Opinion & Commentary

Last night the Dallas school board passed into law a merit pay system for teachers in the biggest victory yet for school reformers and for Superintendent Mike Miles. We probably are about to find ourselves under the national microscope as media and academics from everywhere come here to hover. They…

Dear Mexican: I’m a half-mexicana, half-gabacha working as an appointment scheduler in a medical office. I’m one of a handful of schedulers there who speak Spanish. I’ve noticed that often when a Spanish-speaking patient calls, gets a schedulers who doesn’t speak español and waits for someone to call them back…

This, believe it or not, is an entire column about me paddling a canoe up White Rock Creek. Me up a creek with a paddle. That’s gonna be it. Well, wait. Of course I do see certain metaphysical significance. You don’t think I would just take off and devote a…

Certain amount of talk going around about the superintendent of schools in Paris, Texas, who shot off an angry public letter to parents attacking the validity of statewide student achievement tests. Apparently Paris ISD Superintendent Paul Jones has been getting viral attaboys from test-haters the world over after telling Paris…

A small dagger pierced my heart when my wife told me our 27-year-old son’s reaction to the news story she had emailed him about the n-word-using police commissioner in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire. He emailed her back: “Wow. Way up there.” I took that to mean that our fifth-generation native-Texan son…

North Dallas state Representative Jason Villalba has been taking a certain amount of heat lately for courting the California hot-sauce-maker, Huy Fong Food Plants, trying to sell them on the idea of relocating to North Texas in order to escape local environmental complaints in the company’s hometown of Irwindale, California…

I have a piece in the paper this week about D Magazine publisher Wick Allison and his turn-around on the Trinity River toll road — now he’s against it — for which I genuinely admire him. I have been around people his age in the past, and my impression is…

Today we have a lead editorial in The Dallas Morning News, our city’s sole and only daily newspaper, which starts off with a certain mistake that wounds my heart every time I see it. Again today they say, “There’s a troubled neighborhood along South Lamar where residential property has suffered…

Whoa. I’m in the checkout lane at Tom Thumb reading the May issue of D Magazine so I won’t have to buy a copy. Oops, smudged the cover, sorry. Tore a page, sorry. Then I see this story by Tim Rogers: “The Trinity Parkway Is Dead.” On the way to…

A career as a rough-and-ready entrepreneurial job creator just ain’t what it used to be. I’m thinking about Cyrus McCormick sweating his brow off at the smithy on his dad’s farm in Virginia where he eventually banged together the first horse-drawn reaper in 1831, or Henry Ford 65 years later…

By Thierry Peremarti A pop singer who has enjoyed a 50-year career and sold more than 100,000,000 records shouldn’t need an introduction. But Johnny Hallyday does. The French singer, who will close his 13-date North American tour with a nine-piece band at the House of Blues this Thursday, has never…

When I saw the big news yesterday from New York about the Dallas billionaire Wyly brothers — a federal jury found them guilty on all counts in a $550 million tax evasion case — I had to go back to Joe Guinto’s excellent story last year in D Magazine: I…

Congratulations. You’ve been married for more than one year! That means you get to start celebrating your success at staying married or failure at divorcing once a year every year! The Internet says that there are traditional anniversary gifts for each year of marriage. But the traditional list of anniversary…

If there was ever a window for the Dallas schools home rule initiative to reach some reasonable outcome, it may just have closed. Mark Melton, a lawyer and education activist, made a good faith effort last week to bring about a compromise people could live with, but people told him…

Yesterday afternoon was scary. True story: I was at home. I go to the kitchen to watch the rain lash the driveway. I can hear the tornado sirens. Well, sirens. Then, the rain stops. Sirens stop. Silence. Suddenly, I hear the dreaded “sounded like a freight train” sound — a…

I have a column in the newspaper this week about drinking water fluoridation and a controversy that kicked up recently when three Dallas City Council members responded politely to an anti-fluoridation activist. Dallas Morning News columnist Jacquielynn Floyd was acerbic, choleric and apoplectic, invoking the Red Scare, Howdy Doody and…

During a recent city council meeting, Regina Imburgia, a 58-year-old homemaker and self-described anti-fluoridation activist, walked to the microphone to talk about why Dallas should stop putting fluoride in its drinking water. She had spoken to the council several times before, and also to the television reporters who cover City…

You maybe know by now that a some-kind-of-a-whatever-committee at City Hall has been kicking around the idea of giving the Dallas City Council a big pay raise, from $37,500 to $60,000 a year. Eric Nicholson here pointed out last month that council members would make more than rookie cops and…

Are you a musician? Is your group having issues? Ask Fan Landers! Critic Jessica Hopper has played in and managed bands, toured internationally, booked shows, produced records, worked as a publicist and is the author of The Girls’ Guide to Rocking, a how-to for teen ladies. She is here to…