With all the sassy little girl characters out there in the literary world, it boggles the mind to think that self-esteem is such a huge issue among young women. Some of these loveable heroines are borderline bratty, but none of them give a rat’s about what their peers, their doormen,…

It’s easy to become a jaded, bitter misanthrope when you live in a world teeming with anonymous Internet comments, negative status updates and Fox News. Constant connectivity has done a lot of things for a lot of people, but it also brings out and magnifies the jerks. It’s totally refreshing…

Long ago, before there was Glee, public school offered five or so broad tracks that defined a student’s social circle and extra-curricular activities. (We mean legitimate tracks, stoners and gangs are another story.) You had your pageant girls, your jocks, the science kids, the band dorks and the speech/drama/debate nerds…

The real fairy tale in the Plano Metropolitan Ballet’s production of Cinderella isn’t that some pretty girl escaped a life of housekeeping by being, well, pretty … it’s that a group of 10- to 18-year-olds are realizing their dreams of dancing in a ballet production. It’s a beautiful thing to…

This Kwaanza-fest event is decidedly more low-key than the annual John Wiley Price event at Fair Park, but that’s probably a good thing. It’s much better to celebrate family, community and culture without bumping into FBI agents at every turn. And so this quaint, but meaningful, little event in the…

Shen Yun are a ballsy bunch. The group of Chinese dancers and musicians take some high-flying risks in their stage performances, but it’s what’s on their website that strikes me as pretty courageous: They bash China. And not passive aggressively, like “Oh, hey, we WOULD do this in China but…

Brian Donnelly, known professionally by the moniker KAWS, is interesting for many reasons. Like, for instance, the fact that he blends elements of graffiti, commercial graphic design and fine art to create treatises on modern consumerism. Or that he designed the cover art for Kanye West’s 808&Heartbreak album. Or that…

For years, I resisted the pull of Big D. I was shored up in Little D, with a constant chorus of people who told me that Dallas “had no soul.” There was no art or culture in Dallas, they said. No Flying Tomato, no subculture worth noting, no music scene…

They may have been cleared from City Hall grounds and their occupiers sent home (or to jail, in some cases), but less than a week later tents have started going back up around the city, the state and the country. People will brave the elements, take time away from their…

You should never — ever — Google the phrase “people dressed as turkeys.” I know in hindsight that’s fairly obvious, but I had the best of intentions as I typed that in, and I was rewarded with images that will forever taint the way I think about Big Bird. Feathers…

Up until now, the closest many of us have ever gotten to a Jean Paul Gaultier fashion piece was when he designed a collection for Target last year. The fashion blogosphere exploded with anticipation, and buyers snatched up everything online within days of the line’s debut. Strangely, those pieces languished…

Joan Rivers has a giant card catalog in her fancy New York City apartment where she files every one of her jokes. The 78-year-old manages to shill jewelry on QVC, host a show on E!, film a reality show with her daughter, make brilliant guest appearances on TV shows and…

I know Julia Roberts’ Pretty Woman character was enchanted by the opera from the start, but the reality is that most people start out feeling very special about being at such a fancy event and then figure out about 15 minutes into it that they’re not supposed to bring wine…

It’s like art Christmas in the Dallas area this autumn. The much anticipated Gaultier exhibit is here; Tony Cragg sculptures fill the Nasher; and the Kimball is hosting the only American exhibition of Caravaggio and His Followers in Rome. To top it all off, one of the most interesting and…

It’s really sadistic how we’re so very drawn to movies in which we are practically forced to love a character (despite flaws!) and then watch them die. Slowly. And I’m not talking about, like, Final Destination, but rather the formula terminal illness movie. Beaches, Love Story, Terms of Endearment, Fried…

We can’t possibly feign any sort of journalistic objectivism when it comes to the State Fair of Texas, that wonderful time of the year in Dallas when the weather doesn’t suck, the hipsters mingle happily with high school hoodlums in the Midway and everyone gives up gluten-free diets for pork…

If you’ve ever spent time in a city where the arts scene is really geographically concentrated, you can’t help but be a little jealous. It’s exhilarating to lose an entire day shuffling between giant public museums and tiny, edgy galleries, taking in everything from Renaissance-era paintings to Cubist sculpture to…

Can you break new ground in a tried-and-true Hollywood formula film? If you’ve been victimized by a viewing of The Change-Up lately, you’re probably inclined to say no. And we don’t really blame you. That particular film is a painful example of how the film industry shamelessly recycles old material…

There are few things that make you feel more cultured than going to see some Shakespeare. I’m generally pretty happy just to get out of the house for a showing of Bridesmaids or to commandeer a jukebox with repeats of Joy Division, because those are things I can afford and…

Hollywood likes to think that it will fearlessly tackle any topic of cultural relevance. Terrorism? Check. The LGBT experience? Ok. Bullying? Sure. Zookeeping? Obviously. Christianity? Hello? Is this thing on? There are scant recent films from mainstream Hollywood about the American Christian experience that aren’t skewering satire. This is surprising:…

When artists talk about the “American experience,” it’s hard to say what they really mean anymore. Being American used to mean that you were living a dream of relative financial stability, unmarred by the fear of going hungry. That may no longer be the case. Not that there weren’t pockets…

In a hundred years, some scholar will look at young adult fiction for the current generation and think that these kids have a problem. I mean, everybody is dead. A quick read-through of the American Literary Association’s Best Fiction for Young Adults list shows a serious preponderance of dead parents,…