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On February 5, Mayor Eric Johnson wanted to share some good news about crime numbers in Dallas. In his weekly email newsletter and in a post on Medium, he included a photo of himself hugging police Chief Eddie García. The chief was seated at a desk, looking down at crime data. The mayor, standing behind García, was leaning in to hug him, draped over the city’s top cop like a shawl. 

Along with the photo, Johnson included a chart created by the Major Cities Chiefs Association, a police organization that García serves as president. The chart presented Dallas as the only large American city where all types of violent crime had declined over the previous two years. Johnson wanted to show people that the two public officials are so aligned in their efforts, and so successful in getting results, that the mayor had to hug the chief. 

The image itself was inelegant. Hugs are better when both people are standing. But the message was clear. Yet six days elapsed with no local news coverage of the rankings. So Johnson took to Twitter. 

“Our local media have no interest in reporting on this data, which is why you haven’t heard about it,” he wrote. Reporters with the Dallas Morning News, WFAA, Fox 4, KRLD, and NBC 5 responded with links to stories about Dallas’ declining violent crimes—but they didn’t mention the other nine cities in the chart.  

Johnson then tweeted an adage about defensiveness he’d learned from his grandmother: if you throw a rock into a pack of dogs, the one that gets hit will yelp. “Them hit dogs still hollerin’,” the mayor wrote. He added that journalistic “quality has fallen off a cliff” and called it “pathetic.” 

Here’s the thing about that chart: the ranking was bogus. Comparing one city’s crime numbers to another’s is a reductive exercise that ignores how data are collected and fails to tell the real story about how things are going. Plus, the FBI recently modernized how it collects data. Its new system does away with what it called the “hierarchy rule,” where departments were basically allowed to juke the stats on a technicality. Meaning, if a robbery goes bad and someone ends up dead, police departments filed only the most severe charge—murder—and ignored the others. Now every crime in an incident is tracked and submitted to the feds. Dallas follows this process, but four of the 10 cities in the mayor’s chart do not. 

Promoting that ranking was political boosterism that obscures what we should be analyzing and discussing: what about Dallas’ new approach to curbing violence is working and what is not? Because the department’s data do indeed show progress. 

Among Domenico Seminara’s prized collection of some 500 cappuccino and espresso machines is the first appliance he ever sold, in 1981, a Faema 1 Group that looks more like a fax machine than something that would yield a cappuccino, which, according to Seminara, is “a cup of coffee—with romance.” He bought back the machine years later to keep in his “cappuccino museum.”  

The museum occupies a sunny room on the second floor of his Minion-​yellow Arlington warehouse, lined on one side by a row of windows that face I-30 and, on the other side, by windows that look into a cavernous facility filled with the used gadgets and gizmos Seminara sells via his business, Specialty Restaurant Equipment.

Many of the machines in Seminara’s personal collection (there are hundreds more in the warehouse) are vintage Elektra models in the “old Italy” style, brass domes topped with eagle figurines. The oldest machine in his collection is a shiny 1948 Gaggia that he scored for a bargain from a Venezuelan restaurateur in Paris, Texas. 

He has also customized several machines. One features images of Native American notables that were airbrushed by an Albuquerque artist. Another was fashioned after the Parthenon; he almost sold it to a Dallas Cowboy two decades ago, but then the athlete balked at the machine’s $20,000 price tag. “I said, ‘You get millions of dollars from Jerry Jones,’ ” Seminara says. “You ask me to lower the price by a couple thousand dollars. I will not lower one penny.”  

Carolina Alvarez-Mathies will, in May, celebrate her first anniversary as executive director at the Dallas Contemporary. This month, her Design District museum will open two shows that share a strong tie to a celebrated ceramic studio in Guadalajara, Mexico. The conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.

To work inside a county hospital like Parkland, you have to keep a steady gait while the ground shifts beneath your feet. That’s what Katie Mapula loves about her job as the nursing director over all five intensive care units and burn center operations. You think you know what the day will look like, and then—boom—there’s an urgent rush to make order of fresh chaos. 

On the morning of September 29, 2021, Mapula was making order of yet another exhausting COVID surge. The swath the Delta variant cut through Dallas had filled every bed in the ICU and then some. She had already converted 12 more beds on the Medical Surgery floor to handle the growing demand when—boom—a startling notification rang in. 

