Press Picks
thursday july 10 Bummed? According to the Baylor College of Medicine, depression strikes 15 million Americans each year, but only a quarter of those people seek medical help. If you’re in the unmedicated, sad-sack majority, here’s your chance to join the Prozac Nation on the cheap: Today, Baylor’s psychiatry clinic…
Catch of the Day
There are some women who, widowed at the age of 60, would simply sink into retirement. And then there’s Joyce Gilbreath. After years of being a stay-at-home wife, she decided the best way to deal with being suddenly alone was to try something new. So early last year, when she…
Family Reunion
The Van is being billed as “the final chapter in the Barrytown Trilogy,” Irish author Roddy Doyle’s group of novels set in a fictional north Dublin suburb that also consists of The Commitments and The Snapper. That “final chapter” label, courtesy of the production notes, gives The Van the aura…
To Coldly Go
A lot of ink has been shed in the press lately about the “seriousness” of the new Robert Zemeckis film Contact, starring Jodie Foster as an astronomer who receives humankind’s first extraterrestrial message. Forrest Gump made Zemeckis a guru; now he’s being primed as a philosopher king. Is it rude…
Cozy Ties
Mike McKinney was fed up. For eight months, McKinney, the head of the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, and other state officials had been awaiting the Clinton administration’s ruling on a controversial Texas plan to privatize welfare. But still there was no sign of approval out of Washington. Governor…
Stadia Watch
Anywhere you go, it’s tough to get a precise estimate on the cost of stadium construction. Milwaukee’s proposed $250 million baseball park, for instance, has been scaled back after an architect offered a revised projection of $313 million for the initial design. Cleveland’s Gateway Project, which includes Jacobs Field, went…
The Insider
Summer Reservations at the ReBates Hotel The federal grand jury that has been eyeing the FBI’s City Hall sting finally cleared its decks after last week’s climactic session, and those long-awaited indictments are now scheduled to come down in early August. The roster of witnesses who appeared for the panel’s…
Letters
The Dialectics of Aunt Jemima As a former staff writer for newspapers ranging from Newsday to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, I’ve acquired a certain distaste for letters-to-the-editor sections and am embarrassed that (gasp!) I’m actually writing one. I don’t want to sound like some of the bitchy readers who have attacked…
Bite This!
It wasn’t by accident that youth figured so prominently in this year’s Houston Press Music Awards. An overhaul of the nominating committee to include a younger segment of nominators slightly more on the fringe — not to mention the addition of a Best Underground category — ensured that almost as…