If it’s anything, the Ridgecrest apartment complex, located almost all the way to Mountain Creek Lake in far West Dallas, is proof that in the last half-century most local and national government programs designed to end poverty have been stupid. The good news is that Dallas is beginning to figure…
One part of the police reforms advocated by Dallas police Chief U. Renee Hall worries me. Apparently in response to calls from community activists for a more level playing field where police shootings are concerned, the chief is in favor of doing away with the so-called 72-hour “cooling off period”…
This won’t take a minute, I promise. I am writing on New Year’s Eve day, trying to peer ahead. I have this one question: Why wouldn’t President Donald Trump and his supporters interpret special counsel Robert Mueller’s relative silence on collusion in exactly the opposite way they have been interpreting…
Looking over the few end-of-the-year prediction pieces I have composed, I am embarrassed to see that I have written about the year ahead for Dallas as if it were the white year. What about the black year? But, wait. We all know there’s no such thing as white and black…
A 15-year-old male is under lock and key in a Dallas juvenile detention center charged with the rapes of five women and the murder of one, awaiting a court hearing at which a judge may do what no one else has been able in 15 years — turn the kid…
A new year is about to dawn over Dallas, and it’s going to be for all the marbles. I’m writing about it in a piece that will run next week. But I want to preview that a little by sharing some things I am learning about how we elect mayors…
Texas State Rep. Rafael Anchia is doing a larger version of the same thing my own Dallas city council member did for people on my street two years ago – using political pressure to push a natural gas utility to clean up its act. Sometimes we have to use politics…
Tell me this. Recently I looked at the website of a prominent Dallas consulting firm and noticed they have a social media specialist on their staff who “guides paid social strategy … working with clients to generate content that educates, motivates and empowers target audiences to act in ways that…
If former San Antonio mayor Julian Castro really wants to be president of the United States, maybe he’ll come back to Dallas and tell us why, when he was President Barack Obama’s secretary of Housing and Urban Development, he killed our best shot at overcoming racial segregation. Castro is testing…
Here’s a challenge I put to my fellow lifelong loyal Dem libtards: Back during Lewinsky, did we ever say we didn’t care if Bill Clinton broke the law? I’m serious. I don’t think it’s an easy question. Was there ever a point during the Monica Lewinsky scandal when I told…
The 2019 Dallas mayoral race is beginning to look like a bad parody of an old-time Broadway musical. I don’t know what to do but tell you about it. Real estate developer Mike Ablon filed legally required paperwork appointing a campaign treasurer a month ago for what D Magazine and The…
Last week I walked into Gilley’s in the Cedars and found a huge room packed shoulder-to-shoulder with sleek, gray-headed men in great suits or golf leisure clothes, many of them arm and arm with skinny women sporting $220 hair dyes and shoes beyond my comprehension. The event was the unveiling…
Dallas confronts an enormous moral and psychological challenge in the case of former Dallas police Officer Amber Guyger, charged with murder in the shooting death of Botham Jean, a young accountant killed Sept. 6 in his own apartment. This is one we have to get right, and it won’t be…
If I ask a guy to his face if he’s running for mayor and he says no, can I still write a newspaper column saying I think he’s running for mayor anyway? Yes. And you know why? Because this is America. You don’t have to believe me, but if you…
The Dallas mayor’s race so far is intriguing, sure, but it’s also madness. One guy has been in the race from the beginning. Other unexpected people are showing up, tossing their hats in the ring. Another person whom everybody assumed would run has just now taken her hat out of…
Let’s look at this just in terms of real life and normal business practice. In late November 2017, two months after Dallas police Chief U. Renee Hall arrived on the job from Detroit, detectives from the department’s intelligence unit “escorted” all of the detectives in the vice unit to their…
The 55th anniversary of the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Dallas has slipped behind us already. The few reminiscence stories in the daily newspaper this year all seemed like reaches. That really is the miracle of time, is it not, that it can wear, wash and smooth away…
We have one of those doorbells you can see out of. You know what I mean. With a TV camera in it? You can talk to people through your doorbell. We were early adopters. When we first got our two-way doorbell, they were still fairly uncommon. We could still get…
Last week, almost lost in the dense postpartum coverage of the Amazon’s-not-coming-here story, I found what I thought was an utterly fascinating and infuriating vignette. It was something I should have guessed had happened. It was never a secret. It was something I normally would have assumed was happening. But…
Call it wild speculation, but I think we’ve just been struggling as a community to figure out the wildly troubling case of Amber Guyger and Botham Jean, a terrible event in which a white Dallas cop shot and killed an innocent black man in his own apartment last Sept. 6…
Last week I found myself trying to explain Beto to a New Yorker. I didn’t do a good job. I do better with a day to think about it, a desk, a web browser and an editor than I do trying to talk on my feet. I was taken aback…
You probably knew this. I did not. Dennis Rodman, the retired basketball player who paved the way for President Donald Trump in North Korea, is from Dallas. OK, you white? Then here’s something neither one of us knew. Back in the day, black kids had their own secret tunnel into…
