Daniel Sunshine has a present for you. In fact, the man with an aptronym has two: the gifts of gratitude and calm. As the director of mindfulness at Dallas Yoga Center, his job is to help people learn to live well and happily even while circumstances conspire against them.

Mindfulness as a practice is on the verge of a mainstream phenomenon, Sunshine says. What was once relegated to the woo-woo corners of the world is now a business model, with places like Dallas Yoga Center in Oak Lawn, The Refuge in Deep Ellum, and Dallas Meditation in Carrollton and Plano bringing a more palatable, science-based approach to the general public. “Once science got involved, mindfulness could no longer be categorized as weird or unproven or religious,” Sunshine says. It’s meditation for the masses, and the time has never been more right.

Over the summer, as I was reporting a column on Shingle Mountain, I met Evelyn Mayo for coffee. We talked zoning and land use. I was curious as to how a multi-story tall pile of shingles had come to be located next to the home of an incredibly kind woman named Marsha Jackson. Mayo had been investigating this very thing. Southern Dallas, her team found, is zoned for a patchwork of industrial uses. In some cases, these are next to homes, which exist on land that may not be zoned residential at all. A paralegal with Legal Aid of Northwest Texas, Mayo was in the process of researching all of this for a report she titled “In Plain Sight.”

It uses Shingle Mountain as a lodestar, arguing that the city’s land use policies and zoning created far more vulnerabilities than just the lot next to Marsha Jackson’s home. Mayo and her team went looking for violations of zoning regulations and found a path that basically takes you along the banks of the Trinity River, from West Dallas—former home of lead smelters—all the way down to the city’s southern border near Hutchins, not far from Shingle Mountain. Another hot spot exists further east, in Pleasant Grove. These violations include everything from lacking a certificate of occupancy to industrial activity being too close to homes.

This report, which was published last month, is being offered to neighborhood associations around these vulnerable areas. Some include pockets of homes that aren’t correctly zoned residential. That means, say, a shingle recycling operation could open up next door and the homeowner would not have the same sort of protections as someone who lived in an area zoned single family. That’s Marsha Jackson’s conundrum: her home is zoned agricultural. So she didn’t get a formal review process before the industrial use began. The company behind this, Blue Star Recycling, told a judge that it ran out of money and can’t afford to quickly remove the pile. So now there’s something of a stand-off, and Marsha Jackson is stuck breathing in the particulate matter from the shingles that’s flowing in through her vents.

The report gives the neighborhood associations something of a toolkit. It encourages residents to call 311 when they think they see a violation near them. (Bizarrely, however, the report notes that “it is up to the discretion of the inspector as to what extent the background research is conducted on the site.” Which means they’re not always aware of current zoning when they show up. That’s a policy fix.) It’s also asking the City Council to re-zone some of the areas to prevent such establishments in the future, and, in particular, eliminate the patchwork zoning that creates opportunities for things like Shingle Mountain.

This is why we asked Mayo to come onto EarBurner. And then we wound up talking about Roller Derby and James Harden. Listen below.

Interbang Books was supposed to host Writing Workshop Dallas’ quarterly LitTalk panel this Wednesday. First of all, it’s still happening, and it’s a good one: Alex Temblador (an occasional D Magazine contributor and author of the YA novel Secrets of the Casa Rosada) will moderate a conversation about “Demystifying the Writing and Publishing Process” that will also include Kathleen Kent (New York Times best-selling author of The Dime), Brooke Fossey (The Big Finish, coming this April), and A. Lee Martinez (the Constance Verity trilogy). I am a big fan of process talk.

As most probably know by now, Interbang was destroyed by the tornadoes that hit North Texas on October 20. So, instead, the panel will now be at The Writer’s Garret at 1250 Majesty Drive. But! Interbang is still involved: they’ll be selling books by the writers on the panel and they’ll be making an announcement regarding their new location on West Lovers Lane.

All good things.

Today is the sort of Texas day that requires a lunch-time wardrobe change. As I write this, mid-morning, the temperature sits at a comfortable 62 degrees. By rush hour, an oncoming cold front will plunge temperatures into the mid-30s.

Although the overnight freeze (expect a low of 27 tonight) is not great, it’s sharp winds that will make this short but mighty front so brutal. Gusts could reach 40 miles per hour or higher, enough to pierce whatever light jacket you might’ve chosen after walking the dog this morning in quiet reflection about the mild fall weather. The winds are expected to move the wind chill into the low teens overnight.

While these temperatures are a nuisance for many of us, they are dangerous for the city’s homeless. And to prepare, the city is opening up the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center as an overflow shelter. It’ll open tonight at 5:30 p.m. and close Wednesday morning at 7:30.

It’s a well-worn local business truism: DFW International Airport drives the North Texas regional economy. But hidden inside the statement is a kind of chicken-and-egg conundrum. Is DFW Airport the reason why the region’s economy has grown so much in the forty-plus years since its opening, or does the region’s strong growth support the thriving international airport?

That’s essentially the question taken up by a paper that was published in the Journal of Urban Economics that analyzes the impact of the 1978 Airline Deregulation Act on airline service and regional economies. The paper wished to determine whether airports were the cause of successful regions’ strong economies (and smaller regions’ struggles), or whether airports were successful because the regions within which they were located were already economically strong.

According to CityLab, the paper’s authors found that after deregulation, airlines shifted traffic to major centers, resulting in a sharp decline in airline traffic for small and midsize metro areas, and a boom for large MSAs:

During the Cowboys-Vikings game last night on NBC’s Sunday Night Football, there was a curious interruption that, as far as I can tell, was never properly explained. Al Michaels threw it to a video clip, seemingly filmed for this occasion, of Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski, aka Coach K, aka a noted bad person, talking about how Dak Prescott has “the face of a winner.” That was basically the entire point of the clip. Some questions: