Tag: Texas

The New Yorker writer takes readers through the riparian heart of Big Bend National Park.

Join Nick Paumgarten on a trip down the Rio Grande to understand what we’d lose if Trump’s border wall destroys this ecosystem.

Why does Tex-Mex get such a bad rap when it’s a legitimate culinary tradition predating Texas statehood?

On the artists who labor to keep Austin weird and glowing brightly.

The before, during, and after of how Hurricane Harvey battered Texas for five days.

Attempting civil discourse in a polarizing time.

“He was beginning to think the point of the revelry was to celebrate gluttony, and he wept for the world that his boy would have inherited, had he lived long enough to do so.”

Look to Texas for the future of electoral politics, writes Lawrence Wright. Unfortunately, the future is already here.

Twenty years after Marines fatally shot an innocent 18-year old man in West Texas, the War on Drugs and militarization of the US-Mexico border has left many local people feeling less safe.

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.”

At Cosmopolitan, Jillian Keenan reports on Dinisha Ball’s nightmare experience of being denied rape kits in more than one ER, for both legally invalid and “valid” reasons, after being drugged and sexually assaulted in Houston.

David Hanson, writing for the Bitter Southerner, helps residents of Standard Heights, Baton Rouge, tell their story of a town next to an Exxon plant — explosions, sinkholes, toxic sludge, and a everyday life that has to go on, regardless.

Jeff Sharlet spends a day with the sexually pure teens of Battlecry Honor Academy, and learns that renouncing your sins doesn’t mean redacting their memories.

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Mary Karr, in The Paris Review, on her small-town roots.

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 […]

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. * * *

“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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

Ruby Session was shaking as she read on. The year was 2007, and the letter was addressed to her son Timothy Cole. “I have been trying to locate you since 1995 to tell you I wish to confess I did in fact commit the rape Lubbock wrongly convicted you of.” Ruby sat down, stood up. […]