Want to know what’s really going on in Dallas? Keep an eye on Krymsk. Last Saturday more than 170 people died in flash floods in this southern Russia city. Today The New York Times reports that angry survivors think the Putin government is lying to them about a big release…

Never ever thought I would hear myself saying this — ever never ever. But there may be something to say for certain kinds of all boys schools. Well, that is, if there is anything good at all to say about boys, and there may not be, then maybe it’s a…

Update/Correction/Apology/Literary Forehead Slap: The premise of this column is a stupid mistake on my part. For some time I have labored under the impression that Lucy Crow Billingsley, a daughter of Trammell Crow, was an early partner with John Sughrue in the development of Museum Tower. That’s wrong. She wasn’t…

Over at The Dallas Morning News uniblog, my former colleague Robert Wilonsky has an item keeping us up to date on plans to turn Fair Park in South Dallas into a year-round commercial amusement park, an idea about which I have no personal objections or, for that matter, especially strong…

This morning I found a story in my copy of The Dallas Morning News called “Dallas Police & Fire Pension System looks to reduce its real estate exposure.” Translated into ordinary English, that headline would be: “Boson Six Pineapple Hiccup-Hiccup Do Not Read This Story.” Of course I rushed into…

Let’s go back to hell first, see how things are going down there. Then we’ll visit heaven. Promise. We are trudging in together, you and I, one very hot recent afternoon. If you think back, we have actually visited hell several times. But today, for some reason, as we hike…

So I’m doing a this-hand versus that-hand thing in my head on Obamacare. Everybody says the Republicans are going to make this year’s presidential election a referendum on the Affordable Care Act. I just want to be ready. On the one hand, Affordable Care will encourage tons of poor people…

Sometimes I think the dumbest people to talk to about the newspaper business are newspaper people, of which I am one, obviously. Is it possible to scream blindness? David Carr, The New York Times’s media columnist — one of the few media reporters on whose word I truly hang, often…

Dallas Mayor Mike (“I’m a toll road guy”) Rawlings has pitched a bunch of numbers to the media that he says prove Dallas should build the Trinity toll road before it fixes the existing freeways downtown. But thanks to some very handy detective work by three anti-toll road city council…

So Teresa Sullivan, the president who didn’t cut costs at the University of Virginia, got her job back anyway. Meanwhile making the rounds of newspaper op-ed pages is an essay by Jeff Selingo, editorial director of The Chronicle of Higher Education, saying the way to get college costs down is…

I don’t know how to tell my wife. We’ve got to put this sucker on the market and move the hell out of here. It’s coming! It’s headed right for us! The light! The light is coming! WFAA Channel 8 news had a story last night about a rich lady…

Every once in a while the guns get blazing so fast here on the interwebs that we fail to notice when somebody shoots true. Skimming back through comments on one of my recent items about the proposed new floating boat club at White Rock Lake, I found this ditty from…

The Highland Park White Rock Lake Carnival Cruise Ship story comes into tighter focus with each passing hour, and so far the real story looks a little worse with every new detail. Not to take the onus off the Parkies at all, but I’ve been getting strong indications that another…

Trying hard to think how to bring proper perspective to the absolutely stunning pronouncement by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers last week that the Trinity River in Dallas is not in danger of calamitous flooding after all. We have been told over the last three years that the only…

Oh, damn. Now white people are going to have to defend themselves on a second front. First it was the Mexicans swarming into the country and out-working us. Now the Asians are coming here in droves and out-smarting us. What’s left for whites? Bowling? The big news in immigration today…

You’ll have to forgive us veterans of the newspaper business, but certain days — especially Mondays for some reason — are just self-referential days. Something in us wants to say to readers, “But enough about you.” We wake up way more concerned with ourselves than anybody else out there. And…

I just get a little tummy ache every time I see the Nasher Sculpture Center back in the news again treated like it’s holy Bethlehem. Please. The stuff in there is art, not the preserved teeth and hair of the saints. Renzo Piano, the architect, is on the front page…