Rape: another important topic falls off the map of sanity. Now people are demonizing a North Texas lawmaker because she said rape and booze might have something to do with each other. So does that mean somebody actually thinks there’s a planet out there somewhere in the rant-o-verse where rape…
You know what’s wrong with the new Dallas-based storyline in House of Cards, the Netflix White House soap opera? The same thing that’s wrong with the country. The screenplay assumes that wickedness, cynicism and self-serving hypocrisy flow from the center outward. It’s the whole “fed-up” paradigm now, left and right…
You have to wonder: Are daily newspaper people ever struck by the fact that a movie about what they do is so much more popular than they are? Spotlight, Tom McCarthy’s movie about The Boston Globe’s 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative series on child molestation among Catholic clergy, was two things…
Dear Republicans: Let me get this straight. You want to take back Donald Trump. You want to take Trump off the table. But you want to give us Ted Cruz instead. I know you’re not totally insane. Your problem is that many of you are not from Texas. You don’t…
The Dallas public school system has announced it will launch a new high school in 2017 using the city of Dallas as a “laboratory” to teach kids about architecture, public policy and community development. Is this going to be one of those “scared straight” things? You know, like when they…
Different things can set off my paranoid tendencies, especially a room full of people who look like Masonic Illuminati who parked their black helicopters out back. That’s pretty much how I was feeling last week when I sat down to a white-linen table setting in the Fairmount Hotel ballroom —…
For whatever reason, Dallas is almost always under everybody’s radar and off the charts where national issues are concerned. Well, The Atlantic, the 159-year-old monthly news and analysis magazine that has won more magazine awards than any other monthly, just noticed us. It’s not a great debut, but it should…
No public space or entity in Dallas has thrilled more hearts or broken more hearts than Fair Park. It is the place where two origin myths, one white and sassy, one black and resolute, were born. No surprise, then, that its future is as bitterly disputed as its past. The…
Leona Allen, deputy managing editor of The Dallas Morning News, who is black, has an interesting piece up on the paper’s opinion blog and also in the print edition yesterday, worrying about a fight between two top black Dallas officials last week. She wonders if black people in Dallas are especially…
Award-winning columnist Jim Schutze has been with the Dallas Observer since 1997. Here, he welcomes you to your new home with some solid advice. Some time back back there was a guy from Dallas, a native Texan, who married a French-Vietnamese woman. His sophisticated and reserved mother-in-law lived in Paris. Finally, she…
Like a lone rider on the horizon, a moment is arriving — right here, right now — when we might be able to do something truly revolutionary and life-changing for the city along the Trinity River. This grand opportunity will be easy to miss, however, because it is riding into…
In a dispute over historic markers for segregated parks in Dallas, nobody seems able to hit the broad side of the barn. Of course, that’s because nobody will look at the barn. Last week a local foundation decided to duck. If they’re smart, they’re hiding in the barn. Dallas Morning…
Dear Respected Supreme Leaders of the City: I see what you’re up to. I applaud your motives and the goal you seek to achieve. Your motives are my motives. Your goal is my goal. But I still think you’re kind of retarded. All of a sudden and out of the…
In Charles Dickens’ novel, Bleak House, written in installments in 1852 and ’53, the central character is not a person but a lawsuit, “Jarndyce and Jarndyce,” which Dickens describes as an endless and bottomless morass of “trickery, evasion, procrastination, spoliation, botheration [and] false pretences.” The suit ensures that “whole families…
For once the typical Texas shoot-first personality turns out to be a plus. We’ve been having a lot of daytime coyote sightings in my part of East Dallas lately, so I’ve been reading up. Robert Timm, a University of California wildlife specialist, has found that coyote attacks on pets are…
Dallas is at the edge of a wonderful and terrible moment. Nobody else is going to be able to help us, because nobody outside the city will get it. We’re about to finally try to crack the hard nut of racial segregation and concentrated poverty in our city. The trick…
I don’t know about you, but I want to personally extend my own heartfelt thanks to Dallas city councilpersons Monica Alonzo, Mark Clayton, Sandy Greyson, Scott Griggs, Philip Kingston, Lee Kleinman and Adam Medrano for voting this week to defend the First Amendment. I know it wasn’t easy. It never…
A self-referential anecdote here at the top. I never do this. Indulge me. Several years back I’m starting out on a canoe trip in Canada with a bunch of guys. It’s the part I hate, carrying our canoes on our shoulders and our packs on our backs, stumbling down a…
This is very dangerous talk, dangerous for us all. You agree, I agree, we all agree that sexual slavery, especially the enslavement of children for sexual purposes, is an unspeakable evil. But doesn’t that make it all the more important to be careful and precise in what we say about…
When does escaping from the nanny state become an escape from sanity? Ted Cruz is urging New Hampshire Yankees not to be, in his inimical words, “coddled by a bunch of nanny-state liberals who want to control every aspect of your life, or die.” What if they need a nanny?…
Back in the good old days of cartoons, it was considered howlingly funny for a cartoon character to be old, bald, not very bright and legally blind. Have him walk into a door and fall down sharply: The audience was spitting up popcorn, falling out of their chairs. We’ve made…
Wednesday afternoon a consultant from Ohio spent more than two hours in a meeting room at Love Field Airport with the Dallas City Council to help them find ways to become nicer people. I went to it, because I was hoping I might pick up a few tips for myself…
