Opinion & Commentary

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…

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…