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Publisher's Pen: The Best of Fayetteville starts now!

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Tuesday, 22 September 2026

Written by Bill Bowman

January 2027 marks the 31st anniversary of Up & Coming Weekly—and what an extraordinary journey it has been. Time truly does fly when you’re having fun. For more than three decades, we have been blessed with the opportunity to create and publish Fayetteville and Cumberland County’s hyper local community newspaper.
It has been our privilege to serve the residents, businesses, organizations, visitors, and guests of this warm and welcoming Southern community by providing timely, honest, accurate, and trustworthy news, insights, opinions, arts, culture, entertainment, and relevant information that enriches the quality of life in our region.
Equally meaningful is the enduring legacy of our Best of Fayetteville readers survey. For 29 years, this beloved tradition has recognized the people, businesses, and organizations whose dedication, talent, passion, and investment have shaped the values and standards of excellence in our community. Year after year, these winners prove a simple truth: Good things last.
Best of Fayetteville: A Survey Built on Community Voice
Our Best of Fayetteville reader survey is unlike any other. Each year, we receive thousands of ballots and carefully record the comments and sentiments of our readers—citizens who take pride in determining who truly deserves to be honored as Fayetteville’s Best of the Best.
We have always been transparent: this survey is not scientific. It is an informal, well executed, and thoroughly documented community survey that has proven highly accurate and incredibly reliable for nearly three decades. Its longevity, popularity, and success speak for themselves.
The Best of Fayetteville designation must never be confused with other media advertising, marketing, or promotional programs. Our readers alone decide the winners. We do not accept nominations, and no person, business, or organization is required to purchase advertising, sponsorships, or event tickets to learn the results of the survey.
Most importantly, there can only be one Best of Fayetteville winner per category.
There are no second place or third place awards, and no honorable mentions. Strict, well defined, and closely monitored voting guidelines ensure the integrity, prestige, and honor of each designation.
Celebrating the 2026 Winners
Each year, we celebrate our Best of Fayetteville winners with an exclusive Awards Party at the Crown Coliseum Complex. This event is free to our winners and hosted by Up & Coming Weekly, the Greater Fayetteville Chamber of Commerce, Speediprint of Westwood Shopping Center, the Crown Coliseum Complex, Beasley Media Group, and Fayetteville’s Hometown Utility, PWC.
It is at this celebration that we proudly recognize and honor the outstanding people, businesses, and institutions whose achievements have elevated our community over the past year.
Fayetteville has changed over the past 30 years—and so has our newspaper. But our commitment to our readers and to the Best of Fayetteville tradition has not. We continue to highlight the very best aspects of our community, and you, the reader, remain an essential part of the process. For this, we are deeply grateful.
We extend our sincere appreciation to all our sponsors for their support in making this year’s Awards Party a success—especially Nat Robertson, President of the Greater Fayetteville Chamber of Commerce, and Don Garner, whose laser focused oversight provides the most critical component of any legitimate survey: accountability.
We also thank General Manager Seth Benalt and Assistant Manager Dorothy Strahley of the Crown Coliseum Complex for their outstanding work in coordinating and preparing the venue.
And finally, a very special thank you to the entire Up & Coming Weekly staff, who have spent months working tirelessly on this major undertaking.
Best of Fayetteville is our most significant and challenging event—and our most popular and most read edition of the year. With pride and professionalism, our staff has gone above and beyond to produce this award winning publication. Keep it handy and refer to it often.
Thank you for reading Up & Coming Weekly and for supporting Fayetteville’s only hyper local community newspaper.

(Photo: Bill Bowman, publisher of Up & Coming Weekly, presents the Best Seafood Restaurant award to 316 Oyster Bar at the 2025 Best of Fayetteville Awards at the Crown.)