Once there was a city called Frisco, and she loved a little boy. Every day the boy would come and play in her fields and creeks. He would pretend to be Roger Staubach slaying a fire-breathing dragon, or he would pretend to be Bob Lee Swagger, Mark Wahlberg’s character in the movie Shooter, taking into account humidity, temperature, wind, and the Coriolis effect before sending his lead downrange. 

And when the boy was tired after playing in the fields and creeks, he would sleep in the shade of the city’s trees. And the boy loved Frisco. And the city was happy.

But time went by. And the boy grew older. Then one day the boy came to the city, and Frisco said, “Come, boy, come and pretend to nail headshots from more than a mile away while you are inexplicably on a snow-covered mountain ridge where two helicopters have just landed, and be happy.”

“I am too big for that nonsense,” said the boy. “I want to buy things and have fun.”

And so the city gave her fields and creeks to Jerry Jones, who built The Star in Frisco, a 91-acre campus that included the Ford Center and Tostitos Championship Plaza and a Dallas Cowboys Pro Shop and a Mi Cocina and a Wahlburgers, as it turns out. 

I was only a few steps into Deep Vellum before I bumped into a table with one of my favorite author’s latest books on it.

I had not read it but had been meaning to; after I finished perusing the store, I picked it up to purchase. As I opened the pages to thumb through the colorful hardback, I saw it was a signed copy. What were the chances? 

Finding a signed copy from one of my favorite authors was a serendipitous moment. But behind the scenes, Deep Vellum and its CEO Will Evans have been working for years to make these moments happen. The independent publishing house and bookstore is in Deep Ellum, an area known for its embrace of the arts since the days of Blind Lemon Jefferson. The shop is busy, compact, and full of energy—much like Evans himself. For nearly a decade, he has been grinding to create something from nothing. Along the way, he is doing more; he is sparking a literary movement in Dallas.   

Wally Marshall, aka Mr. Crappie, puts about 90,000 miles on his truck every year, crisscrossing the country from his home in Anna, Texas, to share the good word about his favorite fish. He also hosts the annual Crappie Expo, which features the $300,000 Mr. Crappie Invitational Tournament, the world’s largest crappie fry, and a three-day consumer show. Field & Stream has called him an “American icon.” And this year, in recognition of all his philanthropic work and for revolutionizing the sport of crappie fishing, Marshall will be inducted into the Texas Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame.

In the March issue, we asked him to reflect on all this.

Laray Polk is one of the more interesting people I know. I met her about 15 years ago, after she’d sent a series of emails to the magazine that were more literate than much of the correspondence we receive. I would come to learn that Laray is a writer. In 2013, she co-authored a book with Noam Chomsky that bears the cheerful title Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe. More recently, her writing has focused on a remote South Pacific island called Olohega, which was stolen from its inhabitants in 1860 by a U.S. sea captain who appears to have claimed ownership without even the common courtesy of having paid the place a visit. Laray’s original research may yet change the history of the island.

She’s also an artist. Here’s a text I got from her late last year, about a multi-media show she was mounting at two SMU galleries: “This week is the install. I will be moving 600 lbs of White Rock to one gallery and bags of Bolivar Peninsula sediments to the other.”

And Laray once owned a golf course. Or her husband did. He is Jack Mims, also an artist, and his family for many years operated Sunset Golf Club in Grand Prairie, likely the first integrated course in North Texas. That’s the conclusion we came to in 2019, when we published a story about the wild characters who once held court in its clubhouse. 

Oh, one more thing: the other day Laray told me that her neighbors have given over their backyard to a llama. She lives in a part of southern Dallas, not far from the Trinity River levees, where such things happen.

All of which is why she was the perfect person to write about an important anniversary for the river. Fifty years ago this month, the citizens of Dallas went to the polls and made it plain: they did not want to pay taxes so that a small group of Dallas industrialists, aided by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, could straighten and dredge the river, turning it into a canal to Galveston Bay. Can you imagine how Dallas might look today if we had razed the Trinity Forest and turned that land into a basin for barges to dock? Laray set out, partly, to answer that question in our March issue. Her story is online today.

