OPINION

08/24/2008

Steven Malanga: The plague of professional panhandling
Cities have overcome myriad obstacles in revitalizing their downtowns, but they face a new wave of "spangers" (that is, spare-change artists) who threaten their newfound prosperity by harassing residents, tourists and businesses. Unlike their predecessors, many of these new beggars aren't helpless victims or even homeless. Rather, they belong to a swelling community of street people who have made panhandling their calling.

Police Chief David Kunkle: Panhandling in Dallas
We get a significant number of complaints. People know that we have a city ordinance that prohibits panhandling. There's some misunderstanding about the ordinance. The ordinance doesn't pertain to all panhandling.

Mark Davis: Convention should bring end to Obama-mania
In Denver, the sun sets over the Rocky Mountains. That sun will shine brightly for the Democratic nominee this week as he enjoys his last few days of unfettered adulation. But by Friday, as attention turns to the Republican convention, the sun may also set on the eight months of Obama-mania.

Rod Dreher: Where pragmatism goes to die
Argue for the proposition that not every fight across the globe is properly America's, and you set yourself up for being called soft on tyranny. Who wants to vote for a squish? We prefer to believe the romantic image of ourselves and our country and to deal with the world as we wish it were rather than as it is.

Mary Sanchez: English spoken here (as it is everywhere)
To all those who fear the invasion of our shores by foreign languages – I'm speaking to you, stalwarts of the "English Only" movement – seriously, you need to travel more.

Olivia Judson: Testing genes, solving little
At the heart of this story, there is a paradox. We have accumulated huge databases on human genetic differences – but many of the differences appear to be more or less irrelevant.

Jessica Sidman: You don't have to burn bras anymore
While baby boomers often accuse my generation of apathy or laziness, we are leading a quiet revolution of our own. It's not happening in the streets, but we are making ourselves heard. It's all happening via the Internet.

Sally Kohn: Gen Y's online activism isn't enough
Internet activism is individualistic. It's great for a sense of interconnectedness, but it does not bind individuals in shared struggle like the face-to-face activism of the 1960s and '70s. The real challenges in our society won't politely go away with a few clicks of a mouse. Or even a million.

Point of Contact: Principal Clarissa Plair
Our Q&A with Clarissa Plair, principal of Felix G. Botello Elementary School in Oak Cliff .

Talking Points
Some of the week's most interesting comments, from Rick Perry to Condoleezza Rice to a Chinese gymnastics coach.

08/17/2008

Rod Dreher: Peak oil is coming, and we're unready
Has the world already reached peak oil, a time of permanently high oil prices and shortages that will profoundly change our way of life? The answer, I think, is likely yes, but the proximity of this catastrophe is not the most important question to ask.

Clayton M. McCleskey: Don't be so quick to chide America's 'failing' schools
t's back-to-school time, and before you know it, the debate about if, how and why America's schools are “failing” will fire up again. Despite all the doom and gloom, after a year studying in Europe, I have grown confident that the American approach to education is a model the rest of the world should seek to emulate.

Terry Box: Gas is sky-high, but I'm not junking my great American joyride
My car swills gas, downing shot after shot of rich red petrol. It rumbles rudely at stoplights, scaring the Prius drivers around me. Its flinty suspension – stiff and unyielding as a tax-department bureaucrat – pounds my middle-aged back on rough roads.

Alan Ehrenhalt: The great downtown migration
Will Chicago, the city of slaughterhouses and skyscrapers, soon look like haute bourgeois 19th-century Vienna?

Damian Mosley: The obesity blame game
People-watching in the United States can be a taxing endeavor. Besides the unfavorable ratio of plants to concrete, the neighborhoods I have called home are filled with legions of morbidly obese, diabetic and hypertensive adults and children who struggle daily with their afflictions.

