In case you haven’t noticed, the map that the Redistricting Commission voted to forward to the city council on Tuesday night has one major change: It would place both Vonciel Jones Hill and Dwaine Caraway in District 4, meaning that the two council members would have to run against each…
Things all went wrong for Renee so recently she can still count the days: 32. That’s how long it’s been since she lost her job, her car was repossessed and her house was foreclosed on. “Everything just fell apart so quickly,” she says.She’s in her mid-40s with bright green eyes…
Hardy Haberman was in his local dungeon a couple years ago, beating a friend at a “play party,” when things suddenly got weird. Wielding a soft leather flogger — a thick-handled instrument that resembles a whip, but with a dozen slender tails — he was lashing the slightly younger man’s…
Behold, Dallas, the shiny new city council districts the Redistricting Commission has drawn for you! Don’t uncork the champagne just yet, though. The commissioners themselves certainly didn’t seem to be in the mood for it.Near the end of last night’s six-hour meeting (yes, yes it was), the commission voted 11-4…
Saturday was the last full day of the Martin Creed exhibition, Work No. 1190: Half the air in a given space, at the Nasher that consisted of 9,000 giant gold balloons filling an eight-foot high gallery almost to the ceiling. I headed down with a friend Sunday for the de-installation event…
The end is near! The city’s Redistricting Commission has just one more meeting left before its forwards its final recommended map to the city council. And after Saturday’s public forum in a jam-packed council chambers, and the commission vote that followed, it looks pretty clear that map will be cPlan16b,…
The Annie E. Casey Foundation just released KIDS COUNT, its annual report on child well-being in every state across the U.S. One of their grantees, the Austin-based Center for Public Policy Priorities, put the report for Texas on its website on Wednesday: The State of Texas Children. So how are…
Yesterday, we told you about the Feed Store of God Cowboy Church, where police are investigating possible animal cruelty charges relating to dead livestock, and introduced you to its pastor, James Hatley Jr. We’re still awaiting more information about the investigation, but the name Hatley rang a bell for Wilonsky,…
“I don’t want to talk about all that.” The pastor took some letters from the mailbox without glancing over. “What I really want to talk about is getting more people to come to church on Sundays. You want to talk about religion, you can come by anytime.”Yesterday, we got an…
While Dallas ISD is debating a change to their rules in order to make their campuses more gay-friendly, two local universities have landed, once again, on the Princeton Review’s list of “LGBT Unfriendly” schools. Released last week as part of Princeton Review’s mammoth collection of college rankings, the list ranks…
We know you’re sick of hearing about this, but bear with us: Dallas is, like, thisclose to getting some shiny, newly redrawn, possibly less-gerrymandered city council districts. The Redistricting Commission sat through another marathon meeting Tuesday night and voted to move forward with just three out of the 15 plans…
“You’re going to eat that now?” the guy at the head shop asked. He looked worried. “That’s not a good idea. I don’t take ’em in the daytime. It renders me non-functional.”Well, shit. It was Friday afternoon, and I was about to drug my co-workers.A little background, though, before we…
The end is near … sort of. The city’s Redistricting Commission is inching towards putting together a city map it can forward on to the city council, and everyone — the public and commissioners alike — is trying to get in a parting shot before then. Last night’s meeting was…
A blow has been struck in the name of fun: Owners of the ultra-lounge Plush fought for their right to party and won today at the City Plan Commission, when the panel voted to extend the club’s specific use permit (SUP) for one year. As we mentioned yesterday, the club…
Last week, our friends across the office at DC9 introduced us to a new way to creep on people in the Twitterverse: Undetweetable, an invention by professor Dr. Dean Terry and grad student Bradley Griffith, both of the Emerging Media + Communication program at the University of Texas at Dallas. Undetweetable…
By the end of the day, the sanitation workers who pick up after downtown and South Dallas will have started and stopped their truck around 500 times, pausing each time to heave gray plastic bins of stinking, dripping trash in the compactor. It’s 109 degrees outside, but to the “throwers,”…
The images in Leigh Merrill’s “North Texas Strip” look at once blighted and serene, like photos taken ten minutes after the Apocalypse. Merrill took thousands of photographs featuring buildings and streetscapes in the metroplex, then digitally assembled and reassembled them to make new images of unreal places. Some of the…
We told you it was getting weird in there: At last night’s meeting of the city’s Redistricting Commission, the most important person in the room wasn’t even in the room. That would be Sandra Crenshaw, cactus juice addict, Schutze co-star and, increasingly, the commission’s biggest headache.Crenshaw was scheduled to appear…
It must be Christmas in July or Unfair Park’s birthday or something, because there are two Redistricting Commission meetings this week. The second one is tonight, and the main event will probably be Sandra Crenshaw’s presentation of her two proposed maps. We suspect she may follow that up by expanding…
They waited as long as they could before they left without him. “Don’t bother going out tonight,” Kathy O’Keefe had told Brett, her 18-year-old son, the night before their family vacation. It was March of last year. Brett’s older brother, Kyle, was home from college for spring break and his…
OK, no one has actually studied the effects of redistricting on the human body, but after last night it seems safe to say that the longer a redistricting process goes on, the grouchier everybody gets. At the county level, we have Maurine Dickey’s temper tantrum as evidence. And last night’s meeting…
The sprawling Casa Verde apartment complex doesn’t look like anything much. It’s a weathered collection of green buildings behind a long black fence that runs along a cracked street. Located on Fair Oaks, not far from Greenville and Park, it’s tucked behind Today’s Discount Food Mart, a taqueria and a…
