Two stories in yesterday’s Dallas Morning News were bookends for the debate on school rigor. In one, three Dallas school board members launched a campaign against too much testing, saying it’s mean to the kids. In the other, the head of the biggest company by far in Dallas and one…
Last night’s Trinity River toll road debate in Oak Cliff was a barnburner. A crowd of 450-plus broke into repeated emotional applause for City Council member Scott Griggs, who delivered a series of speeches attacking the road that were a cross between Winston Churchill and Tom Cruise — powerful to…
When a panel discussion of the proposed Trinity toll road begins this evening at 6:30 pm at Rosemont Elementary, something will be quite different about it compared with the same kind of events during the run-up to an anti-Trinity road referendum seven years ago. Everything. Seven years ago the supporters…
Sometimes we reporters who write about the schools get so busy reporting on whether school board members have been engaging in fisticuffs with the staff and why the cops had to hustle a board member out of a school, we lose sight of the boring peripheral questions like whether the…
The Dallas Morning News editorial page subscribes to the belief that our mayor accomplishes a great good when he calls attention to disparities between the city’s white and not-white hemispheres. I assume the paper also would give itself credit for doing the same with its years-old editorial page campaign, which…
At the very warmest and most satisfying moment in Thanksgiving Day dinner yesterday, when all was right with the world and I felt truly thankful for my good fortune, a thought struck my skull like a hammer against a church bell. “What about the commenters?” On Thanksgiving Day, Hanukkah, Christmas,…
Dallas Schools yesterday released copies of the complaints against school system trustee Bernadette Nutall that have spurred an ongoing external investigation of her conduct. The complaints include a reference to something I reported here a week ago having to do with Nutall socking somebody. See also: Nutall Probe Will Include…
Let me make sure I’ve got this right. The Dallas City Council, local grocery chains and the Texas Retailers Association go at it for two years about a plastic bag ban. Last March at the end of a long, agonizing process, the council passes a deeply compromised ordinance that doesn’t…
Two moments caught my ear last week when Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings addressed a well-heeled, smoothly coiffed crowd about the latest effort to get a new highway built along the river through downtown. He’s hiring a panel of experts to help redesign the road, months before a final federal ruling…
Couple weeks ago just before leaving town on vacation, I told you the city of Dallas won big and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Affairs lost big in a settlement of the 5-year-old HUD complaint against the city for racial discrimination. Wouldn’t you know, court papers were filed…
By Amy McCarthy and Jaime-Paul Falcon Bars, clubs, and music venues are generally great places to be, especially when you factor in copious amounts of alcohol and loud live music. Still, there are plenty of people in Dallas who are dead-set on harshing your mellow while you’re taking in a…
Last week, Bedhead, the renowned slowcore pioneers from Dallas led by brothers Matthew and Bubba Kadane, saw the re-release of its entire body of recorded work. Chicago-based record label Numero Group, a label that specializes in offering up richly detailed, comprehensive collections from artists deserving of further inspection, released the…
Sharon Grigsby of The Dallas Morning News editorial page posted an interesting item on their opinion blog yesterday saying the paper’s pontification board had just met with Dallas school Superintendent Mike Miles, that Miles wouldn’t tell them anything and they support him. I agree. He won’t tell me anything, either…
The most popular rapper to have ever come from North Texas is one Robert Matthew Van Winkle. You probably know him as Vanilla Ice. This is nothing short of equal parts silly and embarrassing. Vanilla Ice is the Psy of the ’90s and “Ice Ice Baby” is hands down the…
Results of the Trinity toll road public opinion poll released yesterday by State Rep. Raphael Anchia are so devastatingly obliterating, so thermonuclear, in fact — 94 percent of Dallas zip code respondents opposed to building it – that they direct a hole-burning focus on the obvious correlative question: OK, so…
Wednesday the mayor is holding some kind of meeting to see if people can come up with “design tweaks” to make the Trinity River toll road plan more palatable. Well, yeah, if shooting it in the head is considered a design tweak. This idea — to build a fat new…
Music festivals are a tough business. It’s hard to make them stick. Organizers don’t usually expect to break even for the first five years, often longer. Even if a festival survives, it’s not the end of the story. Maintaining what you have often means expanding your model and your audience…
For what it’s worth – not much, probably – nobody’s sadder than me about the South Dallas/Fair Park Trust Fund and the saga about to unfold around it. I know the history. It was one of those crumbs that poor black South Dallas had to wrench from a fat callous…
I’m headed out of town for a week’s vacation. Spent a good deal of yesterday thinking about the outcome in the HUD case against Dallas. As you know by now, HUD folded a couple days ago and withdrew its racial segregation allegation against the city. If you were here yesterday,…
City Hall announced late yesterday that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has caved on the 4-year-old Lockey/MacKenzie racial segregation complaint against Dallas officials, vacating most of the findings of a four-year federal civil rights investigation. A settlement signed yesterday by HUD and the city (see below)…
Man’s connection to nature, his desire to simultaneously embrace, tame and succumb to the siren song of the wild, has been expressed through art for centuries. And there’s no more fitting musical accompaniment to Mother Nature than metal and punk, two genres that place a premium on organic, unvarnished performances…
The ninth incarnation of Austin’s Fun Fun Fun Fest starts tomorrow, and the growth of the festival shows no signs of slowing. It’s a festival that feels loved, that feels like an awful amount of care and attention has gone into it and that is booked by some sort of…
