I wince. I wish. I need to give up reading. Nature writer Diane Ackerman (The Zookeeper’s Wife, 2008 Orion Award for nonfiction) has an op-ed piece in The New York Times today telling a wonderful story about cities that have turned wastewater treatment operations into nature preserves. I read it…

I have been dealing with both the city and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in recent weeks seeking answers to questions about the “Dallas Wave” or “Standing Wave” man-made rapids that the city has installed in the Trinity River just downriver from downtown. It was intended to be a…

If you start reading the lead editorial today in The Dallas Morning News, you’re going to think at first that the editorial writers have done a good job explaining what has gone wrong with minority subcontracting in Dallas — a central theme in the ongoing FBI Dallas political corruption probe…

This is all high opera from here on out. Every single thing anybody does on any side of the ongoing FBI investigation of political corruption in Dallas will be calculated with trials in mind. Everything — the timing of FBI raids, the way the U.S. attorney releases or does not…

Digging back through old files, I can see some patterns emerging that I missed back in the day. For example, the connection between Willis Johnson, the luckiest radio host in the world, and Ross Perot Jr. Johnson is a close personal and political associate of Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley…

It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that string. Now everybody’s talking about Willis Johnson. But nobody’s got the connection. Last week Brett Shipp of Channel 8 reported on contracts between the county and Southern Dallas political consultant Willis Johnson, and over the weekend The Dallas Morning News…

Colleen McCain Nelson debuts a new political column today on the op-ed page of The Dallas Morning News in which she holds up my former hometown, Detroit, as the arch example of what Dallas needs not to be. She’s writing about Mayor Dave Bing’s initiative to withdraw scarce city services…

Should have seen this one coming. Hope it’s not my own fault. On Monday I reported here that the city is going to spend some $76,000 to have its screwed-up and unusable fake rapids in the Trinity River digitally modeled by an engineering company that builds sewage treatment plants. That’s…

The classic ’50s radio show Queen for a Day always opened with the line “Would YOU like to be queen for a day?” Presumably for the last several weeks a good many Dallas politicians and City Hall insiders have been greeting each other in darkened corridors with a whispered variation…

If you missed Brett Shipp’s Willis Johnson story on WFAA-Channel 8 last night, you need to go give it a gander here. I also have a column in this week’s paper version of Unfair Park talking about Johnson, a radio host who is a crucial but mysteriously low-profile figure in…

Jack Floyd (I don’t really know Jacquielynn personally, but I’m told that’s what cool people call her) has a good column today behind The Dallas Morning News pay well today about making downtown Dallas fun. I know. I know. Right off the top it sounds like a dreadfully dreary topic,…

Somewhere in the saga of the Dallas Wave, formerly known as the Standing Wave, there is sanity. Things happen for a reason. I take this as an article of faith, but my faith is sorely tested by the wave. The standing wave is a manmade rapids in the Trinity River…

Look, I hate it when people tell me stuff and then won’t tell me how they know it. I generally apply about a 50 percent discount to information like that. So I’m about to do the same thing to you: tell you a bunch of stuff I have been learning…

Hey, I was out of town last week when the August issue of D hit the streets — well, given the magazine’s target demo, perhaps we should say it hit the winding lanes and parkways — with an essay titled “Let’s Ditch the Trinity River Toll Road.” Wow. Pretty remarkable…

Quite a bit of chest-puffing harrumphing holier-than-thou going on over at The Dallas Morning News editorial page today, with a self-congratulatory ditty about that dirty Rupert Murdoch, about those nasty dirty Brit tabloids and about how happy the News is with itself for being … well … you know …..

If the ongoing FBI corruption probe is based on things that have gone wrong with county government, the feds may be in trouble. Really bad things happen at the county on really good days. If you walk into county offices and it looks like the entire psych ward has escaped…

OK, let’s get over the thing about “no one has been indicted” in the ongoing federal corruption investigation of Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price. It’s true. No one has been indicted. But let’s be real. Somebody will be. I am working on a column for next week’s paper about…

I have been looking back at the federal corruption conviction that forced the late Al Lipscomb off the Dallas City Council in 2000. That conviction was set aside two years later by a conservative panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. We have lessons, people…

Wilonsky and I attended the John Wiley Price rally together yesterday. He has already done a fine job here reporting on what happened. The only reason I would even open my mouth is in response to some of the comments I see in response to his item. One commenter asked…

Interesting blow-black — so muted you might call it whisper-back — to recent stories and an op-ed piece in The Dallas Morning News extolling so-called economic progress in Southern Dallas. One instance is on the paper’s op-ed page today, a column from respected Southern Dallas blogger-journalist Shawn Williams, who echoes…