Tag: Texas
On Wearing a Hijab for the First Time: They Never Really Did See Me
At The Weeklings, Khirad Siddiqui reflects on wearing a hijab at age 13, as a young woman in Plano, Texas. She discovered “affirmation and reassurance” in the writings of Malcolm X, an American Muslim who too felt that his “peers failed to understand him as a complete and multifaceted human being.”
Lightnin’ Hopkins Gets Your Head Tore Up
In the summer of 1960, Dallas, Texas journalist Grover Lewis went to Houston’s Third Ward in search of Bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins. Lewis found him in an old ’54 Dodge. The resulting essay, published in the Village Voice in 1968, is a small masterpiece of personal music writing, offering a snapshot of artistic endurance, 1960s race […]
The High-Stress Life of a First Responder
You don’t know what it’s like to be an emergency services provider until you’ve stood in the piss-soaked bedroom of a house and watched a team of medics try to revive an old, lonely guy though 15 minutes of automated CPR. It’s a small part of the job, but unavoidable. When the call goes off […]
What It’s Like to Be an FBI Agent in a Border Town
Lawson moved out of his extended-stay hotel and into a house in Laredo, not far from some of the Treviños’ extended family, he says. He came to appreciate the camaraderie of working the border, a destination so low on agents’ wish lists that the bureau lets them transfer wherever they want after five years. Most of the […]
The Emotional Toll of Witnessing 278 Death Row Executions
With each passing year, the act of witnessing executions weighed on Michelle more and more heavily. Larry retired in 2003, and she felt his absence, wishing for the much-needed levity he had always brought to their work. She got married that same year and in 2005 gave birth to her daughter. “I started thinking about […]
The Couple in Their 60s Who Rid People of Their Demons
In D Magazine, Julie Lyons profiles Marion and Larry Pollard, a couple in their 60s living in West Arlington, Texas who happen to be exorcists. During one of her visits with the Pollards, Lyons witnesses the Pollards rid a 38-year-old suburban mom of various demons: Dozens of what appear to be demons manifest and depart […]
The Couple Who Started the Textbook Wars
“Mel and Norma Gabler founded Educational Research Analysts in 1961. Funded through donations, they hired serious-minded believers like Neal Frey, a professor at a small Christian liberal arts college in New York, to help them page through mountains of material. In a 12-by–15-foot bedroom next to the garage in the Gablers’ house, Frey and a […]
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The only American designer for high fashion retailer Hermés lives in Waco, Texas—and works as a postal worker: Kermit was sitting in the living room, in an armchair covered by a red-and-white quilt. He stood up when I arrived. He was small-framed, with salt-and-pepper hair combed off his forehead. Dressed in loose khakis and an […]
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Hundred of international parental child abduction cases are reported to the U.S. State Department each year, and left-behind parents are finding it difficult to receive help: Monica Sanchez, who lives in San Marcos, bounced between law enforcement agencies for days after her ex-boyfriend, Armando Muñoz Garcia, abducted their 2-year-old daughter Sarahi in January 2012. Sanchez […]
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A blind journalist and his brother go to a rattlesnake roundup in central West Texas: We finally bolted for the nearest exit, heading past the coliseum’s fountain. Its gushing water, almost like a sizzle, was loud enough that it touched every corner of the room, though it failed to cool us to any degree. Then, […]
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Inside the groundbreaking investigation by Columbia professor James Liebman, on the case of Carlos DeLuna, who was executed in 1989 for a crime he didn’t commit: At the trial, DeLuna’s defence team told the jury that Carlos Hernandez, not DeLuna, was the murderer. But the prosecutors ridiculed that suggestion. They told the jury that police […]
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A couple’s personal experience dealing with Texas’s new sonogram law, which requires a woman to have a sonogram and hear a doctor describe her child before moving forward with an abortion: “I don’t want to have to do this at all,” I told her. “I’m doing this to prevent my baby’s suffering. I don’t want […]
