Look to Texas for the future of electoral politics, writes Lawrence Wright. Unfortunately, the future is already here.
Texas
Posted inArts & Culture, Crime, Nonfiction, Quotes, Uncategorized
Treating Our Border As a Battle Zone
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.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
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.”
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
‘Equally Victimized by this System as By the Guy Who Raped Me’
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.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Living and Dying in Cancer Alley
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.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Temptation, Purity, and High-Stakes Evangelism in a Texas Town
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.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
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 […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
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 […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
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 […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
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 […]