Book club participants' take on 'The Long Emergency'
Book club participants made astute observations about The Long Emergency and how reading the book affected their thoughts on oil dependence. A sampling from the blog:

One last chance to share your thoughts, in person

Talking Points
"This is not 1968, and the invasion of Czechoslovakia, where Russia can invade its neighbor, occupy a capital, overthrow a government and get away with it . Things have changed." – Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, on Russia's invasion of Georgia (The New York Times, Wednesday)

Point of Contact: Carlos Quintanilla of Acción America
Our Q&A with Carlos Quintanilla, president of Acción America. His immigrant-advocacy group plans a protest at Trinity Medical Center in Carrollton over the arrest of María Martínez, suspected to be an illegal immigrant and accused of submitting a false Social Security number with her job application.

08/10/2008

Tod Robberson: Housing the poor alongside the rich
If someone wanted to devise a plan for maintaining racial and social inequality in our city, it would probably look a lot like Conrad Hilton's formula for building successful hotels: location, location, location.

Rod Dreher: Solzhenitsyn and Wojtyla, tragic prophets
Two men stood astride the 20th century as prophets without peer: Pope John Paul II and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Their experience and testimony contained and transcended the terrible truths of the bloodiest epoch in human history. And they died tragically – tragic, in the Greek sense: They were admired and even beloved. But largely ignored.

John Hoberman: Myths of Olympic proportions
The Olympic Games were founded to bridge cultural divides and promote peace. Instead, they often mask human rights abuses, do little to spur political change and lend legitimacy to unsavory governments. Worse, the Beijing Games, which opened Friday night, could still be the most controversial of all.

Tim Wu: Peak oil, meet peak bandwidth
Americans today spend almost as much on bandwidth – the capacity to move information – as we do on energy. A family of four likely spends several hundred dollars a month on cellphones, cable television and Internet connections, which is about what we spend on gas and heating oil.

Olivia Judson: Feel the eyes upon you
LONDON – Imagine a photograph of the London skyline – the houses of Parliament, the clock tower of Big Ben. Now add, floating in the sky above, a large pair of eyes looking at you.

Tom Arnold: A humanitarian disaster may be looming
The cost of food is a matter of life and death for the poorest people in the world. The United Nations estimates that at least 14 million people in the Horn of Africa are in urgent need of food aid due to conflict, dramatic rises in food costs and severe drought. A region-wide humanitarian disaster may be looming.

Talking Points
"What the Latino community wants today is respect . How do you tell the community that César Chávez isn't good enough when this city has a 60 percent Latino population?" – Mayor Pro Tem Elba Garcia, on renaming Ross Avenue for the late Mexican-American labor leader (The Dallas Morning News, Wednesday)

08/03/2008

Drake Bennett: Amber Alerts are more theater than child protection
The disappearance of Brooke Bennett last month seemed exactly the sort of case that the Amber Alert system was created for. The 12-year-old went missing from a convenience store in Randolph, Vt., and the next day state police issued an Amber Alert, Vermont's first.

Rod Dreher: The hate-filled P.Z. Myers
"It is finished," professor P.Z. Myers wrote on his popular science blog. You've heard the line before. Those were the last words Jesus Christ was said to have uttered on the cross.

Mariana Greene: Time to add vibrancy to downtown Dallas
Downtown Dallas is not hot, and it's not cool.

John L. Allen Jr.: Catholicism's commitment to birth control ban more solid than ever
Forty years ago this summer, Pope Paul VI provoked the greatest uproar against a papal edict in the long history of the Roman Catholic Church when he reiterated the church's ban on artificial birth control by issuing the encyclical Humanae Vitae. At the time, commentators predicted that not only would the teaching collapse under its own weight, but it might well bring the "monarchical papacy" down with it. Those forecasts badly underestimated the capacity of the Catholic Church to resist change and to stand its ground.

John McWhorter: Many overlook Bush's compassion toward black America
As the Bush administration draws to a close, the good-thinking consensus is that President Bush's record with black America can be summed up largely by the name of a certain hurricane. Indeed, by the end of his first term, it was considered a mark of sagacity to dismiss George W. Bush as numb to race issues.

