Over the years Jennifer Conrad has come to see her fight as one against greed and stupidity, a nasty pocket of the stuff festering deep in the heart of her own profession. When her crusade began, though, Conrad wasn’t thinking that way. She was focused on one patient, Drifter, a…
Steven Kenneth Staley’s guilt was never much in doubt. The facts of the case, attested to by multiple witnesses, were clear. One evening in 1989, Staley and two female accomplices showed up at a Tarrant County Steak & Ale with guns. When police showed up, Staley took the restaurant manager…
Sports Illustrated is now on day two of its five-day rollout of its breathless investigation of the Oklahoma State University football program. Dez Bryant, the Dallas Cowboys’ wide receiver who played two seasons at OSU, was not mentioned in the first installment, which focuses on cash that boosters and coaches…
The North Texas Tollway Authority has had trouble in recent years of actually making drivers pay to use its roads. Hence the tens of millions of dollars in unpaid tolls and fees it says it’s owed, hence its infamous list of the most egregious offenders, hence the lawsuits it began…
In years past, the organizers of Dallas Pride have accepted the idea that the outpouring of joy and solidarity that fuels the annual gay pride parade also occasionally leads to the revealing of a bit more skin than might technically allowed under state law. This year, they won’t be so…
Texas is still almost entirely covered in drought, but it’s easy to forget it. North Texas has been comparatively dry, while much of the rest of the state received some much-needed rain over the summer. It has not, however, been nearly enough to replenish the state’s shrinking reservoirs. If this…
Last month, Chelsea Davis filed a lawsuit, which in and of itself is pretty unremarkable given that she’s a lawyer.. Davis, though, is a patent attorney, and this particular suit has nothing to do with the nuances of intellectual property law, a fact she alluded to in a handful of…
Someone give Samuel Ehrenreich a medal. On second thought, buy the man a beer, which the UT Dallas researcher desperately needs after spending a year collecting, then wading through, some 6 million text messages sent and received by high school freshman. All in the name of science. “We were interested…
Two things were certain from the moment 52-year-old Rosy Esparza’s body hit the earth after a 75-foot plunge from the Texas Giant. One was that the Six Flags Over Texas’ iconic roller coaster would reopen, after a properly respectful period of course. Two was that Esparza’s family would file a…
Last January, an FBI agent based in Maryland was cruising through a peer-to-peer file-sharing network in search of child porn. There, he stumbled upon a user named “Classybitch,” who offered him access to several hundred videos and images with file names like “Taboo Incest – Grampa Fucks Sleeping Girl Pedo…
Van Dralan Dixson, the neighborhood watch volunteer accused of a string of rapes in South Dallas, was arrested in Baton Rouge on Tuesday, several local news outlets are reporting. Police announced Dixson as a suspect over the weekend after DNA evidence linked him to one of the assaults. Subsequent DNA…
It’s 3 a.m. You’re driving around Pleasant Grove, hot-boxing your car, when the cops pull you over for a minor traffic violation. Smoke billows from the window as the officer approaches. The smell of marijuana is unmistakable. What do you do? NORML, the national pot-advocacy group, has a handy primer…
This past legislative session, billionaire Elon Musk’s push for a new law allowing electric-car maker Tesla Motors to bypass car dealers and sell directly to consumers crashed and burned. Which wasn’t a surprise. The state’s car dealers have a long, proud history of plying legislators with campaign cash and gifts…
From its website, City Trapping comes off as slick, big ol’ hog-snatchin’ company, with a perfectly corporate “About Us” description: “We help alleviate your destructive feral hog problems in a secure, safe, and humane process.” But it’s actually just one guy, hunting-loving business owner Osvaldo Rojas, who does all the…
Texas’ State Board of Education no longer has the stranglehold on textbooks it did a dozen years ago, when it forced an environmental science textbook to include skeptical language on global warming, or four years ago, when an attempt to slip creationist language into science books sparked a national uproar,…
Van Dralan Dixson, the neighborhood watch volunteer now tied by DNA to four South Dallas rapes, is out of jail and on the run. Alan Mason, the silver Honda-driving, oval glasses-wearing man whom police publicly identified as a “person of interest” before the results of the DNA test came in,…
My personal traffic-signal nemesis is where Garland Road and Gaston Avenue meet at the southern tip of White Rock Lake. Woe to the southbound driver who, having hit the intersection at 6:30 p.m., and having just learned that the squirming 4-year-old in the back seat has to go potty RIGHT…
Good news for anyone who’s ever fumbled with change under a bus driver’s withering glare, or frantically mashed buttons on the ticket dispenser as the train pulls away. Starting next Monday, September 16, you can avoid all that thanks to GoPass, DART’s new mobile ticketing app. It works about how…
The Dallas Morning News has already made clear where it stands on the question of Syria. In an editorial last week, the paper decried the “egregious act of mass murder” currently taking place there and urged the the U.S. to launch a “series of cruise missile or drone strikes on…
The clean-up of toxic land around the former Exide lead smelter in Frisco hasn’t even begun yet, and already it has drawn criticism from state regulators and now the city’s own expert. In testimony submitted on behalf of Frisco in Exide’s bankruptcy proceedings, William Wheatley, an engineer and former director…
An hour before the kickoff of the Cowboys’ season at AT&T Stadium Sunday night, three American icons posed for a photo. If a weirder three-pack of American icons has ever posed for photo, we haven’t seen it. Weirder still is the placement of the Hulkster’s hand near Jerry’s crotch. We’re…
Two years ago, David Mangum left Dallas, where he’d lived for a decade or more, and moved to Dexter, Missouri, population 8,000, where he got a job in a grocery store. He kept the reasons for the move mostly to himself. Small-town life would seem ill-suited to his favorite pastime…
