Its skywalk might be one reason Charlotte's downtown retail plummeted. What can it do to bring shopping back to earth?

It seems like a cool gadget, this newest version of Amazon’s Kindle, and my wife, for whose birthday I bought it, seems to like it a lot.

There. He points to a spot in the empty, green bottom along the Tuckasegee River. “It’s not much bigger than an exaggerated baseball mound anymore.”

In the business world, “socially responsible” is fast becoming what “low fat” is to potato chip makers: a suggestion of goodness, a whiff of virtue and a declaration of commitment to the values of its customers (who may not exactly go around preaching, or even living, those values but surely appreciate goodness by association).

In the television series Father Knows Best, patriarch Jim Anderson often served up the wisdom of his experience to solve some problem caused by the inexperienced youth of his three children.

It started out as the New York Racket, a bargain store at the corner of Main and Morgan in Monroe, about 20 miles southeast of Charlotte. The year was 1888, and though the name likely would be laughed out of focus groups today, it worked well enough then.

It has been a pet project of Georgia congressmen for years, but the idea of an interstate highway linking Knoxville, Tenn., and Savannah, Ga., rubs many in North Carolina the wrong way.

Research Triangle Park marked its 50th anniversary in 2009, and the foundation that supervises and manages the 7,000-acre development announced recently that it is working on a new master plan — the first since 1959.

Their first meeting came in 2007 as part of what would turn out to be one of the Triad’s darker moments.

The economy looks a little better than it did a year ago, and most metro areas in North Carolina are on the road to recovery.

It takes time to change a name that’s had 131 years to make its marque, especially one so venerated in Tar Heel business.

Participation in the annual ranking of private companies is voluntary and has been since the list started in 1984.

Perhaps Hollywood could turn it into a movie: A Cinderella-like character, a small-town girl with big dreams, is swept up in the glitz and glam of big city life.