Dear Mexican: You seem like a smart guy and your input regarding an ethnic phenomenon I’ve observed would be of interest. I live in a tiny, gated neighborhood that I would describe as solidly middle- to upper-middle-class. On each side of me live Vietnamese small-business owners whose kids attend prestigious…
Isn’t it interesting? The one question that seems to bubble back to the top time and time again in the ongoing mayor’s race is the world-class city thing. Why? Maybe it’s just semantics. Maybe what we really mean, when we use that embarrassingly pretentious, transparently insecure term, is that we…
Welcome to Local Music ‘Mericans , where we meet some of the people behind the local music scene — those who aren’t necessarily members of local bands, but more the people who make the scene move. You know who needs a serious set of stones? The person who chooses to…
Forgive me, or just slap me, if this is way too tea-leaves for you, but I can’t help trying to read the dregs, you know, trying to see what’s behind the burqa, since this city is such a Talibaptist mystery some of the time. And lately I think I definitely…
OK, wait, wait, wait. Sorry. I don’t get it. I need a little catch-up here. The second Calatrava fake suspension “signature bridge” across the Trinity is going to be a bicycle bridge? A bicycle bridge? We’re going to spend more than $100 million in tax money to build a make-believe…
Whether you’ve reached the end of your rope or merely the end of your week, welcome to Whitt’s End: *If the Mavericks lose in the first round to the Trail Blazers, Rick Carlisle should be fired. The window propped open by 33-year-old Dirk Nowitzki is closing, and 50-something wins without…
David Cay Johnston, author of the best-seller Free Lunch, has a great piece out this week called “9 Things the Rich Don’t Want You to Know About Taxes,” providing powerful evidence that middle and working class Americans are being played for suckers and dupes by the plutocrats in this country…
Dear Mexican: I grant you a magic wand. Now, tell me—how do we right the wrongs of Sam Houston and Manifest Destiny? Is it to correct his legacy and call out the crimes and recognize the victims? Or should the land be given back? What is it, my fellow American?…
Did you realize our city council was faced with a crisis of too much ethics? Yup. Apparently the council has been staggering under the weight of way too much ethics. So today they approved a proposal to chop those ethics back, specifically by making it much easier for developers and…
Welcome to Local Music ‘Mericans , where we meet some of the people behind the local music scene — those who aren’t necessarily members of local bands, but more the people who make the scene move. Our local music scene’s bartenders are, without a doubt, some of the hardest-working individuals…
I have a new idea for controlling costs at City Hall. Breathalyzers for the city council, because those people must be drunk. The city is in the toilet, so broke it can’t mow the parks. So broke it can’t fix the streets. So broke it can’t keep the rec centers…
Oh, so now it starts. Here it comes. Camouflaged in a lot of pompous blather about a fair city council redistricting process, The Dallas Morning News is already waving the banner for chopping up the East Dallas city council district. Should have seen that one coming. East Dallas is a…
We added insult to injury a long time ago in this whole business of fracking in Dallas — you know, the kind of natural gas drilling where they blow up underground rocks in a geological formation called the Barnett Shale, releasing trapped gas. Now, if you don’t mind, I need…
I used to be such a mass transit whore. I had this post-’60s idea that cars and highways are bad, which they are, so that must mean trains are good. I examine that reasoning now, and I think, “So if smoking crack is bad, does that mean meth is good?”…
Whether you’ve reached the end of your rope or merely the end of your week, welcome to Whitt’s End: *So Nuggets coach George Karl wants some of the Mavs, huh? “If we had to pick and choose, we would probably say 55 percent Dallas and 45 percent Oklahoma City,” he says…
Really interesting story in yesterday’s New York Times about my hometown, Detroit, where the population is now half what it was when I bailed in the late 1970s. It seems Detroit is now on the cutting edge of the “shrinking cities” movement, and I wonder if Detroit may have valuable…
Dear Mexican: I’m a blanquita, and I’ve recently begun dating a CALIENTE mexicano. I adore this man. The first time we were intimate, I noticed his necklace (which I had always assumed to be a rosary) was a name necklace…a WOMAN’S name necklace. He says that his mami gave it…
Honest question. Are you even aware there is a race going on now for mayor of Dallas? Honest answers only, please. It’s OK. Especially in the early phase, the mayoral election is a boring thing. I don’t expect you to be on the edges of your seats clicking updates every…
Check me on this. In an atmosphere of federal, state, county and city funding crises, where we may even see the defunding of federal health care reform, the gutting of the Environmental Protection Agency, an absolute decimation of support for public schools and impoverished children, drastic cuts in Medicaid and…
Welcome to Local Music ‘Mericans, where we meet some of the people behind the local music scene — those who aren’t necessarily members of local bands, but more the people who make the scene move. As a talent buyer at the House of Blues, Brian Lowe’s kind of the definition…
I’m all for pay walls. Pay walls r me. When newspapers like The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times put up pay walls, charging readers for access to news content, I figure they’re trying to get ink-stained schlubs like me paid. I know there are people out there…
Maybe the biggest problem with the fracking issue is that it involves the deadly, mind-numbing and sleep-inducing phrase “parts per billion.” Otherwise I might have cracked the case long ago. Fracking is deep-well drilling for natural gas in which drillers inject water and chemicals into a layer of underground shale…
