On Thursday, as the tremors from Jerry Jones’ shakeup at Valley Ranch continued to reverberate, Morning News entertainment editor Rand Duren seized the moment. “It was announced yesterday that the Dallas Cowboys have fired defensive coordinator Rob Ryan,” he wrote on the paper’s Whatever Blog, “and while that may be…
Every month, the Dallas Police and Fire Pension System’s board of trustees convenes at the break of dawn for its regular meeting. On a scale of exciting-ness, that meeting usually ranks somewhere between scrubbing the mold from one’s bathroom tiles and looking at the photo album my aunt used to…
George H.W. Bush, the country’s 41st president, has been in a Houston hospital for more than a month now, undergoing treatment for complications from a serious case of bronchitis. The 88-year-old was checked into intensive care on Wednesday “following a series of setbacks, including a persistent fever.” It was during…
And by “slow” we mean dead. And by “few” we mean four. We’ll rouse ourselves from our Christmas stupor again on Wednesday. Until then, you’ll have to find another way to infotain yourself. Better yet, go spend time with family. Don’t like your family? Okay, then go hang out with…
Over the summer, plans for a $33 million parking garage next to the American Airlines Center briefly became the focus of the ongoing feud between Ross Perot Jr., whose company was building the structure, and Mark Cuban, whose company opposed the project. The garage was green-lighted by the City Council…
Last night, NBC 5 laid bare the truth about distracted driving and the Dallas Police Department. Over two years, the station reported, in-car computers and similar distractions were a factor in 13 accidents involving DPD vehicles. Over the summer, the department considered changing its policy governing the use of in-car…
It’s safe to say that Museum Tower is losing its public relations battle against the Nasher Sculpture Center. The Nasher has marshaled support from the city’s business and civic elite, successfully casting its neighbor as some hyper-phallic monstrosity bent on scorching anything in its path, while Museum Tower has a…
Mary Padian and Moe Prigoff are regular cast members on “Storage Wars: Texas,” the Lone Star spinoff of the A&E reality show chronicling the odd souls who bid on the contents of abandoned storage units. He’s an antiques dealer, she’s a free-spirited collector, and both run shops in the Design…
With the exception of Mike Hashimoto, the Morning News’ editorial team has been dutifully lining up behind the idea that a (semi?) private golf course can be “the tipping point” — their words, not mine or anyone else’s — southern Dallas needs. “A game changer,” the paper says. Next up:…
Over the weekend, the New York Times took a hard look at the tax breaks and other incentives state and local governments dole out by the billions to lure businesses. As the magnitude of those gifts has increased over the years, corporations have learned to shop for the most lucrative…
We’ve had it good, no doubt about it. Ever since the drought of the ’50s, when Dallas water planners set forth, constructing and acquiring the rights to reservoirs that would feed the city’s growth for the coming decades, we haven’t had to worry. Even as Lake Travis contracted to a…
We generally don’t actively want to write about Glenn Beck, for more or less the same reasons we don’t go around touching other people’s cold sores. But sometimes, up there in his Southlake media fortress, the man does things that put us in the sad position of feeling obliged to…
The Daily Show with Jon StewartMon – Thurs 11p / 10cThe Employees Strike Back – Twinkie’s Endwww.thedailyshow.comDaily Show Full EpisodesPolitical Humor & Satire BlogThe Daily Show on Facebook On The Daily Show last night, Jon Stewart took on Hostess, finally providing the definitive postmortem on what caused the snack maker’s…
Writing in the Atlantic today, Derek Thompson reports from recently released data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis that Midland — not Washington, D.C. or San Francisco, but a 110,000-person speck of dust out in West Texas — is the country’s second richest city, per capita. It might well be…
It’s hard not to note the triumphant tone in Joel Kotkin’s piece in Forbes today on where Americans are moving. Kotkin, a scholar and pundit on urban issues, has some skin in the game, having just published a book that predicts that population growth over the next several decades will…
Pop culture and music writer Dan Solomon, who until recently contributed to CultureMap’s Austin and Houston sites, says his byline is no longer welcome at the digital-media venture. Apparently, corporate didn’t take too kindly to this post on his personal blog, critical of CultureMap Dallas managing editor Claire St. Amant’s…
It’s safe to say that Livefyre, that fancy new commenting system we rolled out four months ago, has been an unqualified success. Sure, there were some technical hiccups at the beginning and some ongoing cries of anguish from the comment section, but what you haven’t seen are the mountains of…
Two weeks ago, Anna Merlan schlepped down to the Dallas Police & Fire Pension Fund’s headquarters for a “technical update” on some of the solutions to the ever-simmering Museum Tower-Nasher dispute. The takeaway was that the louver system being peddled by the Nasher crowd as the only solution to the…
I had one of my newspaper moments yesterday. I have them every so often, usually when the Giants win the World Series and I get all trashed on nostalgia, looking up all the front pages of my hometown rags. Yesterday’s was different. Yesterday’s moment was of the Serious Journalism bent,…
We tried this morning to make it clear that the Twinkie is safe. Some private equity firm will swoop in and buy the brand at bankruptcy auction, along with Sno Balls, Ding Dongs and any other Hostess snack cake that carries with it a whiff of nostalgia. It’s inevitable. According…
Right now, the land stretching south and east of The Arts District toward Deep Ellum is a sea of parking lots. We’ve known for a while now what’s supposed to go there — a humongous, six-building mixed-use development known as The Spire — but news has been scarce since developers…
Yesterday I wrote about Curtis Lockey and Craig MacKenzie, who were on my mind Tuesday night as I watched the final electoral votes for Obama click into place. Lockey and MacKenzie are real estate developers suing Dallas in federal court over what they claim is massive misuse of federal de-segregation…
