In the Roman Catholic tradition, there's something called a year's mind. It's a requiem Mass held on the one-year anniversary of someone's death. That's exactly what we did for Zac and those who loved him. Except the Mass was held at a bar called the Old Monk. And we recorded a podcast during the Mass. We boldly declare that it's the funniest year's mind you'll ever listen to. Stick around till the end, when Zac's son, Isaac, drops in and delivers one of the sickest burns you'll ever hear. Here ...
Jul 17, 2025•57 min
Sarah was the U.S. Attorney for the North District of Texas before Barack Obama appointed her head of ICE in 2014. She talks with Tim about why the agency shouldn't be abolished, despite President Trump's current campaign to use it as a tool of terror; about why Dallas hasn't yet seen the sorts of raids that have gone down in other large cities; about why the agency will never deport the number of people the president claims it will; and about why her family was ultimately wrong when they encour...
Jun 17, 2025•42 min
It's a themed episode! Kathy tells us about a controversy she experienced while judging cakes for the State Fair of Texas. Brian covers the same ground, except with a halal barbecue contest. And then Tim takes us to the Colonial for some golf talk that involves way more fashion choices than it does golf. Remember: print makes the podcast possible. Consider subscribing to D Magazine....
May 29, 2025•49 min
Our own Mike Piellucci talks about one of the world's best bull riders, John Crimber, who lives with a bunch of other badass Brazilian bull riders in or near Decatur, Texas. Kathy Wise reveals her secret nicknames and the difference between her marriage and that of Tim Rogers. Also: Cooper Flagg! Kathy gets a bit quiet during this portion of the podcast, as Tim and The Looch go deep on the Mavs' No. 1 overall pick. Stay tuned for maybe the dumbest question Tim has ever posed: "Do you believe in ...
May 13, 2025•54 min
We discuss meat and the proper smoking thereof. Plus what is "motorcycle paint" and who in the D Magazine office is most likely to assassinate whom? Oh! Also, we reveal a secret Thai menu at a restaurant in Allen. But that's all. Remember: print makes the podcast possible. Consider subscribing to D Magazine ....
Apr 22, 2025•1 hr 4 min
D Magazine ’s dining critic, Brian Reinhart, joins Tim and Kathy to talk about the Dallas dining scene, the origin of Texas toast, how the Rice University mascot got its name, the best pancakes in town, and whether Kathy is insane for suggesting that diners should eat salad with their hands. Remember: print makes the podcast possible. Consider subscribing to D Magazine ....
Dec 05, 2024•1 hr 5 min
If you listened to the previous episode of EarBurner (and you should), you know that Bobby Abtahi was sitting at the table at the Old Monk as Matt and Tim interviewed Mike Rawlings. When they finished the episode with the former mayor, Abtahi, a former president of the Dallas Park Board, having consumed a statistically significant number of beers, started talking about how the city got into the current mess over the management of Fair Park—at which point Tim and Matt plugged the mics back in and...
Oct 21, 2024•28 min
On your November ballot, there will appear 18 proposed amendments to the Dallas city charter, which is quite something. Three of those props—S, T, and U—if they were to pass, would throw the city into chaos. The 59th mayor of Dallas joined Matt and Tim at the Old Monk to talk about why that's the case. While Rawlings (aka His Worship) refused to speculate on the motives of the people behind these props, Tim was not so reserved. (Also, with the passing of Zac , this episode served as a cohosting ...
Oct 15, 2024•1 hr 6 min
The Oak Cliff Film Fest runs this year from June 20–23. Barak is one of the smartest, funniest dudes in Dallas, so it's always a pleasure to have him on the pod to talk about the film festival he co-founded. Tim struggles with the buttons and levers to play sound from the movies' trailers. Zac and Barak demonstrate their pop-culture literacy. Oh, and we talk about why we haven't seen more assassinations in America. So there's that. You know why this podcast is free? Because D Magazine still make...
Jun 18, 2024•56 min
In another lifetime, Julia was Tim's boss at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram . Now she's a best-selling author with six novels to her credit. Her latest is Night Will Find You . Zac gives it five stars. Tim confesses he hasn't yet read it, but that doesn't stop him from reading to Julia the worst review of the book he could find on Amazon. Other stuff you'll hear: how Julia approaches the writing process, why editing is better on paper than screens, and if a building can be shaped like a barn witho...
May 31, 2024•57 min
In the May issue of D Magazine , Matt Goodman wrote a story titled " The Lawyer Who Landlords Don't Want to See in Court ." That would be Mark. Sort of by accident, he started the Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center, which now employs 18 people. On a per capita basis, A LOT of people get evicted in Dallas. That's because the justice of the peace courts where eviction hearings happen are a little wildass. So we talked about all that and about why you should care about people getting evicted. And we e...
