Tyler, Texas, which has produced many yellow roses and U.S. Representative Louie Gohmert, is also home to Neal Barton. Barton is the news director of KETK, the local NBC affiliate, who occasionally takes the liberty of delivering a bombastic on-air op-ed. Think Dale Hansen, minus the humor and self-awareness. On…
Transforming Valley View Center from a dystopian wasteland into Dallas Midtown, a mammoth, 450-acre complex of restaurants and offices and stores and apartments and retail, won’t be cheap. More than $10 billion was the figure floated when developer Scott Beck first went public with the idea last year. Most of…
Those of you who listened to Friday’s Final Four games on the radio were forced to endure not only a complete lack of moving images but also sportscaster Jim Gray’s brief but remarkably inane sideline interview with Jerry Jones, in which the Cowboys’ owner noted approvingly that AT&T Stadium’s TV…
The Dallas Public Library has a fraught relationship with downtown’s homeless population, on the one hand reluctantly accepting that they are members of the “public” the institution was built to serve, while simultaneously wishing they weren’t. So feel free to be deeply cynical about the library’s new “Homeless Engagement Initiative,”…
On paper, Patriot’s Crossing is still going to be a pleasant, 162-unit development on Lancaster Road offering military veterans affordable housing with easy access to the VA Medical Center. The problem — one of them, anyway — is that the generously subsidized project is can’t seem to make the jump…
You needn’t stray far from where where the Texas Horse Park’s barn and activity building are going up off Pemberton Hill Road to start finding goat skulls. A couple of feet into the mesquite trees should do; the bleached white bone is impossible to miss against the underbrush…
Pallavi Dhawan is still facing charges in the death of her 10-year-old son, Arnav, even though the final autopsy report ruled that “natural disease is most likely.” It’s for that and other reasons that the Frisco Police Department seems to have jumped the gun when it held a press conference…
To everyone in town this weekend for what are apparently a series of basketball games played by unpaid teenagers, we say welcome! Welcome to North Texas! How was the weather last night? That bad, huh? Well. If a few tornadoes and storms and the odd bit of baseball-sized hail are…
Two years ago, SMU finally climbed off the Princeton Review’s list of the country’s most “LGBT-unfriendly” schools. The news was welcomed by administrators, who have worked hard to shed the university’s homophobic image, but it hardly meant that The Hilltop had suddenly become a bastion of progressive inclusiveness. Case in…
Robbing someone is, without exception, a terrible idea. Robbing someone in broad daylight one block from police headquarters? About as dumb as ideas get. That seems what happened this morning in the 1200 block of South Lamar Street:…
Among the things you’d probably rather not see at a baseball game, coming in somewhere below a barrage of apocalyptic hell fire but slightly above an opposing team’s walk-off home run, is a tornado looming over the left-field fence. It’s a vision concern that might inspire panic in some. Ah,…
The Texas Department of Transportation and its transportation-planning surrogates have unsheathed their latest weapon against the proposal to tear down I-345, and that weapon is poor people. The argument was first voiced by Dallas Morning News editorial writer Rodger Jones, who wondered a few days ago why the urban types…
We’re all getting sophisticated enough to agree that climate change is real, climate-deniers are wrong and someone should do something about it. Good for us. But what any of that actually means is still a major point of debate. On Monday the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released…
In the two years since the Dallas City Council made twice-per-week watering restrictions permanent the water situation in North Texas hasn’t improved much. We’re still in severe drought, lake levels are still low and long-term projections of drought and population growth still aren’t pretty. A slightly less verdant lawn seems…
The one-year anniversary of the West fertilizer plant explosion that killed 15 people is a couple weeks away, and will no doubt bring with it some thoughtful coverage from various media outlets around town. Among that coverage, we now know, will be an hour-long documentary from WFAA, which will have…
The margins in the illicit cigarette trade are relatively low. Tobacco is legal, for one, eliminating the risk-based premium that comes with trading in illegal drugs, and there’s a lot of competition, which puts downward pressure on retail prices. But there is a margin, enough of one to attract entrepreneurial…
It used to be that, four or five times a year, Dallas would have an auction and sell its tax-foreclosed properties to the highest bidder. The last one happened on June 13, 2013, two weeks before the City Council complained that the houses were falling into the hands of slum…
In case you missed it, NPR ran a piece yesterday about Texas’ moderately surprising move toward bike-friendliness. The state, especially its cities, have been adding trails, bike lanes and pro-cycling policies at a respectable, if not quite Portland-esque, clip. Just look at Dallas’ ambitious bike plan, with its plans to…
Texas doesn’t necessarily want the lesser prairie chicken to die, but Texas is vehemently opposed to doing anything that might prevent the bird from dying. Late last year Texas was vowing to fight any efforts by the feds to place the dying bird on an endangered list, but the state…
It’s cold comfort now, a day and a half after Stephen Curry’s game-ending dagger lifted the Golden State Warriors to a 122-120 victory over the Mavs at the American Airlines Center on Tuesday night, but the NBA has ruled that the Jermaine O’Neal “block” that set the stage for Curry’s…
Update: Never mind. An appeals court overturned Gilmore’s decision. Original post: There have been two significant developments since the Texas Supreme Court ruled Friday that the state doesn’t have to say where it got the pentobarbital it will use to kill death row inmates Tommy Lynn Sells and Ramiro Hernandez-Llanas…
Dallas County Schools — the local school district with no schools or students but lots and lots of school buses — sent word last Friday that it was preparing to unveil the “School Bus of the Future,” and that this futuristic vehicle will “will revolutionize school bus transit and exponentially…