Jeffrey Brown: The Long Emergency is here
James Howard Kunstler has long criticized the suburban way of life as ugly, wasteful and destructive of authentic community. But in recent years, he has proclaimed that suburbia would crash and burn because the one thing necessary to its sustenance – cheap and abundant fossil fuel – is fast disappearing.

Trey Garrison: It's not time to panic over peak oil
I thought I saw something familiar in James Howard Kunstler's doomsday peak oil prophecy that promises to wipe clean from Earth all the things that Mr. Kunstler can't stand. Sure enough there was – almost everything he predicts from peak oil is what he predicted a decade ago, only the villain – avenging angel? – was the Y2K bug.

James Howard Kunstler: An excerpt from his book 'The Long Emergency'
Carl Jung, one of the fathers of psychology, famously remarked that "people cannot stand too much reality." What you're about to read may challenge your assumptions about the kind of world we live in, and especially the kind of world into which events are propelling us. We are in for a rough ride through uncharted territory.

Talking Points
"I'm trying to save the planet ." – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, impatiently explaining why she's using parliamentary maneuvers to prevent GOP members from offering energy policy alternatives (Politico.com, Monday)

Point of Contact: Bob Barr
Our Q&A with Bob Barr, former Republican member of Congress and current Libertarian Party candidate for president

07/27/2008

Barbara Ehrenreich: This land is their land
I took a little vacation recently – nine hours in Sun Valley, Idaho, before an evening speaking engagement. The sky was deep blue, the air crystalline, the hills green and not yet on fire.

The Economist: Why are Americans shunning the Great Outdoors?
On July Fourth, normally the busiest public holiday of the year, tourists were put off by high gas prices and wildfires raging across California. On Memorial Day, it was cold. In 1999, there was a grisly murder. In 1997, the Merced River flooded, inundating a hotel and wiping out hundreds of campsites.

Javier Marías: How tourists are ruining the world's most treasured cities
During the 1980s, I lived in Venice intermittently for a couple of years. At the time, I was struck by the fact that it seemed to be the only city in the world where visitors did not behave as they did in the other cities I knew – that is, with more or less the same respect as you would when visiting someone's house.

Christopher Beam: The quest for this year's sexy swing demographic
Every four years, the media announce which slice of American voters – Soccer Moms, NASCAR Dads, Angry White Males or One-Armed Vegetarian Live-In Boyfriends – will decide the election for the rest of us.

Mark Davis: Gore's 'final decade' of extremism
I'm sure that Al Gore felt he was channeling JFK as he issued his challenge to America to generate electricity without a speck of fossil fuel within 10 years.

Derrick Z. Jackson: Al Gore is a sound pick for the environment
It is unlikely that a Nobel laureate, Oscar winner and former vice president of the United States would return to the nuts and bolts of the federal bureaucracy, but it is obvious who Barack Obama or John McCain should make either energy secretary or administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Rod Dreher: Bullying marks you for life
The eighth-grade thugs would pin younger boys to the ground in the locker room. The ringleader would put his fist into a plastic cone and try to shove it into his victims' rectums. His pack stood around and moaned to torment the weaker kids.

Wesley J. Smith: Granting apes rights will only devalue human life
The Great Ape Project was launched just 15 years ago by Princeton utilitarian bioethicist Peter Singer and Italian animal rights philosopher Paola Cavalieri with the stated goal of obtaining a U.N. declaration welcoming apes into a "community of equals" with humans.

Donald G. McNeil Jr.: When human rights extend to nonhumans
If you caught your son burning ants with a magnifying glass, would it bother you less than if you found him torturing a mouse with a soldering iron? How about a snake? How about his sister?

Talking Points
"People of Berlin, people of the world, this is our moment ." – Sen. Barack Obama, speaking to 200,000 in the German capital (CNN, Thursday)

Point of Contact: James Howard Kunstler
Our Q&A with James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency and World Made By Hand .

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