May 16, 2024•52 min
James is the artistic director of the Dallas International Film Festival , which runs from April 25 through May 2. We talked about how many movies he had to watch to pick the 145 (so far) that will screen this year. We talked about how much he cries and why his back is giving him so much trouble and whether Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn get back together at the end of The Break-Up . But James also made us talk about this year's DIFF lineup, which features a bunch of world premieres, includin...
Apr 19, 2024•1 hr 1 min
Megan spent four years researching and writing her new book, City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America's Highways . Here's what Richard Florida said about it: " City Limits is a triumph. Megan Kimble echoes Robert Caro exposing how powerful groups like TxDOT are able to take away people’s homes, destroy their neighborhoods, and run roughshod over communities with virtually no accountability.” So yeah. We talked about highways and I-345. And about how Megan went on a fish...
Apr 12, 2024•49 min
Mike used to work at D Magazine . Now he doesn't. But he's got a new podcast that dropped April 11 on Audible. It is titled Hold Fast . Over nine episodes, Mike and two other journalists ( Sam Eifling and Trevor Aaronson ) chronicle the rise and fall of Backpage.com, the Dallas-born classified ad site that a federal prosecutor called "the world’s largest sex trafficking operation." Mike spent three days interviewing Mike Lacey, the founder of the New Times chain of alt weeklies and the man the f...
Apr 10, 2024•53 min
Greg is an SMU professor who hails from Pumpkin Bend, Arkansas. He's also the lead singer for Beekeeper Spaceman and the editor of the Southwest Review . It is under the auspices of the latter that he is launching a new literary festival. Frontera runs April 12 and 13 in three Oak Cliff venues (Wild Detectives, the Texas Theatre, and the Kessler Theater). So we talked with Greg about how you stage a lit fest that feels less like homework and more like a party. And we talked about one of the most...
Apr 08, 2024•53 min
You probably know Joel from his appearances on the Ticket and his Fox Sports work on college football. Along with Curt Menefee, he'll be calling the first-ever United Football League game, at Choctaw Stadium in Arlington, March 30, at noon. We got the breakdown on the game, but we also talked with him about why specialization in youth sports is lousy and the fact that he's so cheap that he listens to Spotify with commercials. You should subscribe to D Magazine . At the very least, rate and revie...
Mar 28, 2024•25 min
Over the years, starting in 1992, D Magazine has unintentionally caused the man grief. In this episode, Tim and Zac run through the slights—but only to properly apologize. Also to give Zac a moment to humble-brag. For reference, here is what Eric Celeste's 1992 profile of Aikman looked like with the dumb "Troy Aikman Won't Dance" headline. Here's Aikman on our cover in 2011 , when Wick made up a cover blurb that suggested Troy had talked to us about his divorce. And, finally, here's the blog pos...
Mar 20, 2024•1 hr 4 min
Right here you've got another chat recorded on the shady side of White Rock Lake, at Goodfriend. The boys tackle the goofiness of what one local official said about transportation to World Cup matches in Arlington. E.g.: "[W]e wish to have an aggressive travel demand management program to encourage our residents to participate in FIFA." Also they talked about tattoos.
Feb 08, 2024•44 min
We're doing a thing. Sometimes we'll have a guest on the pod, sure. But sometimes (if we stick with it), Tim and Zac will simply go to a bar near their houses (Goodfriend) and chop it up as a duo, like Simon and Garfunkel. The hatred for each other will still be there, but they'll make beautiful music together. In this episode, the boys talk about a recent giraffe death at the Dallas Zoo (and whether there are animals smart enough to kill themselves), the proposed ban on horse-drawn carriages (Z...
Jan 25, 2024•41 min
Casey is one of the most committed magazine writers working today. When he profiled Leon Bridges for Texas Monthly , he rented a house and bought a crazy-expensive shirt to establish a connection with the recording artist. For his profile of Erykah Badu that ran in the January issue of D Magazine , he hired a team of researchers to help him understand the icon. More than a podcast about magazine journalism, though, this one is about striving to become the best possible version of yourself. And S...
Jan 06, 2024•1 hr 19 min
Tim is a Lakewood dad with four kids and a wife who runs a restaurant ( Lounge Here ) to which he is sometimes summoned to do handyman work. He's also a rockstar, making his name first with Tripping Daisy and now serving as frontman for The Polyphonic Spree . The latter is dropping a new album, Salvage Enterprise , on November 17. We talked with Tim about how recording that album broke him out of a years-long depression and why kids today can't seem to listen to a song that lasts longer than a m...
