The thing I felt when I read of Rick Finlan’s recent death was simple sadness. He was a hero. A jerk. So smart, so funny. A great source for reporters. Friend of mine. A jerk. For the better part of two decades Finlan marched against local government chicanery arm in…
Flickr/eyeliamMixing business with pleasure is a dirty game, isn’t it? While necessary, practice spaces exemplify the tension that comes with sharing a small area with a number of personal friends and acquaintances. It’s like living in a tiny house with eight other unbalanced roommates. Between paying rent, keeping the space…
Whoa. Wait up. Take five. Let’s take another look at that Wallace Hall narrative. He’s the University of Texas regent from Dallas who is supposed to be a crazy, nuts, Tea Party, Rick-Perry-buddy, off-the-wall, Neanderthal education-hater who needs to be impeached, criminally prosecuted and generally expunged. OK. But what if…
I found it in the children’s book section of Barnes & Noble. It was colorful. It had birthday balloons all over it. It was sent to my eyeballs from the devil himself. And now, I share this awful news with you: There is an Elf on the Shelf for birthdays…
It’s been a pretty terrible past few years for country music. The rise of “bro country,” music made for and by red-blooded, America-loving, beer-drinking white guys like Luke Bryan and Eric Church, has turned the country music airwaves largely into a cesspool. There is one glaring exception, though: reigning queen…
Maybe you saw the 2011 movie Bernie by Richard Linklater, starring Jack Black, Shirley MacLaine and Matthew McConaughey, or maybe you remember the story. Bernie Tiede was the real-life funeral home worker who befriended widows of Carthage, an East Texas town of some 7,000 persons about 140 miles southeast of…
Dear Mexican: I am a Mexican who owns a successful wholesale liquidation business, which happens to be an industry dominated by Jews and Asians and some gringos. So why does almost everyone, including mexicanos, that visits my warehouse think my business or any successful business (for that matter) is always…
Real estate writer Steve Brown has a story in today’s Dallas Morning News about massive apartment projects springing up around the site of the new Toyota headquarters in Plano. Apparently these will be part of an even bigger sea of apartments not far from the J.C. Penney headquarters up there…
I was on vacation in an especially beautiful corner of New England — a place darkened at the time by some typically wet, chilly, early spring New England weather — when I saw the piece on the op-ed page of The Dallas Morning News by Larry Good. Wow. One of…
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…
I’m in my late 20s, and when you hit that period of your life suddenly things start to change. You might have worse hangovers, the bands you liked in college most likely broke up, everyone is getting married, you desperately try to make the things you liked as a kid…
Recently, Time magazine published a baby-name predictor, developed with Chris Franck, an assistant research professor in statistics at Virginia Tech. Using a model that seems to be at the very least more accurate at generating results than The Dallas Morning News’ Best Neighborhood Survey, Franck reports that Noah has unseated…
In a new series, Choice Cuts, Jonathan Patrick talks with artists – both local and international – about their favorite records. As dusk lingers in the sky, DJ Gabriel Mendoza — one Dallas’ richest resources for music knowledge — meets with me to discuss soul music. He’s upbeat and enthusiastic…
Here’s me in a Dallas school board meeting waiting to see if the board will pass a merit pay system for teachers — the single most important element to date in what is now a 3-year-old program of massive school reform. It would be a monumental change, more significant than…
I have a column in the paper, at least for the first part of this week, about paddling my canoe up White Rock Creek. I know what you’re thinking. “So why haven’t you been fired?” No, listen. It has a lot of important stuff in it. I hat-cammed it, so…
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…
