Dear D Magazine: Thank you so much for nominating me for “best columnist.” I can’t tell you how pleased I am to be in the running. I am determined to win this thing. Thank you for sending me instructions on how to get votes for myself. In a recent email,…

OK, look, just see if you can follow me here, because I need to know if I am following myself. You tell me. Michael Morris, a regional transportation official who gets quoted, has always said we need to build a new super-highway along the Trinity River, walling it off from…

Off on vacation for a week, so great to be back here on the lawn, but really, you know, I was never gone. Thanks to my colleagues over on Frontburner, the D Magazine blog, my presence did not fade. Last Friday D Editor Tom Rogers penned a long item he…

In my ongoing series on cities smarter than Dallas, please allow me to add Seoul, South Korea, another place we need to send a team to right away. Yesterday the Dallas City Council heard an awe-inspiring presentation by Guillermo Penalosa, a leading-edge planner whose work has helped transform cities from…

Yesterday a commenter accused me of dredging through The New York Times every morning to find a pretext for some kind of inflammatory ditty here on Lawn whose only purpose is to stir up a hornet’s nest of clicks. Yeah, I can see how somebody could get that impression. But,…

I try. I keep offering. Dallas doesn’t have any problems it couldn’t solve if it just looked to more advanced cities. I make suggestions. Dallas gets pissed off. I don’t know what else I can do. Recently I pointed out that Dallas could resolve its seemingly intractable 15-year-old standoff on…

Art fight! Art fight! Everybody ditch class and run out in the halls to watch! The rich kids are fighting about their art! On this day when the national economy is still on life support, Texas schools are sinking into Dickensian poverty and the city can’t afford sewers, our city’s…

Yikes. Now I have to say I found something good on The Dallas Morning-News op-ed page today. Will my Job-like suffering never end? In today’s Dallas’-only-daily-newspaper (alas), Mark Melton, an attorney at Hunton & Williams, has written an essay about the involvement of the “business community” in the Dallas public…

I’d like to say a quick thank you to the Nanny State, before the moment passes and I forget all about spending a good deal of Tuesday cowering in a downstairs bathroom preparing to find out what my everlasting reward will be. Hey, thanks, Nanny State. Couldn’t have made it…

So hard to keep up. Last week The Dallas Morning News said in an editorial that the special tax-break district around the American Airlines Center basketball arena has been a major success. I thought most of it had been repo’d by a bunch of krauts. The News said in its…

If The Dallas Morning News and the University of Texas at Arlington sponsor a big seminar on regional cooperation, how many people at the seminar are going to come out against regional cooperation? Yeah. Not to be self-important or anything, but I believe that’s my job, Pilgrim. So here it…

Not sure what to think of Mike Miles, the Dallas school board’s pick for new superintendent? Here’s a shortcut. Decide what you think of the Broad Superintendents Academy (BSA). Miles is a 2011 graduate of a boot camp for school superintendents in Los Angeles founded and funded by a foundation…

Dear Friends Among Dallas Black Activists: Some of you have contacted me to ask me who this Uncle Tom son of a bitch Greg Howard is working for the Observer. One of you — a guy with a long history of responsible activism — called me from the picket line…

I am terribly embarrassed by the short film I offered here yesterday about driving over the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge for the first time. The comments on my cinematography, direction, editing and narration have been scathing, scathing! Shockingly caustic. I just feel utterly scathed. I get the message, people. It’s…

Big business is finally figuring out what Democrats have been saying since the worst days of George W: that the genius idea of Bush’s brain, Karl Rove, was a Faustian bargain with that powerful and elusive element of American political landscape — the ignorati. Now the ignorati are demanding their…

Old news department. Dallas has a new bridge over the Trinity River near downtown designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava. It has been the subject of hoopla. I have been negative. The story of why is too long, too boring. When they had the hoopla party several weeks ago, my…

The Republican presidential candidates all agree on one thing — the same mantra between all their lines. They all want us to believe that the extreme polarity of rich and poor in this country is an expression of natural law. The super-rich just have to get super-richer. Everybody else, sadly,…

I have a column in tomorrow’s paper wailing about the city’s failure ever to generate a true high-concept vision for the park we’re supposed to be building on the Trinity River. We’ve seen bits and pieces of ideas come and go — good, bad and ugly. Audubon Center, good. Horse…

Sunday the Dallas Peace Center chose Dealey Plaza, where JFK was killed almost a half century ago, as the site for a protest demanding justice in the killing of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin. It’s hard to feel good about anything associated with the Martin story, but Dealey Plaza was a…

American Airlines wants to ditch all of its labor contracts. I wonder a couple things about that. But first: I do get what bankruptcy is. It’s pushing back the creditors. I get that. Maybe everybody signed deals that were too generous, back in the fat days. Now somebody doesn’t want…

Just want to make sure you know what you’re getting into if you count on The Dallas Morning News to tell you what’s up. It’s not that they won’t. But you do have to deal with the social local filter. The New York Times this morning carries a story by…