Last weekend was a good one for Texas’ Canadian-born junior senator, Ted Cruz. He won caucuses in Kansas and Maine — Cruz’s chief rival, Donald Trump, did note that Cruz likely did well in Maine because it was “close to Canada” — and finished closer than expected to Trump in…
You have to wonder: Are daily newspaper people ever struck by the fact that a movie about what they do is so much more popular than they are? Spotlight, Tom McCarthy’s movie about The Boston Globe’s 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative series on child molestation among Catholic clergy, was two things…
Anyone from Dallas sitting down to watch the first couple of episodes of season four of Netflix’s House of Cards over the weekend was bound to have felt like they took half a step or so into the uncanny valley. Keeping spoilers to a minimum, the season begins with First Lady…
The Texas Rangers started 2015 as an abomination. That went 7-14 in April and appeared set to wander as haplessly through the season as they had in 2014. They ended the season as a revelation, reversing what, at the end of July, had been an eight-game American League West deficit…
Texas’ Super Tuesday primary featured one of the most important elections in the state’s history. We’re not talking, of course, about the presidential nominating contests, which were dominated in expected fashion by Texas’ own Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton, who won her second Lone Star State primary. Nor are we…
Dear Republicans: Let me get this straight. You want to take back Donald Trump. You want to take Trump off the table. But you want to give us Ted Cruz instead. I know you’re not totally insane. Your problem is that many of you are not from Texas. You don’t…
As with so many things — sprucing up the Trinity River, fixing Fair Park, combating domestic violence and poverty, regulating gas drilling — Dallas’ next step in dealing with the city’s lack of affordable housing should be to form a …. wait for it … task force. On Friday, the…
Rebecca Graves, a detective with the Grapevine police, was driving back to the station one day in 2012 when she heard the call from dispatch: Possible overdose off Holly Street, officer assistance requested. Graves, an eight-year veteran of the force, usually worked violent crimes. But Holly was just a few…
On Wednesday night, NBC 5 carried a report about a DeSoto mother, Ayanna Smith, calling for the immediate dismissal of a teacher at The Meadows Elementary for paddling her son, a kindergartener. Which doesn’t seem that far out of bounds given that Texas’ definition of criminal assault (“intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly…
The Dallas public school system has announced it will launch a new high school in 2017 using the city of Dallas as a “laboratory” to teach kids about architecture, public policy and community development. Is this going to be one of those “scared straight” things? You know, like when they…
With the possible exception of our love for Whataburger, nothing unites Texans like their hatred of toll roads. Few reliable public opinion polls directly measure the level of hatred, but the Texas A&M Transportation Institute’s semi-regular statewide transportation survey provides a taste of the depth of feeling on the issue…
Different things can set off my paranoid tendencies, especially a room full of people who look like Masonic Illuminati who parked their black helicopters out back. That’s pretty much how I was feeling last week when I sat down to a white-linen table setting in the Fairmount Hotel ballroom —…
The battle over House Bill 2, Texas’ 2013 anti-abortion law, is really two fights. There’s the battle that’s been waged in federal courtrooms and there’s the rhetorical struggle among activists on both sides of the issue and the state’s politicians. Wednesday morning, that first clash reached its inevitable destination —…
Tracy Murphree stood in front of his campaign signs, speaking to a room full of supporters, some wearing red T-shirts with the words “Team Murphree” on the front and “Justice is coming 2016” on the back. The road to earning the Republican nomination for Denton County sheriff has been long…
Opinions about the F-35 Lightning II are ubiquitous, and they are usually focused on its staggering $200 million-per-airplane cost. Other coverage details the engineering struggles of the airplane as the Pentagon program advances, concentrating on evaluations from the Government Accountability Office and internal Pentagon program evaluators. The Texas factory outside…
For whatever reason, Dallas is almost always under everybody’s radar and off the charts where national issues are concerned. Well, The Atlantic, the 159-year-old monthly news and analysis magazine that has won more magazine awards than any other monthly, just noticed us. It’s not a great debut, but it should…
A 55-year-old “non-pregnant” patient from DeSoto who traveled recently to El Salvador is the fourth person to test positively for infection with the Zika virus in Dallas County, the county’s Health and Human Services Department said Tuesday. Of the four Dallas cases so far confirmed by the Centers for Disease…
No public space or entity in Dallas has thrilled more hearts or broken more hearts than Fair Park. It is the place where two origin myths, one white and sassy, one black and resolute, were born. No surprise, then, that its future is as bitterly disputed as its past. The…
Over the past two decades or so, Lower Greenville residents have waged a heroic and largely successful battle to reclaim their neighborhood from the drunk 20-somethings who treated it like a never-ending frat party. With help from the city, they strong-armed problematic bars into closing at midnight. They got the street…
In a move that surely has nothing to do with Texas’ primary election today, George Nash, a volunteer staff member for Dwaine Caraway, has sued Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price for assault. Nash claims that during the melee between Caraway, who’s challenging Price for his seat on the commissioner’s…
Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo’s lawsuit against the NFL highlights one of the league’s essential hypocrisies – the fact that, although it is dependent on interest from gamblers and gambling interests, the league keeps visible endorsement of gambling at arm’s length.
Dallas, thank goodness, is not Cleveland or Detroit. Its economy and identity have never had the Rust Belt dependence on manufacturing, and so it hasn’t been hollowed out by American manufacturing’s collapse. But make no mistake. Even though the Dallas area’s population and economy are both famously booming, the city…
