It’s true: Nothing brings out the courage or the imagination in this town like the Trinity River project, our gigantic multibillion-dollar plan to build a magnificent park in the center of the city. But there’s also nothing else quite like it for bringing out the groveling, the up-sucking and under-knuckling…

This moment shall not pass. Sorry, but I have to ring the timeout bell right here. The first major public political unraveling of the Trinity River expressway project took place last week in direct response to criticisms raised by Dallas City Council member Angela Hunt. Thanks to Hunt, the Trinity…

Mullets and rebel flags. Those Dallas Cowboys know their target demographic. Here goes. I am going to write about a sports-related issue. I know better. But I just can’t take any more of this hang-dog, slump-shouldered, foot-scuffling, snot-snuffling agony over the Cotton Bowl game. So the big namesake winter classic…

You just never know. You go to these incredibly boring City Hall meetings in a back room with people mumbling about fill dirt, and you think it is never…ever…EVVVer going to end. And then BAM! The big bomb goes off. Last week I attended a meeting of the Dallas City…

When Hutchins police Detective Emily Owens saw the voodoo pot her colleagues had found beneath a bridge, her reaction was an immediate reflex. “As soon as I saw it, I said a prayer over it and bound the spirit in it. “I believe in evil spirits and good spirits, but…

Sorry, but I feel like Thomas Alva Edison the first time his light bulb lit. I must share. In the last year and a half I have written five columns—count ’em, five, and this one makes an even half-dozen—about the strange case of Jim’s Car Wash on MLK. Six too…

If we had the equivalent of a national sport just for Dallas, it would be “Tip-toe ‘Round the Elephant.” I do get why everybody debating the Bush library at SMU does it. The people against the library don’t want to get drawn off their base into an argument they can’t…

You don’t really have to get too deep into the parts-per-million debate about coal-fired power plants to see the sea change. The really revolutionary shift here is not about the coal. It’s the people opposed to the coal. The roster of people fighting against TXU Corp. on its application to…

My prediction. A few days before Christmas I’m in the car at a light on Matilda at Mockingbird, and this sedan comes rolling around the corner at me with two guys, one at the wheel in his 40s maybe and the other guy riding shotgun probably in his 70s. As…

A portrait for the museum. A Rembrandt. I’m looking at Mitchell Rasansky in a pool of light at the back of a darkened office, staring back at me glumly. Here on Walnut Hill Lane across from Presbyterian Hospital, winter evening has fallen. The secretaries and administrative assistants of the world…

I don’t want you to imagine this scene. It’s not imaginary. I want you to see it. Picture this. South Dallas at night. Jim’s Car Wash, corner of Myrtle Street and MLK Boulevard. Right across Myrtle Street a dope house is doing a land-office business. Behind the car wash on…

OK, now I’m mad. Do you hear me, Wick Allison? Yeah, scary, isn’t it? Let me tell you how I feel about the big project to build parks, lakes and roads along the Trinity River downtown. I love it. We need more Austin here, less Waco. It costs money. We…

Steve Blow, a metro page columnist in The Dallas Morning News, wrote a column last week about the mayoral candidacy of former Dallas Observer music editor Zac Crain. I sometimes enjoy Blow’s stuff, which has a comforting kind of good-old-boy twang to it, like a mouth harp on a hay…

How to begin? Well, that’s what I’m writing about, isn’t it? Where to begin, how to end. I put up with this stuff from my dogs every day. I walk three of them—Otto, my 900-pound Weimaraner; Skeeter, my son’s seriously bloated toy fox terrier; and Dottie, my mother-in-law’s 900-year-old border…

First, the big news, the part that has to do with you. In 1998 you were told the Dallas taxpayers’ share of the Trinity River Project was $246 million and would never go higher. What I don’t think anybody has told you since then is that under Dallas Mayor Laura…

I hated giving this kid rides home, not because I was afraid of his neighborhood—maybe I was a little—but more because after we put him out of the car and drove off, my heart sank, as if we had just left a naked infant alone on an ice floe. It…

Maybe Katrina will save Dallas. All we need is a leader willing to put human lives and safety ahead of real estate deals and decorative bridges. Please let me know if you spot anybody like that within 10 miles of City Hall. Last Friday in Chicago, a panel of engineering…

So once in a while I don’t get something just perfectly right-on, 100 percent gold-plate correct. So, sue…uh, cancel that. In a case where I have been less than totally right I need to provide…well, I’m still not going to call it a correction…elaboration. I’m not talking about actual factual…