection and, until now, has been one of the scant few pieces of ephemera you can find online regarding Salim, who died in 2008.
Read more at the link in our bio.
Written by Sarah Edwards
Photos by Alan Dehmer and courtesy of Kenny Dalsheimer
Several years ago, Tressie McMillan Cottom drove her mother, Vivian McMillan, from Charlotte to Winston-Salem for a 50th anniversary party of the local Black Panther Party.
Seeing her mother with fellow former Black Panther Party members—now in their 70s and 80s but lively as “a bunch of teenagers”—McMillan Cottom, a sociologist and writer who teaches at UNC-Chapel Hill, began filming “for posterity.”
That footage evolved into a mandate and later, Power to the People, Y’all, a documentary short that focuses on five founding members of the Winston-Salem chapter—Larry Little, Nelson Malloy, Cynthia Norwood, Brad Lilley, and Hazel Mack—as they look back on a revolutionary chapter of North Carolina history. The 35-minute film premiered at RiverRun International Film Festival.
Written by Sarah Edwards
Photos courtesy of the filmmakers
Read more at the link in our bio.
Local public school students will be out of classes on Friday while thousands of their teachers go to Raleigh to rally for more funding from the state. The vice president of the North Carolina Association of Educators (NCAE), recalled a similar day in 2018 when thousands marched on the state legislature in the state’s first mass teacher walkout
Durham, Chapel Hill-Carrboro, Chatham, and Orange County public schools added teacher workdays on Friday after thousands of employees put in requests for the day of the “Kids Over Corporations” rally (Wake County had already planned a workday before the rally was announced). In Durham, nearly two weeks before the planned rally, school staff had projected about 900 teacher vacancies.
Local public school students will be out of classes on Friday while thousands of their teachers go to Raleigh to rally for more funding from the state.
Read more at the link in our bio.
Written by Chase Pellegrini de Paur
Photo by Caitlin Penna
Reporter Jasmine Gallup published a story this week about Flock cameras, explaining what they do and why Triangle communities are concerned about them.
Here’s what Jasmine had to say in Wednesday’s edition of The Line:
Q: How would you describe what a Flock camera is? What does it look like?
A: The easiest way to understand a Flock camera is to understand what it does, which is to take pictures of your car as you’re driving down the road. It’s kind of like a stoplight camera, except it takes pictures of every car that passes, not just the cars that run a red light.
Flock cameras don’t really look like cameras, at least not the ones we’re used to. They’re not security cameras that look like upside-down fishbowls or the white boxes on the highway that monitor toll roads. The first thing most people will notice is a solar panel on top of a tall pole. That’s the power source for one popular model of the cameras, which are small, relatively hard-to-spot black devices.
Find the whole story at the link in our bio.
A lawsuit filed earlier this month against the Durham Rescue Mission and the nonprofit’s former volunteer coordinator, Lenny Sutherland, alleges Sutherland committed repeated acts of sexual assault between April 2023 and February 2024.
The civil suit, filed by the Lanier Law group on behalf of an anonymous plaintiff, accuses Sutherland of unwanted groping, kissing, and fondling “four to five days a week, sometimes multiple times a day.”
Sutherland also threatened to remove the plaintiff from the Mission if he reported the assault, Lisa Lanier, president of the Lanier Law Group, said: “He felt really incapable of getting away from him, because he was able to hold the housing and the services and the position that he had at the Durham Rescue Mission over our clients’ head.”
Written by Cy Neff
Photo by Kate Medley
Read more at the link in our bio.
Ayear after buying her first car, a Hyundai Elantra, Nikki Puckett Bosov faced a situation many people may be familiar with: A mechanic messing with her car and then trying to upsell her on a repair she didn’t need. In her case, it was new brakes.
“I realized that they just took the brake booster hose off,” Puckett Bosov told INDY. “I was like, ‘Wait, this is a brand new car. I didn’t come in like this.’”
After that experience, she decided “to learn everything about a vehicle, because I don’t want to get taken advantage of again.”
Two decades of experience and certifications later, Puckett Bossov and her business partner, Bear O’Brien, are opening up their own garage that will look unlike any other in Durham.
The pair is calling it a community garage, a place where customers can acquire the skills and knowledge to make empowered decisions. The space will be, as the garage’s GoFundMe says, “Durham’s first women-, queer-, and non-binary-led community auto repair shop.”
Located at 103 E. Rockway Street in Durham, Fluid Community Garage will offer regular mechanic services, as well as classroom lessons and a community space.
Read more at indyweek.com.
Written by Chase Pellegrini du Paur
Photos courtesy of subject
