It’s that time of year when we look back at what was and give serious thought to what we need to do to become better people in the year ahead. Which, come to think of it, probably explains why we drink so heavily on New Year’s Eve. Either direction we…
Now that 2015 is drawing to a close, the time is right to continue what has become an Observer tradition: looking back at the year that was and marveling at the incredible number of traffic tickets North Texas municipalities handed out to drivers. The methodology is simple. Texas’ Office of…
Sean Fitzgerald hated working for a big law firm. After moving to a small firm, he discovered that he hated that, too. “I finally realized I need to be out, I need to be moving, I need to be touching earth and touching sky or I’ll be suffocated.” And so,…
There’s an alternate universe in which Dallas doesn’t exist. I mean, Dallas still technically has a physical presence and it shows up on maps and stuff, but it doesn’t exist in the way that people normally think of cities as existing, with people living, working and recreating. All of that…
Zachary Akins is small for his age. He’s 15 and slightly built, with nerdy-chic horn-rimmed glasses that swallow half his face. He prefers playing video games to sports and keeps a bottle of hand sanitizer on his desk at school. He’s also into art. When we met at a Starbucks…
You can probably trust the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on this one. The dam holding back Lake Lewisville probably isn’t going to fail in the immediate future. The 180 billion or so gallons of water it holds back probably won’t burst free and wash away the half-million people in its…
For what it’s worth, Texas is still the death-penalty capital of the United States, which in turn employs capital punishment more frequently than any other western country. Only Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and China — none of them shining beacons of human rights and individual liberty — kill more prisoners. In 2015,…
The popularity of Lakewood Elementary has effectively warped the East Dallas real-estate market as upper-middle-class-to-rich families outbid one another for homes within the school’s attendance boundaries. This makes a certain amount of sense, as Lakewood is a really good school that the surrounding community is heavily invested in, but it’s also…
In 2012, after two decades of steadily marching skyward, Texas’ obesity rate dropped, from 30.4 percent to 29.2 percent. That hardly made Texas thin, to be sure; the state was still the 19th fattest state in the chubbiest country in human history, but the drop theoretically meant that there were…
There comes a time in all Dallas parents’ lives when they must decide whether their iron-clad commitment to city living is really clad in enough iron to see them through a dozen years of DISD. The crisis point often arrives with the letter from Dealey or Harry Stone Montessori informing…
On Tuesday night, the Denton City Council set the city on a dark path from which it may never recover. After hours of wrenching debate, the council voted 5-2 to give Buc-ee’s Ltd. $8 million in tax incentives to build one of its beaver-themed convenience store-cum-amusement parks on a vacant plot…
Gazing south from the upper floors of City Hall, the first thing you’ll probably notice is the shell of the old Plaza Hotel rising 12 stories just across Interstate 30. The second thing you notice is how ugly it is. The beige monolith was charmless when it opened as a…
Every so often, city officials descend on a particularly dismal corner of southern Dallas, say a few words about the neighborhood’s bright future and then gaze appreciatively while hulking construction equipment tears apart a decrepit house or apartment complex as TV cameras roll. It’s an attention-grabbing and even useful spectacle. Far…
Late Sunday night, The Dallas Morning News posted a banal piece announcing that Mayor Mike Rawlings had raised $30.5 million for a southern Dallas investment fund, a cornerstone of his GrowSouth initiative. The most controversial thing in the article was that the fund — which doesn’t involve tax money, just the…
Although you are already well aware, either because you are one of the 66 percent of Dallasites who rent your home or because you’ve wondered at the bewildering number of luxury apartments sprouting up around the city’s core, the point bears repeating: The rent is too damn high. This is true…
Two weeks ago, Ben Sandifer took off from his job as an accountant and headed down to City Hall to plead with the City Plan Commission to vote against rezoning a portion of the Texas Horse Park. He didn’t have a problem with the zoning change per se, which was…
On Friday morning in the bowels of the Frank Crowley Courts building, Dallas County’s leading criminal justice policymakers reminisced about the bad ol’ days at the Lew Sterrett jail. County Commissioner John Wiley Price recalled the time five years ago when the county, faced with a choice between drastically trimming…
You can glean many lessons from the recent tension at the University of Missouri, the most trenchant being that life for minority students on many college campuses sucks, which college administrators seem ill-equipped to understand. And then there’s this: A new generation of social-media apps has emerged that provide young people…
Now that she has returned from the lengthy mental-health sabbatical that put a bold-faced exclamation point on her remarkably tumultuous first several months in office, Dallas County District Attorney Susan Hawk is projecting an air of super-competence. Not only is she fielding the public’s questions (and quite deftly, by all…
The forebears of the modern-day feral hog arrived in Texas well before there was a Texas, tagging along with and occasionally escaping from early Spanish explorers in 17th century. They took to the wild, where they spread like kudzu and interbred with subsequent waves of formerly domesticated swine gone rogue,…
On the front page of its Metro section last Monday, The Dallas Morning News had a piece reporting that the Dallas Police Department’s attrition rate (i.e. the number of officers who resigned, got fired, retired or died last year) was higher than it’s been in Chief David Brown’s five-year tenure leading the…
You may have read about how firefighters discovered several dozen marijuana plants inside a burning house at the corner of Peavy Road and Carnegie Drive in East Dallas on Sunday. Crazy, right? Well, what you may not have realized is that, after the fire, a team from the Observer discovered an antique…
