There has been a lot of ink devoted over the past few days to Dallas ISD being named a finalist for $40 million in federal Race to the Top funds, which built to a crescendo yesterday when Education Secretary Arne Duncan came to town. That all sounds fantastic, but what…
The Morning News’ Tanya Eiserer and WFAA’s Rebecca Lopez teamed up last night for what has to be one of the more bizarre stories to emerge from the Dallas Police Department in recent years. Their reports revealed that Regina Smith, a DPD lieutenant in charge of burglary and theft detectives…
Luther Campbell’s days as a member of 2 Live Crew, cutting wildly misogynistic tracks that shocked and appalled Tipper Gore and led to a famous Supreme Court victory for free speech, are behind him. He’s a father now, married to a lawyer, and he has a respectable job as a…
On March 30, 2007, 57-year-old Margrit Long went to the Center for Integrative Medicine in Portland, Oregon. She was given an intravenous dose of colchicine, a drug developed to treat gout but commonly prescribed, as in Long’s case, to treat neck and back pain. She’d been receiving the treatment for…
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 officially called the IH 345 overhead freeway bridge, but you probably know it better as the clusterfuck between Woodall Rodgers and Interstate 30 which, even when there’s relatively little traffic, is a nightmare to navigate. It’s also structurally deficient, which is a civil engineer’s way of saying it’s not…
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…
Angela Hunt, the term-limited City Council member representing District 14, has already made it pretty clear whom she favors as her successor. That would be Philip Kingston, a Dallas attorney who entered the race last month and whose campaign treasurer is Paul Sims, aka Mr. Angela Hunt. If you still…
We’ve officially known it was coming for a couple of months now, and we’ve assumed as much since forever, but yesterday marked the first official volley in the biennial battle to legalize gambling in Texas. State Rep. Carol Alvarado, D-Houston, filed a resolution yesterday that proposes a constitutional amendment –…
In 2003, the state of Texas took a halfhearted swing at skyrocketing childhood obesity rates when it took steps to ban the sale of soda and candy — though only in elementary schools and only during breakfast and lunch. Those rules were strengthened in 2009, but middle and high school…
The future seemed bright for the Dallas Plaza Hotel in 2006. Developer Larry Hamilton, fresh off a slew of successful downtown redevelopment projects, had just purchased the seedy, 12-story complex on Akard Street just across Interstate 30 from City Hall with plans to turn it into a boutique hotel. Construction…
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…
In February, a ginger-haired young man named Ryan Naylor went on the reality show Shark Tank to pitch his business idea: a watch line that Naylor claimed looked great and improved health and balance using “negative ion technology.” Neither of those claims was true. The watches are hideous, basically DayGlo…
Even after a gunman slaughtered a dozen moviegoers and injured scores more this summer in Aurora, Colorado, President Obama was careful not to utter anything that could be construed as anti-gun. He merely alluded, vaguely, to a need to keep firearms out of the hands of criminals. His reluctance to…
It’s not clear why a Hurst police officer was arresting the 17-year-old shown in the above video, or how much the he was resisting. What is clear is that the he didn’t pose much of a threat when a second cop — who IDs himself as Officer Arnold — sprinted…
It’s something of a head-scratcher why the Texas Legislature decided in 1905 to entrust the Daughters of the Republic of Texas with the care and preservation of the Alamo, site of one of the fiercest — and most pivotal — battles of the Texas war for independence. The DRT is…
The last time Tom Corea was in Judge Michael Snipes’ Dallas County courtroom, he had just finished trashing his former Design District office and drawing amateurish penis graffiti on the walls in permanent marker. For that, Snipes revoked Corea’s bond and sent him back to jail. Corea, who stands accused…
It’s the day before Thanksgiving, which means we probably should be explaining to you the proper basting technique or giving you tips on deep frying a turkey without setting your neighborhood ablaze. But we don’t know really know what “basting” is, and we’re not very good at not setting stuff…
Earlier this year it came to light that DeVry, the Illinois-based tech school giant, wanted some students from its Caribbean medical school to complete their training in Texas. The plan was modest, a maximum of 20 students from DeVry’s American University of the Caribbean placed in Texas hospitals for third-…
America let out a collective sigh of relief on Monday, when Hostess and its striking union, the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International, agreed to mediation talks, staving off liquidation — and the possible but not very likely demise of the Twinkie — for at least a day…
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…
On Friday, when the county posted the agenda for today’s commissioners court meeting, I took note of Item 11, which concerned a request by Dallas County Clerk John Warren to kick out all occupants of Room 333. This sounded like it could be interesting, if, say, Maurine Dickey’s furs had…
