Innholdsfortegnelse for May/June 2023 i The Texas Observer

On the last Sunday of March, I was playing hide-and-seek with our golden retriever when I got a call from the editor-in-chief of the Texas Tribune: “Gabe, we have a 2,300-word story coming out.” Our board, he told me, had voted to lay off the Texas Observer staff and cease publication. The blood drained from my brain. We have a staff member with a baby on the way, one who just quit another career to start here, and several with cats that need to eat. All were going to be jobless with just days’ notice. With dread, I started calling our team. Then, something shifted: We began to talk about whether we could stop it. The staff decided to make a simple but profound request to the board the next…

Now in his sixth regular legislative session as a member of a largely powerless minority caucus, state Representative Gene Wu, a 45-year-old Houstonian, has cultivated a number of strategies for a Texas Democrat to stay busy. He battles trolls on Twitter; he searches for marginal ways to make state systems work better for vulnerable kids; and lately he’s taken off as a political communicator on Reddit. An immigrant originally from China, he’s spent years battling xenophobia in Texas’ Capitol. In 2017, he gave a memorable and tearful floor speech decrying that year’s anti-“sanctuary cities” bill, and this year he fought against a bill that would have banned land sales to citizens from certain countries, including China. He represents a district where 71 percent speak a language other than English at…

Lynne Dobson & Greg Wooldridge | Dale Linebarger | The McHam Project Abby Rapoport | Ron Rapoport | Alec Rhodes Gabriel Arana & Michael Collis | Beatriz Pérez & Vincent LoVoi | Abi Mallick | Peggy & Matt Winkler Carol M. Barger | Carlton Carl | Lois Chiles | Marian & Paul Cones| Roxanne Elder & Scott Borders Kyle & Noah Hawley | The Neavel Family | Janis & Joe Pinnelli Greg Wooldridge | Elliott Harris | Don Gardner & Pat Murfin (in memory of John Henry Faulk and Larry lee) | Samuel England | Carol Barger | Ramona Adams | Wade Arledge | John Bailey | Thomas Belden | Katy Bettner | Karen Brown | Declan Dunne | Robert Frump | James Galbraith | Dicky Grigg | Charlie Gustin…

I want to livein the negative spaceof your landscapes, recede intoshadows on the horizon soft likean echo,a ghost note. Desert mother,I see you cloistered inyour Model Ain a swarm of bees,painting fever dreams ingold and ochre— I want to be still. I am a lens,setting fires in the sandwith insolent focus. Teach me to bean aperture, quietand cleanas bleached bones,speaking only to water. Dallas poet and educator Kim Nall co-curates and emcees the Raising Our Voices Alumni Reading Series for Carlow University, from which she holds an MFA degree.…

all the Texas Observer has given me.” —Eric Dafoe “The legacy of Molly Ivins and so many others needs to carry on!” —Eric Hanselman “We need progressive voices in Texas, now more than ever.” — Everard Santamarina “The Observer is essential if there’s any hope for the future of my native state.” —France Davis “We need more progressive voices in Texas, not fewer.” —Frank Brill “We need to save the journalism profession, especially in areas where authoritarianism is taking hold and threatens all.” —Gary Blog “We need progressive voices in Texas, now more than ever.” “Keep up the good fight. Texas is in shambles and needs journalists like you to get the truth out to people and to expose the corruption of the government nitwits running the state.” —Gayna Dupont…

The Solid Rock Church of Kerrvillehas moved to another location.It says so on the sign underits name – Solid Rock. Also the entire town of Comfortappears to be for sale.this does not feel comforting at all. How many times we drove these curves,pale fence posts, bent cedars…but nothing needs us here. Nothing we said, thought, forgot,took root in the ditch around the bend.I always want to stop at historic markers,see what happened long before, butthe pull of motion keeps a car going,passing by till next time,which soon won’t come,even when everything we knowsays slow.…

It’s become an inside joke among Capitol watchers that the best way to figure out what Governor Greg Abbott and the Republican Legislature are gonna do next is to read the Miami Herald—or better yet, follow Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Twitter. While that’s a bit overstated, it’s truer than Abbott and his allies would care to admit. Long the biggest, baddest political perch in red state America, the Texas governorship is no longer the singular juggernaut it once was in national politics. DeSantis, boy wonder of the Sunshine State, availed himself of a GOP power vacuum that opened after Trump’s 2020 presidential loss, becoming the frontrunner among 2024 Republican presidential contenders whose names don’t end in rump. That status was further solidified by his nearly 20-point blowout reelection in…

