Quick Links

Contributors

Jake Silverstein

Jake Silverstein is the former editor in chief of Texas Monthly. He attended Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and also received degrees from Hollins University, in Roanoke, Virginia, and the Michener Center for Writers, at the University of Texas at Austin. In the late nineties, he worked as a reporter for the Big Bend Sentinel, a weekly newspaper in Marfa. In 2005 he became a contributing editor to Harper’s Magazine. His first book, Nothing Happened and Then It Did: A Chronicle in Fact and Fiction, was published in 2010 by W. W. Norton. His work has also appeared in the anthologies The Best American Travel Writing 2003 and Submersion Journalism (2008). He joined the staff of Texas Monthly as a senior editor in 2006. In 2008 he was named the fourth editor of the magazine. During his editorship, which ended in 2014, the magazine was nominated for eleven National Magazine Awards (the industry’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize) and won two, for general excellence and feature writing. Silverstein lives in New York and is the editor of the New York Times Magazine.

118 Articles

Editor's Letter|
January 21, 2013

The Truth About Texas: Water = Life

As last year’s historic drought reminded us, Texas has always lived life by the drop, just a few dry years away from a serious crisis. With our population expected to nearly double over the next fifty years, this situation is about to become more, not less, challenging. This month we

By

Editor's Letter|
January 21, 2013

Dry, the Beloved Country

The first serious coverage of water in TEXAS MONTHLY came just a couple months shy of our two-year anniversary, in a story by Greg Curtis entitled “Disaster, Part I. Lubbock is running out of water.” (A companion piece, “Disaster, Part II,” argued that Houston was sinking into

By

Editor's Letter|
January 21, 2013

The Scales of Injustice

About a year ago, it was reported that Randall Dale Adams had died, bringing to a close one of the more tragic stories in recent Texas history. A construction worker from Ohio, Adams (pictured here, in 1989) was convicted and sentenced to die in 1977 for the murder of Dallas

By

Feature|
January 21, 2013

Trials and Errors

Over the past two decades Texas has exonerated more than eighty wrongfully convicted prisoners. How does this happen? Can anything be done to stop it? We assembled a group of experts (a police chief, a state senator, a judge, a prosecutor, a district attorney, and an exoneree) to find out.

By Michael Hall and Jake Silverstein

Editor's Letter|
January 20, 2013

Tenacious P

If it’s something you’d just as soon not think about, chances are Pamela Colloff has written about it for TEXAS MONTHLY. Here is a partial list of the subjects she’s covered since coming to work at the magazine thirteen years ago: murder, arson, abortion, heroin addiction, hate crimes, illegal immigration,

By

Editor's Letter|
January 20, 2013

Memory of Fire

The cliché about any great tragedy is that it creates indelible markers in time and space: Had John F. Kennedy visited Dallas in 1963 without incident, few Americans would be able to recall much about where they were or what they were doing on November 22 of that year.

By

Food & Drink|
January 20, 2013

Lockhart: Kreuz Market

The old Kreuz Market was like a one-room chapel. The humble brick building off the courthouse square in Lockhart had turned out divine smoked meat since 1900. But just as churchgoers nowadays worship in larger halls, so too does the visitor to the new Kreuz Market, which opened in 1999

By

The Culture|
August 15, 2012

How to Raise a Texan

Our forthcoming issue, on newsstands next week, tackles this subject, but we couldn’t wait any longer to share the cover of this special issue. Caution: Cute babies ahead. 

By

Politics & Policy|
July 31, 2012

Uncivil War

It’s the Year of the Dragon, officially, but you could be forgiven for thinking that it’s the Year of the War on Women, or the War Over Women, or the War Among Women, or the War About Whether There Is a War on Women. The trouble began in January, when

By

Editor's Letter|
April 30, 2012

Primal Screen

Here is a partial list of the nice people Skip Hollandsworth has written about since he joined the magazine as a staff writer in 1989: Charles Albright, a serial killer in Dallas who removed his victims’ eyes; Marie Robards, a Fort Worth teenager who killed her father by poisoning

By

The Culture|
March 31, 2012

Kind of Blue

Two framed letters hang side by side in the main conference room at the offices of TEXAS MONTHLY, both of them written and signed by the magazine’s founder and former publisher, Mike Levy. The first is a note that prefaced the inaugural issue, in February 1973. The second is a

By

Business|
March 1, 2012

Plane Management

I hate flying. I don’t mean that I’m a legitimate, doctor-approved aerophobe who munches Xanax like candy and lunges for the barf bag at the first sign of turbulence. I just dislike the minor ordeal of air travel—the security lines, the required partial disrobing and unpacking, the “huddled masses”

By

Food & Drink|
February 1, 2012

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

For all the stories that we publish in TEXAS MONTHLY, there are always more that we don’t publish, usually because we run out of space and time. In a state that spans 261,232 square miles and contains 25,145,561 people, it’s a safe bet that the things we could cover

By

News & Politics|
January 1, 2012

Decision 2012

No one wants to give the governor a Bum Steer. No one wants to poke fun at the elected representative of 25 million Texans. In fact, when Rick Perry launched his presidential campaign four and a half months ago, we felt compelled to defend him (a little) from the slings

By

Editor's Letter|
December 1, 2011

Going Postal

Back in February 1973, in the very first issue of this magazine, founding editor William Broyles wrote, by way of introduction, “If our readers have ever finished the daily paper or the six o’clock news and felt there was more than what they were told, then they know why

By

Sports|
October 31, 2011

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Later this month, one of the great long-standing traditions in college athletics—the annual Thanksgiving game between the University of Texas and Texas A&M—will come to an end. The rivalry between these two schools has lasted so long, and fostered such ferocious passion on both sides, that most people probably

