Search Results for: Texas Monthly

Longreads Best of 2015: Here Are All of Our No. 1 Story Picks from This Year

All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2015. To get you ready, here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.

If you like these, you can sign up to receive our free weekly email every Friday. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photograph by Will Mebane for The New Yorker

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

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Read more…

Trouble Between the Buns at Whataburger

Photo by Rick, Flickr

There’s nothing simple about selling simple burgers for a living. The decades-long relationship between Whataburger’s parent company and the Andrews family’s successful Whataburger franchises soured recently, when the Andrews’ company filed a lawsuit, claiming Whataburger violated an agreement. In Texas Monthly, Loren Steffy writes about the bad blood and changing corporate culture at Texas’ second-largest homegrown restaurant chain.

When most Whataburger customers walk into the restaurant, they have no idea if the place they are eating at is a franchise or a corporate-owned branch. And as long as they can still get their Green Chile Double Whataburgers or Honey Butter Chicken Biscuits, they probably don’t care. But the rift between the Andrews family and the burger chain they helped build represents a struggle between the past and the present, and between two families who have known each other for a long time. “It’s a little like a public divorce—neither side walks away looking good,” says Michelle Hartmann, a Dallas attorney who specializes in private-company litigation. “It hurts the brand ultimately.”

This is a terrible time to risk messing with the Whataburger brand. The Texas burger landscape is more competitive than ever, thanks to an influx of regional mini-chains such as Austin’s P. Terry’s, the Metroplex’s Twisted Root Burger Co., and Houston’s Becks Prime and smaller national chains such as Smashburger, Five Guys, and Shake Shack. Whataburger is bigger than all of those, and that may be the point. It isn’t a small business anymore, and to keep ahead of the competition, it may have to start acting its size. Its competition is McDonald’s and Wendy’s, not a boutique operation with three locations that offers grass-fed-bison burgers topped with arugula on a gluten-free bun.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Selena impersonators Lupita Espinoza, Jocelyn Gonzales, and Monica Peralta wait to perform at a Selena tribute. Photo: Scott Squires

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

* * *

Read more…

What Happens When a Doctor Decides to Battle a Drug Cartel

Cartel Land, the new documentary by director Matthew Heineman in theaters July 3, follows Dr. José Manuel Mireles, a small-town physician known as “El Doctor,” who leads the Autodefensas, a citizen uprising against the violent Knights Templar drug cartel in the state of Michoacán in Mexico. The above clip, exclusive to Longreads, features Mireles attempting to gather volunteers and support from one town.

Things have changed for both the Knights Templar and the vigilantes since the film’s completion. As Heineman told Variety: “Very, very quickly I realized that this story was much more complex and much more gray, that the lines between good and evil were not that clear. I became obsessed with trying to figure out what was really happening, who these guys truly were, where the movement was going, what the endgame was.”

More Stories from Mexico’s Drug War:

1. “The Hunt for El Chapo” (Patrick Radden Keefe, The New Yorker 2014)

2. “The Murderers of Mexico” (Alma Guillermoprieto, New York Review of Books 2010)

3. “The Mistress and the Narcotraficante” (Ricardo C. Ainslie, Texas Monthly 2013)

The People on Our Postage Stamps: A Reading List

Flannery O’Connor is going to be on a stamp! I’m going to actually mail those postcards I bought years ago. In my enthusiasm, I learned there have been almost 800 different folks on the U.S. stamp—authors, like O’Connor, but also blues singers, inventors, athletes and politicians. After much deliberation, I chose to feature five stamped individuals: an inventor, an entertainer, an activist, a journalist and a short story mastermind. Don’t worry, I linked to their stamps.

1. Buckminster Fuller: “Dymaxion Man.” (Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, June 2008)

Buckminster Fuller wrote rambling manifestos and dreamed of cookie-cutter bathrooms and cars that flew. This inventor’s stamp is as strange and wonderful as his failed, fanciful inventions. Read more…

The Proustian Powers of Ice Cream

Ice cream is Proustian. One bite can send you time-traveling decades back, to a hot summer day, when you walked barefoot on shell-dappled Gulf sands, vanilla ice cream dripping over the sides of a cone and onto your fingers. Maybe it was a reward for the first time you lost a tooth, a sweet, cold dish of mint chocolate chip as balm for the pain. A bite of blackberry gelato might conjure up a stroll down a sunny Roman street with a long-lost love. More recently, ice cream has become associated with being a good person and doing good works, even though the product really isn’t all that good for you. Honesty matters. Trust matters. We feed it to our children, after all. This is why Ben & Jerry’s, on its website, stresses its commitment to “progressive values across our business,” “climate justice,” and mandatory GMO labeling. This is why Häagen-Dazs wants you to know that the company has devoted more than $1 million to honeybee survival (“We want to keep those little heroes buzzing”). This is why Breyers pledges to use “sustainably farmed vanilla and fruit” and milk and cream from cows “not treated with artificial growth hormones.” Keeping up with modern times, Breyers also features lactose-free, no-sugar-added, fat-free, half-the-fat, carb-smart, and gluten-free ice cream.

Mimi Swartz writing in Texas Monthly about Blue Bell, a much-loved Texas company that has recently been plagued by a series of recalls and deaths linked to listeria-tainted ice cream.

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Inside the Advertising Industry: A Reading List

Photo: SenseiAlan

From fashion bloggers to food “fluffers,” it takes a village to make you want to buy stuff. Why do some brands connect with us, while others take us by surprise or make us angry? Here are six stories examining the advertising industry.

1. “Nice to Meat You.” (Adam Kotsko, The New Inquiry, February 2015)

On the creepiness of the Burger King king (you know the one), Freud’s “uncanny,” and more. (This excerpt is a classic example of why I love The New Inquiry.) Read more…

Longreads Best of 2014: Here Are All of Our No. 1 Story Picks from This Year

All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2014. To get you ready, here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.

If you like these, you can sign up to receive our free weekly email every Friday. Read more…