Mary Kelleher knew she was moving to a floodplain when she bought a farm on Fort Worth’s east side in 2003. But the risk was worth it. “I just fell in love with it because there was still so much country over here,” she said. She did not expect that, nearly two decades later, the 100 acres she loved would nearly cost her her livelihood, propel her into public office, and drive her to become a flood control activist. At first the high-water incidents were about what she’d expected for a floodplain: manageable if you prepared. Her house was on a high point on the property, safely away from flood-prone areas. But the water rose faster than usual in 2010, killing some of her livestock and ruining thousands of dollars…

I grew up in northwest Austin at the edge of the Texas Hill Country, where hiking through the woods and playing in creeks were daily activities. So, I’ve always been an “outdoors person.” After moving to Houston for a journalism job, I quickly began running and biking along the city’s mostly concrete-lined bayous. Then an environmental activist told me something intriguing: Just an hour north of the traffic and skyscrapers of downtown Houston is the 96-mile Lone Star Hiking Trail, the longest footpath in Texas. During April 2020, I began a quest to hike the full trail along with a friend in my “COVID bubble.” It was a sunny and unseasonably hot day as we embarked from mile marker zero inside the 163,000-acre Sam Houston National Forest. So early in…

My late father-in-law, an Episcopal priest, had a cartoon taped to his kitchen wall in Sherman that skewers an obnoxious feature of American religion. In the cartoon, a grinning devil, sitting on a throne surrounded by flames, instructs a horned apprentice, suitcase in hand, who is about to head upstairs to torture the human race. “Remember to quote lots of Scripture,” Satan says. If you work as a reporter for more than four decades in Texas, as I have, you will—regularly—encounter the most inappropriate, unfortunate and downright bizarre invocations of the Almighty. It’s enough to make me, a church-going Episcopalian who has—until now— kept my beliefs in the closet as a reporter, ruefully agree with the quip I saw on a refrigerator magnet. A man says to the Prince of…

AUSTIN The antics of Attorney General Ken “I’m still under indictment” Paxton could often earn a mention here doing his part to retain Texas’s tile as the “Strangest State.” But things got weirder than usual when Paxton asked lawmakers to fork over $3.3 million for a settlement with four ex-employees who are SUING him for firing them after they reported his illegal activities to the FBI. But legislators balked. Even weirder, the Texas Legislature wrote the law that makes the state liable for damages and granted officials like Paxton immunity from paying for their own misbehavior. LUFKIN Since 1976, the Museum of East Texas has offered exhibits of art and sculpture in a historic building that once housed an Episcopal church. Museum officials often host inventive fundraisers, but after two…

The staff of the Texas Observer would like to extend our biggest high five and our utmost gratitude to the 4,800 (!) people who donated to our GoFundMe. You saved the day and helped make this issue and our ongoing reboot of this muckraking, truth-telling magazine possible. Some supporters are longtime readers who knew Molly Ivins or have served on the board of the Texas Democracy Foundation, our nonprofit parent. Others recently befriended us on social media platform Mastodon. Many words of solidarity came from beloved TXO alums, including journalists who started their careers here. Olivia Messer—whose first investigation of sexual misconduct by Texas legislators was published by the Observer (a story no other outlet would touch)—wrote: “I’m paralyzed by sadness for what was my first real reporting home and…

Austin author Szilvia Molnar’s debut novel The Nursery, a memoir-looking work about a new mother suppressing baby-harming thoughts, is an engaging experiment in uncomfortable empathy that finds its tonal antecedents in cerebral body horror movies like David Cronenberg’s The Brood and David Lynch’s Eraserhead, and its stylistic sisterhood in the early avant-garde confessionals of French novelist and screen writer Marguerite Duras. Expressing the parasitic pain her unnamed narrator experiences while nursing her newborn, Molnar writes: “With a hand on the back of her head, I put her face toward my nipple and a toothless mouth opens. She latches on with lips soft as a fish. I squirm from the initial discomfort of her bite.” Our heroine, a translator of Swedish literature who refers to her infant as a leech and…

I think of it as a bloodline, clean thread stretching west,mind emptying so gently as it ranged farther from billboards,chains, farther from access roads, exits, deeper into sky,that road is why I love this state, despite politics, pronouncements,the boy called Cody in Comstock who wrote me,a year after I visited his class,Basically poetry changed everything,it made me see where I was,could you please come back and stay forever?Finding his letter again thirty years later,looking him up to learn he died young,cowboy hat over his downturned face,I want to say Your roads are still stretching outwards,the fields you walked through,we are here soaking in the mystery of time,trapped in our little houses, scared of a virus,feeling connected through the spaces, all of these new ways,and I remember you.…