Slowly, but surely under the leadership of new executive director Kelly Gottschalk, the moribund Dallas Police and Fire Pension System seems to be digging itself out of the chasm dug during the leadership of former director Richard Tettamant. According to new data released by the pension fund on Thursday and…
Thursday morning, Mike Rawlings, for better and worse, presented the case for his term and a half as Dallas. Speaking to a crowd gathered for something called the City Makers Summit put on by The Atlantic and JP Morgan Chase, Rawlings offered a sampling of the things that make his…
One of the most striking things about the run-up to the trial in Three Expo Events v. The City of Dallas — the fight over Dallas City Council’s vote to ban the Exxxotica adult expo from the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center — is the unanimity with which both sides…
It was hard to tell from the breathless news coverage of Ted Cruz’s hanging on to win the Texas primary and stay in the race with Republican front-runner Donald Trump last week, but the Lone Star State had yet another election with terrible voter turnout. Despite Texas Republicans casting a…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 —…
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…
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…
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…
Leona Allen, deputy managing editor of The Dallas Morning News, who is black, has an interesting piece up on the paper’s opinion blog and also in the print edition yesterday, worrying about a fight between two top black Dallas officials last week. She wonders if black people in Dallas are especially…
Marco Rubio is late. The Florida senator, the guy best positioned to take a run at Donald Trump and save the GOP from itself, had a late night in Houston on Thursday, teaming up with Ted Cruz to take repeated swings at Trump in a debate at the University of…
Donald Trump floated the proposal two-and-a-half months ago with all the careful deliberation of a Fox News comment section troll: Maybe, in the wake of husband-and-wife jihadists shooting up a holiday party in San Bernardino, California, the United States should just ban Muslims. The suggestion was so unapologetically xenophobic and so…
After issuing a warning to Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings yesterday, Exxxotica has sued the city of Dallas, Rawlings, City Manager A.C. Gonzalez, the director of Dallas Convention and Event Services Ron King and each of the seven members of the City Council who voted to ban the sex expo from…
To hear Texas’ longest-serving governor tell it, the single biggest reason he struggled so much to get his 2016 presidential campaign off the ground was the indictment that hung over his head for the 90 days or so he was in the race. He just couldn’t shake the stigma of…
The Standing Wave — the $4 million Trinity River white-water feature for kayakers that was deemed too dangerous to traverse almost as soon as it opened in 2011 — will stay in the river for now. The City Council voted against removing it Wednesday, choosing instead to weigh other options,…
Rebecca Levin, a documentary filmmaker based in Paris, arrived in Tent City on a brisk Wednesday morning in early February with a spiral notebook and a knee-length maroon coat. She’d been assigned by a major French TV network, TF1, to shoot a film about inequality in Dallas, and the sprawling…
Like a lone rider on the horizon, a moment is arriving — right here, right now — when we might be able to do something truly revolutionary and life-changing for the city along the Trinity River. This grand opportunity will be easy to miss, however, because it is riding into…
Finally, Exxxotica CEO J Handy has fulfilled his promise of presenting a completed complaint to the city of Dallas over the City Council’s decision to ban his sex expo from the Kay Bailey Hutchinson Convention Center. Rather than dropping his suit directly on the city’s head by way of a…