In 2009, KERA produced a documentary titled Living With the Trinity that centered on a man named Ned Fritz and a ragtag group who helped win that vote five decades ago. At just under 60 minutes, the film is a fascinating look at our city’s history. It will screen at the Dallas Angelika on April 6, with a panel discussion following. Details were still being locked down as we went to press with this issue. Ned Fritz Legacy has partnered with KERA to present the Living With the Trinity documentary. Reserve your spot at this link. I hope to see you there.  

But for the spread of cheese and crackers and a light insistence on my acceptance of a glass of sweet tea, the table inside Norma Minnis’ East Dallas home could have been arranged for an interrogation. Minnis, 78, and two of her neighbors, Olive Talley and Greg Estell, look at me skeptically, eager to learn my intentions. 

Things have become tense on their block. A dozen yards have red signs that read “Homes Not Hotels” and “Neighborhoods Are For Neighbors.” Talley lives four houses down from an Airbnb; she and the property owner have traded code complaints. Another Airbnb owner sent a cease-and-​desist letter to a neighbor to get that person to stop filing noise complaints on the rental. 

The three at Minnis’ table want me to know: they are not NIMBYs. Some among their ranks might have gray hair, but they are not gray hairs. They think this quiet area on the edge of Lakewood is under attack, just like most other neighborhoods across the city. 

Dallas has quietly allowed Airbnbs and VRBOs to operate in residential neighborhoods, and Minnis and her ilk have spent the past three years consolidating their opposition. A zoning vote that would kill short-term rentals in single-family neighborhoods is expected to come before the City Council prior to the May council elections. (Five council members recently sent the city manager a memo demanding that the vote be placed on the April 11 agenda.)

Minnis and her allies say that short-term rentals—defined by the city as a dwelling rented out for 30 days or fewer—are commercial businesses that operate illegally in residential neighborhoods and should be zoned out. They are not subject to city inspection, because they don’t have to be registered with the city’s rental home registration program. The Department of Code Compliance doesn’t work after dark or on Saturdays and Sundays, and the Dallas Police Department doesn’t have the bodies to prioritize breaking up a house party. 

Minnis and her crew have more anecdotes demonstrating the problem than they probably need. In Lake Highlands, two men were caught on camera sauntering down an alley holding rifles after a neighbor knocked on the door of their short-term rental. In West Oak Cliff, there was a drive-by shooting on New Year’s Eve. In Winnetka Heights, a Parkland doctor was forced to move his family because of constant disruptions from his ever-changing neighbors. In Plano, a brothel. Practically everywhere, party buses. 

Minnis stands a few inches over 5 feet tall and has a tidy white ’do that sits above her ears. But do not underestimate her. She is one of this city’s most effective organizers and has been for more than four decades. And she couldn’t be more clear about the crux of the conflict. “We own the water,” she says of her desirable neighborhood, “and everybody else wants it.” 

Albania, the small Balkan nation just across the Adriatic Sea from Italy, is a powerhouse on the Texas pizza scene. If you’ve gotten takeout around town, you’ve probably tasted the Albanian touch. One Fort Worth restaurant even offers Albanian Pizza, with artichokes, sun-dried tomatoes, spinach, and peppers.

To find out why the influence of immigrants from one small country is so huge, we talked to Maggie and Tony Hajro, two of the original founders of Dallas’ Albanian pizza empire. Tony opened his first pizza place in 1984, in Lewisville. For the last 17 years, his wife and sons have operated Tony’s Pizza & Pasta in The Colony while he enjoys semiretirement.

February is the month that contains Valentine’s Day, which makes it theoretically the month of romance, which makes it perhaps an appropriate time to announce that, while I have not exactly given up on the idea of romance altogether, I have given up on the idea of finding it on “the apps.” Tinder, Bumble, Raya, Venmo, SNKRS. Whatever. It’s not going to happen, and I have made my peace with that. I’ve been trying to use my phone less, anyway.

I did try, on and off for maybe two years, switching from one app to another, polishing and repolishing my bio, updating my photos, widening my parameters here, narrowing them there, looking up tips, taking advice. I made a connection or two and at least a few lifelong enemies. I learned I appeal to a very particular type that I won’t share here. Anyway, like I said, I tried. It’s like my man James Ingram once sang: “I did my best, but I guess my best wasn’t good enough.” That’s the way the cookie bounces sometimes.

But Zac, what are you going to do for companionship if you have sworn off dating apps? Great question, and one I’ve put a bit of thought into.