The federal income tax deadline is just a little under two months away (April 18, 2017), but being prepared well in advance is never a bad idea. Preparing your taxes, after all, can be complicated, so on this edition of Houston Matters, we’re here to help! Craig Shenkman, a CPA and partner with BDO USA, joins us to answer your tax preparation questions.

Also this hour…

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of the News

A lot can happen in a week. Some of it good. Some of it bad. Some of it downright ugly. When faced with intriguing developments in the week’s news, we turn to our rotating panel of “non-experts” to parse The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of it all.

This week, our panel weighs in on the city of Houston considering ways to help clear the homeless from Houston streets, Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez opting out of the voluntary U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement 287(g) program, and a man getting removed from a United Airlines flight headed for the Bayou City after allegedly making multiple racist comments to a Pakistani-Indian couple in front of him.

On today’s panel: Tamara Tabo, who writes about the law and politics at AboveTheLaw.com; Charles Kuffner, who writes the political blog Off the Kuff.  Mary Flood, a blogger and legal consultant with Androvett Legal Media & Marketing.

Natalie Lin

Houston’s music schools attract a broad variety of students, from different backgrounds, ethnicities and nationalities. One of them is Rice University violinist Natalie Lin. She’s lived in the United States for about ten years, but she started somewhere considerably far away. In a profile for Houston Public Media’s new DiverseCity initiative, Joshua Zinn looks at Natalie’s origins as a musician, her international experiences, and how all of that plays a role in her own performing organization, KINETIC — the conductorless ensemble.

Houston Matters offers a free daily, downloadable podcast here, on iTunes, Stitcher and various other podcasting apps.