Opinion & Commentary

If Sarah Palin is the canary in the coal mine, Texas is the bats.

In this town, if you say you don’t think we should build a highway practically on top of the Trinity River through downtown, the people who want to build a highway on top of the river through downtown always say, “Well, what’s your idea instead?” As if that’s the perfect…

Great story in The Dallas Morning News yesterday by Brandon Formby revealing that the toll road agency in our area has been sitting on $1.7 million worth of traffic studies for the one they want to build along the Trinity River through downtown. The North Texas Tollway Authority just won…

Once in a while a really brilliant idea pops up in a relatively obscure place, a diamond in the coal mine. The particular coal mine I have in mind is the letters to the editor section of The Dallas Morning News (why not just put your idea in a bottle…

Last week right after the Texas attorney general released an investigative report on the University of Texas Law School, we talked a little bit about it here on Unfair Park. Reflecting my own journalistic and literary values, I went for the really lurid stuff first, like the former law school…

Comebacks are a bitch. More often than not, they’re a plain bad idea. But when we kept hearing, throughout the summer and fall of last year, that the organizers of 35 Denton were planning to bring back the festival after its one-year hiatus in 2014, we couldn’t help getting excited…

We have this basic impasse in Dallas where the public schools are concerned. The deal struck by the white and black leaderships 12 years ago was supposed to be that elected black leadership would get to run the school system and hand out the jobs and so on, and the…

This item is in answer to a comment on Unfair Park yesterday that I thought deserved a more detailed response than I could provide in the comments section. Let’s see if I can use more words to make things even worse. This week I have a story in the paper…

The legal event called criminal indictment is a familiar theme in the news of any given day: It’s the step where a grand jury formally accuses a person of a crime and thereby launches the process that will lead either to a trial or a plea of guilty in some…

Last week when the Texas attorney general released a long-stalled investigation of a lucrative off-the-books compensation system at the University of Texas Law School, The Texas Tribune, the on-line news service that has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants from the University of Texas System, blew off the…

Lots of people — and by that I mean Steve Blow — base their faith in fluoridated drinking water on what they believe to be the preponderance of scientific opinion as expressed by dentists. I refer to Blow’s recent column in The Dallas Morning News. The implicit assertion — made…

There’s something about a man in a band. Or who can play the guitar. Or who can sing. Or really who even hangs out with the band. Put a guitar in front of or in the general vicinity of a man and women will drop their panties. Men will drop…

Okay now, hear us out on this one. Last Friday, we ran a piece arguing for the benefits of Denton bringing in a larger, mid-sized music venue to help make the scene a little more robust. Not everybody liked that idea, which is fine; the point of healthy conversation is…

Selma was on my mind again a few days before Martin Luther King Day, for unexpected reasons. I had to call my old friend, Peter Johnson, to ask him to talk to another journalist. He picked up, but he couldn’t stay on the phone long because he was walking out…

Denton has reached critical mass. With so many local bands in its orbit, it was kind of an inevitability. But as the music scene spins on its axis, it lacks a gravitational center to anchor it to the city and keep bands and fans from floating off into the twisting…

For better or for worse, a fair housing case filed by Dallas plaintiffs will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court next week. It deals with the “disparate impact” doctrine of discrimination — the idea that if you do something that discriminates against protected groups, it doesn’t matter whether it…

Today Dallas is host to a clerical “summit” called “The Reconciled Church: Healing the Racial Rift,” put on by T.D. Jakes of the Potters House in Dallas and Harry Jackson, pastor of Hope Christian Church in Beltsville, Maryland. Something about it seems powerfully counter-intuitive. Rift-healer Jackson is a right-winger who…

When 102.1 FM The Edge killed Mark Schectman’s The Local Edge radio show last August, it left a gaping hole in the Dallas radio landscape. Suddenly the one show that focused entirely on showcasing local talent was gone, and without any explanation. Sure, there’s the excellent Paul Slavens Show over…

Normally I don’t talk about this, but I can see the future. I know ahead of time what’s going to happen. It’s better if we don’t talk about how. It will just scare you. But I happen to know, for example, what Steve Blow is going to write in his…

Some years ago I was brutally chastised by a person who lives in my house for an especially nasty column I wrote about Dallas Morning News columnist Steve Blow and something he said about the Trinity River toll road — that unbuilt monster highway somebody wants to stick on top…

Look, you know the drill. Denton has a tragically hip music scene teeming with talent and potential. And we will be the first to admit that seven archetypes will never quite cover all the bases. But we are invariably bound by similarities and shared idiosyncrasies that help us navigate the…

You saw Stephen Young’s piece last week about kids in Irving being taught to “duck and cover” (dive under their desks) in case of an earthquake. You probably have to be of a certain age (old) to appreciate the cultural importance of duck and cover drills. It’s what we old…