Last night at HKS Inc.’s downtown office, firm executives welcomed Mayor Mike Rawlings, Dallas Regional Chamber chief Dale Petroskey, and an intimate crowd of industry players for an HQ2 post-mortem. It was less about licking wounds and more about marveling at new opportunities.

In partnership with local developers, Dallas was able to amass a 28 million-square-foot “Super Site” of potential office space in its bid for Amazon’s HQ2—more than three times the square footage the e-commerce giant asked for in its request for proposals. The conglomeration of space from three different landholders—Hunt Consolidated, Matthews Southwest, and the KDC/Mike Hoque partnership­—spans the southern and southeastern boundaries of downtown Dallas and is still very much in play for other corporate relocations.

The Super Site features a massive new deck park over Interstate 30, the gateway to Dallas overlooking the Trinity River, and a host of other office and residential buildings. (Click through the attached slideshow for renderings of all proposed sites.)

Neurosurgeon Christopher Duntsch, the first doctor to be convicted for aggravated assault related to the care provided in his operating room, lost his appeal this week. His conviction was affirmed by Justices Douglas Lang and Robert Filmore in the Fifth District Court of Appeals. Justice David Schenck dissented.

The affirmation means that Duntsch’s life sentence will more than likely stand; he had 15 days after the Monday ruling to appeal further. You probably know him as Dr. Death, a nickname we came up with for our cover story in November of 2016. Wondery then took that moniker and ran with it, producing a popular Podcast earlier this year about Duntsch and his victims under the same name.

Duntsch’s case is a depressing and frustrating one. It’s also salacious. By the time he found himself in court, charged with five counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and one count of injury to an elderly individual, prosecutors had identified nearly three dozen people who had been harmed under his knife. They ranged from Kellie Martin, who bled to death after a relatively common procedure called a laminectomy. He sliced Floella Brown’s vertebral artery, causing massive bleeding and fueling a stroke that later killed her. Others suffered severe nerve damage after Duntsch procedures. Some can barely walk years after their operations.

Duntsch was charged with those six counts, but tried on only one: the charge of injuring an elderly patient. Mary Efurd, then 53, was to have two vertebrae fused, linked by a metal plate. She woke up screaming and in severe pain. Another neurosurgeon who was called in for corrective surgery would testify that the spinal fusion hardware had been left in her muscle. The nerve root had been severed. Her spine was pockmarked with screw holes, and a screw had been lodged in another nerve root near the bottom of her spine.

The deadly weapon were his hands and surgical tools and a pedicle screw. Generally, the state would only be allowed to enter in evidence pertaining to that one case. But prosecutors argued that evidence was admissible—they’d have to prove that Duntsch intentionally and knowingly caused this harm, and they could only do so by showing the totality of what he has been charged with. In lawyer speak, it’s called pattern of conduct, and the judge ruled during pre-trial that the evidence from those other cases was indeed admissible.

DFW International Airport submitted a pair of bids to Amazon for its second headquarters—working in one case with the cities of Irving and Euless and in the other with Grapevine—that would have each topped $20 billion in tax breaks over the next century.

At more than double the highest incentive offer revealed since Amazon made its choices last month, the attempts set a new standard for the lengths cities were willing to go in an effort to snag the $5 billion capital investment and 50,000 well-paid employees. The airport provided us its bid documents in response to an open records request.

Under the respective deals, airport-controlled land would’ve been leased to Amazon over 99 years, meaning the tax incentive would’ve spanned about two and a half times the longest tax abatement period ever, according to Good Jobs First, which tracks subsidies. A Dell plant in Tennessee, the previous leader, is about halfway through its 40-year abatement.

“Offering a 99-year incentive is madness,” says Nate Jensen, a professor of government at the University of Texas in Austin who specializes in the area.

Under one of the plans, officials proposed that Amazon build HQ2 at Passport Park, a new business development on the south side of the airport. The proposal would’ve put the headquarters within the city boundaries of Irving and Euless, on about 250 acres of developable land. Amazon was to benefit from a tax incentive valued at $22.7 billion within Passport Park through “entering into a 99-year ground lease and assigning the improvement’s ownership interest to DFW Airport,” according to a pitch document compiled by the airport. Arlington had additionally agreed to spend $50 million to connect the development to the TRE Centreport Station, bringing the HQ to Dallas and Fort Worth via rail.

A package of $22.7 billion would’ve easily marked the priciest incentive deal in U.S. history. The state of Washington put together an $8.7 billion package for Boeing in 2013.

Curbed takes up a topic we’ve batted around these parts before: why are new apartments in American cities so ugly? Calling it the bland, boxy apartment boom, the website wonders why so many U.S. cities are being reshaped by the same kind of mishmash-y housing that has come to define the many Dallas inner city neighborhoods that have been the beneficiaries of new investment and development over the past decade or so. Architects and urbanists have struggled to put a name on it, coming up with “Simcityism,” “SketchUp contemporary,” “Minecraftsman,” or “Revittecture.”

In their attempts to find out why this style of building has come to define new construction in American cities, Curbed encountered many of the same fundamental forces shaping design that I wrote about in this article last year. These days, aesthetics, architectural ideas, and regional sensitivity take a back seat to the more practical considerations of the development market, such as building code, construction costs, and a trend in the industry to cut expenses by bypassing architects all together. Builders defend the practice by pointing to the practical necessities of turning a profit while providing much needed new housing. 

As a father of two, I was curious when I read about a case that had gone all the way to the Supreme Court of Texas. At it’s core was a high school-aged kid who’d (maybe) gotten busted smoking pot during school hours. How far do you go, as a parent, to defend your children? When do you stay out of it and just let them take their licks and learn?

Those were some of the questions that got me interested in a story about ESD that we published in our December issue. It just went online today.

Thank y’all, next.