The Art of Formation

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Tuesday, 08 September 2026

Written by Dan DeBruler

From the advent of personal computing to the AI-infused versions of just about everything, I’ve long been fascinated with the technology that props up our world. In communications, knowing what’s new—or what’s coming next—is especially helpful.
As a career “early adopter,” though, I’ve learned something: it’s often more economical to buy the older model. There’s always plenty of buzz surrounding whatever is new. A year later, much of the excitement about that same product can be found on the clearance shelf when retailers need room for the next version. Sometimes it pays to wait.
By version two or three, somebody has discovered the bugs, identified the shortcomings, and figured out what sounded better in the sales pitch than it worked in real life.
That principle extends far beyond technology. I was reminded of it by two recent education stories. New York City Public Schools announced restrictions on generative AI use for younger students, while the American Psychological Association has raised concerns that educational technology can increase engagement and immediate performance without necessarily producing deeper learning.
Put those thoughts together and an important distinction emerges:
Getting something done and developing the human capacity to do it are not the same thing.
AI can write a polished paragraph, summarize a difficult chapter, solve a problem, or organize an argument in seconds. That’s impressive. But if a young person routinely bypasses the struggle required to develop those abilities, we may improve the product while weakening the process that produces a capable person.
And that becomes about much more than school. There’s no fast track to wisdom. There isn’t one for physical fitness either. Both require repetition, resistance, and time.
The same is true spiritually. We can listen to a sermon without wrestling with Scripture. We can read somebody else’s devotional without spending time in prayer. We can even ask technology to explain a Bible passage and give us three practical applications.
None of those things is necessarily wrong. But there’s a difference between receiving an answer and being formed through the process of seeking one.
Hebrews 5:14 speaks of people who “by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.” James tells us not merely to hear the Word, but to do what it says.
Those phrases—constant use, trained themselves, do what it says—aren’t descriptions of shortcuts. They’re descriptions of formation.
Technology can be enormously useful. I certainly don’t plan to stop using it. But maybe the question we should ask about every new convenience isn’t simply, “What can this do for me?” We should also ask, “What might I stop learning to do for myself?”
Some struggles shouldn’t be eliminated too quickly. Wrestling with a problem is sometimes how we learn to think. Working through disagreement can teach patience. Sitting quietly with Scripture teaches us to listen. Doing the hard thing repeatedly can develop something in us that no shortcut can provide.
There’s no fast track to wisdom. Information can produce an answer. Formation produces a person.

When Licensing Isn’t Worth the Cost

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Tuesday, 15 September 2026

Written by John Hood

When economist and Hoover Institution scholar Thomas Sowell famously observed that “there are no solutions, only tradeoffs,” the North Carolina native wasn’t suggesting that public-policy analysis was useless. Sowell has spent much of his lengthy career engaged in it.
To say that doing X to achieve Y will inevitably cost Z is not to throw up one’s hands. It is merely to frame a series of questions for which there are at least partial answers. For example, what are the projected values of Y and Z? And can it be reasonably projected that doing X will actually accomplish Y?
Every dollar a government spends on, say, education or public safety is a dollar that cannot be simultaneously spent by government on, say, health care or transportation — or spent by the taxpayer who originally earned the dollar on something of his own choosing.
Unless you are an anarchist, you must grant that there are, indeed, circumstances in which it passes the cost-benefit test to collect those dollars as taxes and expend them on public services. And unless you are a socialist or deeply confused (I’ll distinguish the two as a gesture of good cheer), you must grant that there are circumstances in which it’s better to leave the dollar in private hands, either because the proposed program won’t work at all or because its benefits are too small to outweigh its costs.
The same principle applies to government regulation. While it compels private households or businesses to spend money rather than confiscating the money for government expenditure, tradeoffs are still inescapable. Every dollar spent installing scrubbers on smokestacks or taking classes to obtain a credential is a dollar that can’t be spent on something else with its own potential benefits. Similarly, every hour of time spent complying with regulation represents something not done during that hour.
Assessing the relevant tradeoffs can be very difficult. Agencies, regulated parties, and interest groups spend gobs of time and money attempting to quantify costs and benefits. So do think tanks and academic scholars. They could all be doing something else, so that’s another tradeoff! I happen to think sound policymaking is worth the expense.
For example, my John Locke Foundation colleagues and I have spent many years urging North Carolina lawmakers to scale back state-mandated licensure of occupations. Limiting the number of people allowed to deliver a particular good or service, or requiring the expenditure of much time and money to acquire such a permit, will necessarily impose significant costs on both consumers and prospective workers.
Those with licenses face fewer competitors and can charge more. Consumers shoulder the cost either by paying more or choosing less-desirable alternatives. Those excluded from licenses are forced into other occupations that pay less or that they value less.
Are these costs worth paying? Perhaps. If licensing physicians ensures safer, better-quality medical care, it might be worth it. If licensing barbers ensures fewer nicks or chemical burns, ditto. I suspect you probably agree with me that the former is a far likelier scenario than the latter.
Skeptics of North Carolina’s extensive occupational-licensing regime see more barbers in the story than we do physicians. We spotlight studies showing not just that licensing raises costs but that it often fails to deliver measurably better quality, safety, or protections against fraud.
The most recent example is a paper just released by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Taking advantage of a “natural experiment” — Uber drivers must be licensed as cabbies in New York City but not in neighboring New Jersey — the researchers found “no consistent evidence that occupational licensing improves consumer outcomes.”
Licensed drivers didn’t have lower accident rates or earn higher ratings from consumers. The authors also examined the case of Houston, where Uber drivers had to be licensed until a state law ended the requirement in 2017. “Deregulation changed the composition of the driver pool,” they concluded, “without changing measured performance.”
Tradeoffs are inevitable. Bad policy choices are not.

