Texas
Story Stream
Unpleasant Gore-ography February 25, 2025
In 1968, The New York Times dismissed Night of the Living Dead as a revolting little item cobbled together by “some people in Pittsburgh.” The review was myopic; the film was visionary. George A. Romero’s low-budget account of everyday Americans unde...
Texas’s Barbecue Schism February 25, 2025
Seventeen years ago, on assignment for The New Yorker, Calvin Trillin travelled through central Texas on a barbecue-themed road trip. He was with editors from Texas Monthly, which had just published its top fifty barbecue joints in the state, a list ...
Desperado Dadaism February 18, 2025
Lubbock, Texas is almost exactly five hours from Dallas, Albuquerque, Oklahoma City, and El Paso. It’s home to Texas Tech University, the National Cowboy Symposium, and frequent dust storms and tornadoes. In 1951, the still-unexplained “Lubbock Light...
Collectivism in the C-Suite February 06, 2025
On January 10, Federal Judge Reed O’Connor, of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, ruled that American Airlines had violated both federal law and its fiduciary duty of loyalty to its employees by contracting with BlackRock to ...
The Carpetbagger Who Saw Texas’s Future December 11, 2024
When Edna Ferber’s Giant was published in 1952, Texans were not pleased. Ferber’s sweeping novel about cattle, oil, and the winds of change brought a reform-minded Virginia woman, Leslie Benedict, to a Texas ranch, where she has the temerity to sugge...
The Californication of Texas August 12, 2024
When I first moved to Texas in 2006, I spent several months living with my in-laws in Georgetown, a quiet town of about 46,000 people located 30 miles north of Austin. There was a giant house in their neighbourhood that looked different from all the ...
Why Readers Love — And Love to Hate — Colleen Hoover August 09, 2024
This weekend, one of the most popular books of the decade is making its way to the big screen. Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us, a romantic tearjerker about breaking the cycle of abuse that became a social media sensation after it was published in 20...
Driving While Female August 01, 2024
I’ve exceeded the speed limit on Texas interstates, spun around after taking a turn too fast, and once changed my outfit while driving. I learned to drive in a 1971 three-on-the-tree Chevy pick-up and my daily driver is a six-speed, turbo-charged Jap...
My First Year in Texas April 03, 2024
I’m reflecting on the good, the bad and the surprising of my first year in Texas. I took a huge risk moving my business and my family away from California. How has it gone?I had a tough entry into my new life. Moving is insanely stressful. So much so...
Fables of the Lone Star Liberal March 29, 2024
A distinguished writer sits in an East Texas diner, chatting with the director Richard Linklater: They shake hands with locals and talk about Linklater’s family, the prison system, and the curious “oppositional personality” of radicals. Now, the writ...
Beyoncé’s Country Roots March 27, 2024
If you somehow haven’t heard: Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, her eighth studio album and the much-anticipated sequel to Renaissance, drops on Friday. Its lead single “Texas Hold ‘Em” made history when it debuted at the top of the country charts last month....
Steve Austin Turned “Texas Tough” Into Megacelebrity March 26, 2024
The Texas Rattlesnake. The Bionic Redneck. The Bottom Line. Steve Austin has been known by many names, but two words rise above them all to define this true-blue Texan phenomenon: Stone Cold....
How Jesse Plemons Came to Star in Everything March 25, 2024
When Jesse Plemons goes quiet—and here on the front porch of his childhood home, thirty minutes east of Waco, Jesse Plemons has just gone quiet—you don’t know if you’re at the end of something or the beginning. Nobody suggests so much by saying so li...
The Cult of Townes Van Zandt March 15, 2024
On 20 September 1977 Townes Van Zandt played the first of two nights at the Lone Star Cafe, then New York City’s premier country music venue. By this point the Texas-born musician had recorded six albums, made over the course of just four years. The ...
Wim Wenders’s Cinema of Sincerity December 11, 2023
Partway through the 1989 documentary “Notebook on Cities and Clothes,” Wim Wenders reveals the philosophy that underpins his art. “Filmmaking should just be a way of life,” he says, “carried along by nothing other than its curiosity.” Then in his ear...
My Ultimate Texas Songwriter Playlist December 11, 2023
I moved to Austin with a little bit of knowledge of Texas music—but it was lopsided.I knew lots about Texas blues and the songsters of the old days, and a bit about Tex-Mex border music and some other traditional styles. But I was actually more famil...
The 10 Worst Things About the Florida State Travesty December 06, 2023
At noon on Sunday, the College Football Playoff committee announced that the fourth spot in its four-team tournament, which begins on January 1, would be filled not by undefeated ACC champion Florida State but instead by one-loss Alabama, which joins...
How a Texas Tale Reinvented the Hollywood Film Industry October 17, 2023
An exhausted Faye Dunaway savors the sweetness of breakfast and flashy newspapers, celebrating her triumphant Oscar win for Network the evening before. The iconic 1977 image, taken at the Beverly Hills Hotel, would become a testament to the industry’...
Texas Heartbreak, Forever October 10, 2023
Where to start with the final Big 12 edition of the Texas-Oklahoma game? One play speaks for the 34-30 Sooners win. In the fourth quarter, the Longhorns were down by seven. It was fourth-and-goal at the Sooners’ 2-yard line. Here was the Longhorns’ c...
'The Daytripper' with Chet Gardner October 03, 2023
There aren’t enough television shows that make good use of the banjo in their opening song, but The Daytripper with Chet Gardner definitely does. Daytripper plays on Texas PBS, and it features Chet and his crew taking daytrips to all kinds of towns i...
How Larry McMurtry Defined the Idea of Texas September 19, 2023
As a boy, Larry McMurtry rode Polecat, a Shetland pony with a mean streak and a habit of dragging him through mesquite thickets. The family ranch occupied a hard, dry, largely featureless corner of north-central Texas, and was perched on a rise known...
Can The CW Survive Without Superheroes and Teen Soaps? September 15, 2023
The CW systematically stripped away its superhero dramas and teen-centric soaps during the 2022-23 television season, taking the foundation of its primetime programming slate down to the studs. Now comes the reveal of a renovation that leans heavily ...
A YouTube View of Deion Sanders September 11, 2023
This past Saturday, the revamped, unranked University of Colorado football team coached by Deion Sanders shocked the sports world by upsetting, on the road and in hundred-degree-plus heat, last year’s national runner-up, Texas Christian University. I...