Nov 15, 2023•48 min
Start here if you don't know who Joshua Ray Walker is. Short version: Rolling Stone said of Josh: "country's most fascinating young songwriter is a baby-faced, 6XL guitar hero with a Dwight Yoakam voice and songs about suicide and boat-show models." We began our conversation at the Old Monk with Josh telling the story about how he wound up in the hospital, for the first time in his life, with a roommate named Dick who was a mob enforcer. We also talk about F1 and helicopters. And the best Tex-Me...
Oct 28, 2023•1 hr 5 min
David McCloskey used to work in the CIA. Now he's a novelist and does most of his writing in coffee shops on Greenville Avenue. Which ones? He wouldn't say. Even after Zac and Tim subjected him to extraordinary rendition, he wouldn't break. He also declined to read a sex scene from his new novel, Moscow X , so Tim did the honors, which was gross. For more about David and his wife, Abby, check out Holland Murphy's profile of the couple in which we wondered if they might be the most interesting co...
Oct 10, 2023•49 min
This one is a bit of an experiment. When we learned that Catbird, a fancy "Best of Big D" award-winning joint in downtown Dallas' Thompson hotel , was launching a 10-course tasting menu where each course was accompanied by a cocktail and that Catbird would let us preview the experience before the unwashed masses could get their unwashed mouths on it, we were like: "Yes." The idea was that four D Magazine staffers would journalistically investigate this important situation. Our Serious Food Peopl...
Sep 13, 2023•1 hr 14 min
OK, first Zac and Tim talked a bit about how to pronounce Lionel Messi's name and whether his recent performance in Frisco (which Zac witnessed in person) is one of the top five sports moments in the history of North Texas. THEN the lads turned their attention to the wonderful Elizabeth Wattley, president and CEO of Forest Forward , the group working to save the historic Forest Theater in South Dallas and rejuvenate the ZIP code with the lowest life expectancy in all of Dallas County. Elizabeth'...
Aug 10, 2023•56 min
Michael Sorrell is the president of Paul Quinn, the oldest historically Black college west of the Mississippi. He died in 2008. True story. The man's heart stopped, and his girlfriend Natalie (now wife) performed CPR until medics could arrive and shock him back to life. So we talked about the fact that he's our first undead guest on EarBurner . And we talked about how the pandemic changed people and why those changes have made it harder to run an instution of higher learning. But the main reason...
Jun 27, 2023•48 min
Nick is in the pantheon of Dallas chefs. His new(ish) joint, the Brass Ram, in the East Quarter of downtown Dallas, occupies a space that once housed the broadcast studio for KLIF, one of the most important stations in the history of American radio. The space, called the Triangle Point Building, also once housed the Dallas Observer . So we bellied up to the Brass Ram bar with Nick and two former Observer staffers, Eric Celeste and our own Zac Crain, to talk about Gordon McLendon, the parrot he t...
May 26, 2023•1 hr 2 min
Barak Epstein from the historic Texas Theatre joins us to preview the 2023 edition of the Oak Cliff Film Festival, which runs June 22–25. Movies discussed (some with confusing sound from their trailers!): Going Varsity in Mariachi , The Lost World , Quantum Cowboys , Walker , Stand By for Failure , Don't Fall in Love With Yourself , The Adults , and Earth Mama . Also, we talk about Barak's resurgent baseball career. REMEMBER: print makes the podcast possible. Consider subscribing to D Magazine ....
May 21, 2023•51 min
Once upon a time, Tim was a schoolmate at K.B. Polk Elementary with a guy named David Hale Smith. That fellow wound up becoming kind of a big-deal literary agent , even though DHS wouldn't tell us how much he earned last year. Be that as it may, DHS is part of a cabal responsible for the Dallas Noir Film Festival , which runs May 17–20 ("cabal" is a joke you'll get after listening to the podcast). We talked about books and movies and hamburgers and why Dallas City Council three-time losing candi...
May 12, 2023•48 min
Abraham Alexander is buds with Leon Bridges, a connection that helped him get into the studio to record his debut album, SEA/SONS , which dropped April 14. Zac profiled Abraham for the June issue of D Magazine . In this episode, Zac and Tim talk about the profile-writing process, why more than a few musicians have wanted to punch Zac, and how much (or little) recording artists make from Spotify. Oh, also, we play a few songs from Abraham's new album and talk about them. Help us keep this podcast...
Apr 26, 2023•44 min
