Five months ago I told you about David Jensen, a semi-retired art-handler and antiques collector who lives in a warehouse in West Dallas. He’s right in the path of major real estate developments that are changing that realm from a disused industrial wasteland to an urban oasis. He moved there…
Here’s a mental exercise: Think of the rain that falls on your head as if it were continuing to fall through the soil beneath your feet. That’s how it’s supposed to work. Rain falls fast through the air, hits the earth, then falls slowly through the soil until it reaches…
Major focus this week in the wake of the Supreme Court gay marriage decision on Texas county clerks who will or will not obey the law and on private institutions as well. Baylor University, for example, changed its mind and said married students could have gay sex (sort of). Now someone…
First, I want to say that that Digital is God. Second, I know digital when I see digital. An item that appeared on The Dallas Morning News crime blog yesterday was the new digital version of how to cover a murder trial. It was really breezy and first-persony and it focused not…
The Dallas Morning News had an editorial this week about how City Council members need to be more polite, under the headline, “Yelling and Hurling Insults Is No Way To Lead.” Wrong. Sure it is. Depending on what you’re leading. If you’re leading the Sunday school class out onto the lawn…
Try to imagine the ravaged heart of Patricia Allen, whose three children drowned last month in an Irving apartment pool so murky that emergency crews couldn’t tell how many kids were even in the pool. These were not toddlers. Treshawn Smith was 9. His brother Anthony was 11. They lingered…
Try this on for size. The University of Texas is back in the soup big-time over its admissions policies, for what will be its second tour before the U.S. Supreme Court. In putting itself there, UT has dragged every other public university and college in the nation back into the…
Yesterday firefighters found a body believed to be Edgar Castro, missing since his kayak flipped on the Trinity River in Fort Worth four days ago. A day earlier while searching for him, Castro’s family found another body in the river, still unidentified. A month ago a high school student died after…
Every Supreme Court decision is a “landmark decision” until it gets rewritten by a new Supreme Court,. But the recent decision in favor of a Dallas-based fair-housing advocacy organization has the scent of staying power. After all, it was based on a principle that hasn’t changed much since Brown v…
David Brooks has an essay in The New York Times this week called “The Next Culture War” in which he quotes former Dallas Morning News editorial writer Rod Dreher as saying that, in the wake of the Supreme Court gay marriage decision, now is time for Christians to take what Dreher…
Listen. We could sit here and go on and on all day long about Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and his basically insane exhortation to county clerks not to issue marriage license applications to gay people. But somehow talking too much about people like Paxton just makes us feel sort…
You know what this unusual season of heavy rain and flooding is really? It’s Mother Nature giving us a big wake-up call. She’s telling us we need to go all the way back to zero. We need to rethink everything we thought we knew about flood control, which is everything…
Veteran Dallas fair housing advocates Mike Daniel, Betsy Julian and Laura Beshara won a huge victory at the U.S Supreme Court yesterday; civil rights lawyers all over America heaved a sigh of relief; and Dallas housing policies suffered yet another big black eye. The impact locally will be one more…
Wait a minute. For 10 minutes after the Charleston church slaughter we were engaged in a national conversation about racism. Now everybody up North is singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic again. I hate the rebel flag. I can’t stand it when racist confederophiles tell me the Civil War…
He didn’t just get sick of it and quit. There was calculation. Dallas School Superintendent Mike Miles, who came here three years ago with a mandate to reform the school system, quit yesterday because the board had flipped and the mandate was gone. In effect the school board gave up…
Tougher than it ought to be: the question of who’s nuts, who’s a terrorist and who cares. Of course Jeannine Hammond cares. Her kid got shot. Hammond, mother of James Boulware, sent an email to Dallas media Sunday saying cops shouldn’t have shot her son, because he was crazy. They…
One of the funniest not-at-all-funny things Dallas City Hall has done in recent years is the MLK “façade improvement program,” intended to “spruce up” (in the words of the city’s only daily newspaper) Martin Luther King Boulevard, an arrow through the heart of abject poverty in southern Dallas. We have…
Take a good long look at that guy in Charleston with the apartheid patches on his jacket and the Lee Harvey Oswald stare. Now try to think. Is there any imaginable circumstance, any remotely possible scenario in which you could be in that picture with Dylann Roof, the man suspected…
Maybe it’s a busy day for you, but every once in a while if you get a minute you need to stop and think about what you want the city to be. If you don’t, somebody else will. “This is social engineering,” Elizabeth Julian said to me recently. “The question…
Words, words, words. What do they really mean? Always a favorite game of mine. Recently I found myself back on a familiar reporting beat — affordable housing. I know what affordable means: something that non-zillionaires can afford. A week ago a member of the Dallas Plan Commission, Paul Ridley, proposed…
All of a sudden nobody remembers what teenagers are? They’re stupid. They’re wonderful. They’re awful. And they run from the cops. Many of their parents tell them to run from the cops, especially during the college admissions years. If they come from rich enough families, their parents hire bartenders, bouncers,…
Oh, I do so love it when the little people pull a swiftie on the big shots. Yesterday, just shy of the deadline, a neighborhood group ducked into the city planning department and posted a $150 fee to postpone the Trammell Crow zoning case next to Klyde Warren Park. Gotcha!…