Editor’s note: John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His books Mountain Folk, Forest Folk, and Water Folk combine epic fantasy with American history (FolkloreCycle.com).

Troy's Perspective: In defense of mayor

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Tuesday, 08 September 2026

Written by Troy Williams

On Tuesday, Aug. 18, Fayetteville Mayor Mitch Colvin appeared on the WIDU Morning Show, a program I regularly host. I was in the studio that morning, sitting approximately 15 feet from the Mayor and listening to the conversation firsthand.
The previous day, Councilmember Lynn Greene and former Councilmember Tisha Waddell had appeared in that same studio and were sharply critical of Mayor Colvin. When the Mayor joined us the following morning, it was clear that he was frustrated by some of what had been said. At the beginning of our conversation, I expressed my own disagreement with the tone and nature of the previous day’s discussion.
Mayor Colvin continued by saying he believed the personal attacks were unfair and, in describing what he witnessed, used the term “cooning.” That word quickly became the centerpiece of a much larger controversy. Some of the Mayor’s critics subsequently characterized his remarks as an insult directed at Black people generally, with some going so far as to suggest that he had called all Black people “coons.”
I was there. I heard the conversation firsthand. That is not what I heard him say, nor is that how I understood his remarks.
For the record, I am a Black person. I have been one for 71 years, and I certainly did not interpret the Mayor’s remarks as an attack on Black people. Had he been “throwing shade” at Black people generally, I would have been standing squarely within the group being insulted.
That does not mean people cannot object to the word he chose. They certainly can. Some may consider the term offensive, inappropriate, or unacceptable for an elected official to use. That is a legitimate debate. But there is an important difference between criticizing someone’s choice of words and changing the meaning of what that person said.
Within a day or so, a portion of Mayor Colvin’s remarks was isolated from the longer video and circulated on social media. Predictably, the edited clip took on a life of its own. Anyone who watched the full exchange would have had the benefit of hearing the remarks in full context and could have reached their own conclusion about what was said and intended.
But that is increasingly the nature of modern political discourse: isolate a few words, cut and paste them into a more damaging narrative, circulate the clip widely, and allow the controversy to outrun the context.
Anyone interested in determining what happened should watch the entire exchange—not simply a selected excerpt. Context does not require anyone to agree with the Mayor, excuse his language, or defend his choice of words. It simply allows people to hear the complete conversation and reach their own conclusions.
People are certainly entitled to criticize the Mayor’s choice of words. They are entitled to find the terminology offensive, inappropriate, or beneath the dignity of his office. But criticism should begin with an accurate representation of what was said and the context in which it was said. There is a meaningful difference between criticizing conduct and directing a racial insult toward an entire group of people. Based on what I personally witnessed, those two things should not be confused.