When Bill Masen wakes up in the hospital one morning, he finds the hospital staff peculiarly unresponsive. In fact, all he can hear from the hospital corridors is moaning and sobbing. With bandages on his eyes, he can’t see what’s gone wrong, and he agonizes over whether or not to take his treatment into his own hands and remove his bandages. Haunted by the terrifying sounds he hears, he finally peels off his bandages and finds a world in collapse. Sound familiar? You bet it does, since that’s essentially the opening scene from Danny Boyle’s film “28 Days Later,” and, for that matter, the comic book (and later AMC series) “The Walking Dead.”

Starting in October 2013, residents and businesses in New Hampshire will be shopping for health insurance through a partnership with the federal Health Insurance Marketplace.

Adjunct teachers at the Community College System of New Hampshire, which voted two years ago to form their first union, protested on March 11 their lack of a contract with the state’s Community College System. They also delivered 500 petitions to the administration that have been signed in support of the adjunct’s cause.

The Great Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, the New Hampshire Coastal Adaptation Workgroup and the NERRS Science Collaborative have announced the spring date for their annual discussion and collaborative forum among scientists, agencies, municipal leaders, watershed organizations and citizens concerned about the impacts of climate change in coastal New Hampshire.

Hillary Clinton is the heavy favorite among New Hampshire Democrats for the 2016 New Hampshire primary., and there is no clear frontrunner among Republicans, according to a WMUR Granite State Poll conducted in February.

The producers of Troma-Fest celebrate a legendary B-movie studio and vow to keep Portsmouth weird.

There are good movies, there are bad movies, and then there are Troma movies. For nearly 30 years, Troma Entertainment and its founder, Lloyd Kaufmann, have been making flicks so bad, so gross, and so weird, that they blur all the usual judgments we make about movies.

It’s not always easy to know who's teaching, as local colleges and universities follow the trend toward more freelance faculty

In a recent piece that picked up attention in the mainstream media, the Chronicle of Higher Education noted that for this new teaching population, there is “little concrete information about key factors such as pay, benefits, and what the climate on the job is like." The Adjunct Project is one of a few places that’s trying to measure this growing labor force. It functions as a crowd-sourced job survey that gathers information about pay and working conditions across the country.

former Push Stars frontman and songwriter Chris Trapper brings his personal approach to Portsmouth

“For me, songwriting is as pure, honest and open as a diary entry,” Trapper says in an e-mail between studio sessions. “It has been a lovely form of therapy for me since I was 13 years old. I felt blessed just to be able to do it as a teenager in my bedroom.”

Rated PG-13: Unfortunately, these magic beans were obviously a Monsanto strain, a hybrid carefully bred to thrive in a modern environment of clichés without offending anyone, but not meant to actually be nutritious for our imaginations, or even be able to take root beyond the immediate viewing. Leaving us hungry, we just have to keep consuming movies in hopes of finding one that actually sustains us.

Joe Hill's comic book series “Locke & Key” enters the homestretch

I didn’t read “Locke & Key” for a long time. The comic series, written by Exeter’s Joe Hill (“Heart Shaped Box,” “Horns”) and illustrated by Gabriel Rodriguez, premiered in February of 2008 and sold out its first issue in one day. People like this book. People love this book. People acted incredulous for years as I kept making weaker and weaker excuses as to why I wasn’t reading this book.

New World Pictures, 1988: At the outset, “Heathers” seems like just another 1980s teen comedy with the familiar theme of social outsiders taking on stereotypical mean girls. But this movie is much darker than it at first appears, as evidenced when the lead Heather chugs down a Drano cocktail and promptly croaks, crashing through a glass coffee table on her way to eternal quietude.

The Senate Ways and Means committee voted 4-1 to approve a bill that would allow one casino gambling facility in New Hampshire with up to 5,000 video slot machines and table games.

Nationwide, evangelical Christians lead in church membership. Locally, they’ve found a home in Dover. The city of just over 30,000 people is home to at least five evangelical churches: Restoration, the Awakening, Zone Church, New Frontiers, and Dover BeFree Community Church. Pastor Chris Dubois, age 32, of Awakening Church, was drawn to Dover because it is a growing city, the fourth largest in New Hampshire. Dubois sees hundreds of people waiting to be reached, and imagines one day folk will come down from Portland and up from Boston to visit Awakening.

The power of Hyatt’s black and white photography is that it distills images, focusing the viewer on primal elements. At the center of this epic are the famed ruins of Machu Picchu aloft vertiginous mountain peaks. Hyatt conveys the power and beauty of the highland’s natural world and the deferential relationship of an indigenous population to its rugged and mystical landscape. He seems particularly interested in the duality of humanity versus nature, heightened by the monochromatic medium of black and white film. In many of photos the population is portrayed as weary, even skeptical, except when they are looking to the sky.

One of the first Christmas presents I received in my new home was an old fashioned bean pot and a recipe for “Nin’s Beans.” My dad had purchased the brown ceramic pot at the local hardware store and had transcribed my great-aunt’s inexact measures (a pinch, a palmful) into their teaspoonish equivalents. The thing about Nin’s was you never had to ask what time dinner would be (just after 5 p.m.), and yu never had to ask what was for dinner.