Friends In Deed

Meet some of Texas’ secular latter-day saints: volunteers.

by Suzanne Winckler

The Gittings People

Shoot enough portraits of Texans, and you’ll have made a portrait of Texas.

by Nicholas Lemann

Texas Primer: The Right-angle Pump

West Texas was a desert when this little irrigation device came along. Now it’s a desert that produces more cotton than anywhere else in the country.

by Dick J. Reavis

The Cutting Edge

Texas’ glass artists are leading a revolution in ancient craft.

by Michael Ennis

Lyndon Johnson, Hairdresser, Prepares for Battle

The long afternoons of the best friend the rich women of Houston have ever had.

by John Davidson

Blood of the Lamb

A high school teacher shot up the First Baptist Church in the East Texas steel town of Daingerfield, and the agony has lasted longer than anyone could have imagined.

by Jan Reid

Behind the Lines

The graybeard at the fat stock show.

by Gregory Curtis

Fun

Say, Have You Heard the One...

One man’s ludicrous attempts to trace the origin of a joke led him to a simple truth: life is funny.

by Harry Hurt III

Crime

Daddy’s Gone to Jail

Sometimes prison is harder for the people on the other side of the bars.

by Jim Atkinson

Movies

The Nerd Who Would Be King

Martin Scorcese’s The King of Comedy is about the stock-in-trade of comedians, but who’s the laughingstock? You’ll be smitten with Lovesick. The Year of Living Dangerously teeters precariously between metaphysics and lust.

by James Wolcott

Food

Is There Food After Fort Stockton?

Ah, the hungriness of the long-distance diner. Trapped in the vastnesses of West Texas, he drives and drives in search of edible beef and credible Tex-Mex. He finds both - and more.

by Griffin Smith, Jr

Architecture

Architect in Wonderland

The barren plains of the Southwest and the fertile fields of his mind led architect Bruce Goff to create houses that got curiouser and curiouser.

by Lisa Germany

Reporter

Texas Monthly Reporter

Pecos bucks for the title of world’s oldest rodeo; medical students make us pay now so they can make us pay later; Ground Zero radiates good, atomic fun; Texas’ jails get slammed; Fort Worth’s namesake languishes among Yankees.

by Peter Applebome

Roar of the Crowd

No oil in Israel, no crown for the congressman, no Coke at the Last Supper.

Touts

What’s red and black and read all over?

by Patricia Sharpe

Puzzle

Go play in the traffic.

State Secrets

Wright is wrong in the Houston mayor’s race; the medical establishment beats the state budget crunch; capital punishment faces death by bureaucracy; will defense put John Tower on the defensive?

Edited by Paul Burka