Downtown Dallas’ Tunnels: Are They Really All That Terrible?

Nowadays, Dallas’ network of tunnels are pretty widely reviled as an urban planning nightmare that have sucked the life off downtown’s streets. They are a “sordid story,” Downtown Dallas Inc. CEO John Crawford told the City Council this morning. “Frankly, we’re trying to do away with them as quickly as…

Texas Might Finally Approve a Mexican-American Studies Course Today

High school students in Texas can take, and get credit toward, electives like floral arrangement, team sport officiating, and turf-grass management. But not for Mexican-American studies, something activists, education groups, and several dozen state lawmakers are pushing to change. They came out in force for Tuesday’s State Board of Education…

Dallas Is Making It Harder to Dodge Traffic Tickets

Remember that story a couple of weeks back about how Dallas was sitting on 25,000 municipal court warrants? And how you were probably safe ignoring your traffic citation with impunity? That was caused by a technical glitch, and technical glitches get fixed. The reprieve was temporary. The broader trend is…

The Dallas Library Is Now Producing a Homeless-Person Podcast

The Dallas Public Library has a fraught relationship with downtown’s homeless population, on the one hand reluctantly accepting that they are members of the “public” the institution was built to serve, while simultaneously wishing they weren’t. So feel free to be deeply cynical about the library’s new “Homeless Engagement Initiative,”…

At Dallas’ Horse Park, Beware of Goat Carcasses

You needn’t stray far from where where the Texas Horse Park’s barn and activity building are going up off Pemberton Hill Road to start finding goat skulls. A couple of feet into the mesquite trees should do; the bleached white bone is impossible to miss against the underbrush…

SMU Students Aren’t Quite Ready For Increased LGBT Representation

Two years ago, SMU finally climbed off the Princeton Review’s list of the country’s most “LGBT-unfriendly” schools. The news was welcomed by administrators, who have worked hard to shed the university’s homophobic image, but it hardly meant that The Hilltop had suddenly become a bastion of progressive inclusiveness. Case in…

In Left Field For the Frisco Roughriders, A Tornado

Among the things you’d probably rather not see at a baseball game, coming in somewhere below a barrage of apocalyptic hell fire but slightly above an opposing team’s walk-off home run, is a tornado looming over the left-field fence. It’s a vision concern that might inspire panic in some. Ah,…