By

Editor's Letter|
September 30, 2011

City Girl

Some writers are journeymen, always on the road. Others work and rework the same ground, eventually becoming identified with the places they inhabit. In this second category you often find journalists and novelists who take their inspiration from huge and fascinating cities, urban ecosystems with enough tragedy, comedy, and

By

Sports|
August 31, 2011

It’s Not About the Hike

You’re probably well aware that earlier this summer the television show Friday Night Lights came to an end. The network season finale, in mid-July, triggered a wave of epitaphs from critics and slews of tearful “texasforever”-hashtagged tweets from fans, more reminders of the powerful chord that the scrappy football drama

By

Politics & Policy|
August 13, 2011

The Great Campaigner

We interrupt your regular blogger to bring you a special message from the editor: So it’s official. As of today, at 1:30 pm EST, Governor Perry is finally a formal candidate for president (though we’ve been convinced he had eyes on the job as far back as

By

Editor's Letter|
July 31, 2011

Cover Edge

One of the best—and the hardest—parts of being a magazine editor is deciding what goes on the cover every month. There is nothing else quite like that little rectangle of real estate. Book jackets and album covers are quiet­er, movie posters are less integral to the product, billboards are more

By

Politics & Policy|
June 30, 2011

The Usual Suspects

There’s an old joke that goes like this: A girl is out milking the family cow one morning when a stranger rolls up and asks if her parents are at home. The girl yells out, “Mama, there’s a man here to see you!” Her mother peers out the door and,

By

Editor's Letter|
May 31, 2011

App in the Heart of Texas

Only a few years ago, the word was understood (if it was used at all) to mean chicken wings or jalapeño poppers or nachos. That time is gone forever. As even the proudest Luddite now knows, an “app” is something you download onto your handheld device or tablet, a helpful

By

Editor's Letter|
April 30, 2011

Talkin’ About an Education

The U.S. Constitution says nothing about public education, but all the state constitutions have clauses addressing it, and reading through them is a mildly inspiring way to spend half an hour. Arkansas: “Intelligence and virtue being the safeguards of liberty and the bulwark of a free and good government, the

By

Politics & Policy|
April 30, 2011

Night of the Living Ed

With public education facing an estimated $7 billion in cuts, the question on everyone’s mind is, Are Texas schools doomed? So we assembled a group of dinner guests (a superintendent, advocates on both sides, an education union rep, and the commissioner of the Texas Education Agency) to find out. Check,

By Nate Blakeslee and Jake Silverstein

Food & Drink|
March 31, 2011

Holy Frijole

The first person I think of when it comes to cooking like a Texan is Enrique Madrid. You probably have someone you think of, your father, perhaps, or your grandmother. I think of Enrique, a historian, archaeologist, cook, defender of the borderlands, author, and lecturer whose family has been living

By

Texas History|
March 1, 2011

Past Present

Big moments call for big efforts. This year marks the 175th anniversary of the victory of Sam Houston’s ragtag band of volunteers over the Mexican army, which led to the creation of the sovereign Republic of Texas. In the almost two centuries since then, much has changed. Texas is now

By

Politics & Policy|
February 1, 2011

Session Up

This issue went to press four days before the start of the most important legislative session of our lifetime, when lawmakers face, in addition to the testy, high-stakes business of redistricting and the supercharged debate over immigration and voter ID, an epic fiscal crisis: a budget shortfall of up to

By

Editor's Letter|
January 1, 2011

Steer Pressure

A wise man once said, “Beware of football Bum Steers.” Baseball is fine, and so is basketball, since both of those seasons will have wrapped up by the time the January issue goes to press. But football is a different story. Just when you think a player or a coach

By

Politics & Policy|
December 1, 2010

Don’t Mess With Exes

“Take the grips up to the attic.” That was Harry Truman’s response to a reporter who asked him, as he arrived back home in Independence, Missouri, after leaving the White House, what he intended to do first (“grips,” for all you kids out there, used to be a common synonym

By

News & Politics|
October 31, 2010

Point of Border

The job of most editors, myself included, is to delight, entertain, surprise, and inform their readers. The majority of the time, when it comes to choosing a cover story, we try to keep the emphasis on the first three, since the other job of most editors, myself included, is to

By

Energy|
August 31, 2010

Baby Boom

On October 27, 1900, an Austrian-born mining engineer named Anthony F. Lucas spudded in an oil well on a hill near Beaumont. He’d drilled a previous well in the vicinity to a depth of 575 feet before running out of money and giving up, but this time he’d secured financing

By

Editor's Letter|
July 31, 2010

All He Wrote

He’s been here from the very beginning. In February 1973 readers of the first issue of a brand-new magazine called TEXAS MONTHLY were treated to, among other stories, a strange but fascinating piece by a strange but fascinating writer named Gary Cartwright. Gary was already familiar to many Texans

By

The Culture|
May 31, 2010

Where I’m Home

This is our second “Where I’m From” special issue, in which the entire magazine, front to back, is given over to stories about growing up in Texas. Last time, most of the essays were by staff writers. This time we turned to some of our favorite authors, folks like

By

Editor's Letter|
April 30, 2010

Yes We Canoe

I’ve been thinking about a spot on the Brazos about a day and half below the dam at Possum Kingdom Reservoir, where a long, humped island narrows to a spit of sand. A couple of years ago I found myself camped there with three friends. We’d been paddling all

By

Music|
March 31, 2010

Fotos y Recuerdos

This past year marked an important, though largely unnoticed, milestone for fans of Selena Quintanilla Perez, the hugely popular Tejano singer who died at 23 on March 31, 1995: She has now lived in our memories for longer than she performed professionally. She was 9 years old when she started

By

Magazine Latest