Happy Birthday, Mary Kay Ash
A look back through the years of the empire of Mary Kay, who would have turned 96 today.
A native of Houston and a graduate of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, Sonia Smith is a writer-at-large for Texas Monthly. She cut her teeth reporting on crime on the bayou for the Baton Rouge Advocate. She has also written for Slate, The New York Times Magazine, Roads & Kingdoms, and the Kyiv Post, and was a finalist for the 2008 Livingston Awards for Young Journalists for her reporting on sexual abuse at the Louisiana School for the Deaf. Her Texas Monthly profile of leading climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe was included in the anthology The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2017.
A look back through the years of the empire of Mary Kay, who would have turned 96 today.
By Sonia Smith
Our favorite recent items from the Lufkin Daily News' police blotter.
By Sonia Smith
Plan a summertime weekend glitzing it up using this guide with tips on what to do, where to eat, and where to stay.
By Sonia Smith
Born in Pakistan and raised in Abu Dhabi, the mayor of Paris, Texas, Dr. Arjumand Hashmi, tackles city business in between patient visits and holds the distinction of making the small East Texas city a medical destination for former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf.
By Sonia Smith
Glitzing it up around Big D (as in, “Downtown”).
By Sonia Smith
Hill Country glamping in the ultimate tent for two.
By Sonia Smith
Inmates at two women's prisons in Texas train service dogs for veterans through Patriot Paws, a Rockwall-based nonprofit.
By Sonia Smith
Sean Morris and Ryan Ringnald, both in their late twenties, are leaders of the conservative, 90-person Church of Wells, which many consider to be a cult. This doesn't come as a surprise to a number of peers who knew them during their college years at Baylor.
By Sonia Smith
"Manor of Speaking" unpacks each new episode of the critically-acclaimed Masterpiece Classic series and has quickly become Houston PBS's most popular locally-produced show.
By Sonia Smith
The man behind the offbeat local produce powering some of Dallas’s best dishes.
By Sonia Smith
Kelly Siegler uses the skills she honed in a two-decade-plus career in the Harris County district attorney’s office to solve cold cases on the TNT show “Cold Justice.”
By Sonia Smith
Our favorite recent items from the Lufkin Daily News’ police blotter.
By Sonia Smith
Hundreds of people pawed through an extensive collection of guns and taxidermied animals owned by the infamous hand surgeon, who killed himself last year. It was just another spectacle in the long-running circus that defined Brown's life—and death.
By Sonia Smith
Twenty-seven-year-old Catherine Grove is a member of a small, insular, and eccentric church in East Texas. Her parents think she’s being brainwashed. She insists she’s being saved.
By Sonia Smith
The McDonald Observatory, celebrating its seventy-fifth anniversary this year, forges ahead with groundbreaking research and crusades to keep the night skies of West Texas pristine and unadulterated.
By Sonia Smith
Because it certainly has been a year full of cheetah cubs.
By Sonia Smith
Our favorite recent items from the Lufkin Daily News' police blotter.
By Sonia Smith
Our favorite recent items from the Lufkin Daily News’ police blotter.
By Sonia Smith
An interview with Peter Savodnik, author of "The Interloper: Lee Harvey Oswald Inside the Soviet Union."
By Sonia Smith
For the last several centuries, Texas was cattle country. Now, with worldwide demand for goat meat growing, and drought threatening to put cattle ranchers out of business, should Texas be goat country?
By Sonia Smith
Sasha, born in July, can now be see romping around the Texas Wild! exhibit at the Fort Worth Zoo.
By Sonia Smith
Lubbock, long a stronghold in the Bible Belt, is home to a new religious marketing campaign featuring a tattooed Jesus. The billboards picturing inked Jesus have irked some in the community (where churches outnumber tattoo parlors 25:1) and left others impressed with the message.
By Sonia Smith
Our favorite recent items from the Lufkin Daily News' police blotter.
By Sonia Smith
Some choice details from Jason Zengerle's GQ profile of Texas's junior senator.
By Sonia Smith
The Select Committee on Transparency in State Agency Operations met Monday to discuss its investigation of the UT System Regent.
By Sonia Smith
Our favorite recent items from the Lufkin Daily News' police blotter.
By Sonia Smith
Why Shymkent, a city in South Kazakhstan, proudly thinks of itself as the Lone Star State of Central Asia.
By Sonia Smith
Our favorite recent items from the Lufkin Daily News' police blotter.
By Sonia Smith
On the first day of the second special session, activists on both sides of the abortion debate arrived at the Capitol to make their voices heard.
By Sonia Smith
The abortion debate continued to play out in Texas over the last few days as Governor Rick Perry, Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst, and Senator Ted Cruz addressed the National Right to Life Convention in Grapevine.
By Sonia Smith
Senator Wendy Davis continued her national media blitz on Sunday with appearances on CBS' Face the Nation, ABC's This Week, and NBC's Meet the Press.
By Sonia Smith
The scene from inside the chamber of the Texas State Senate Tuesday night.
By Sonia Smith
With all the strange things that happened during Wendy Davis's filibuster, there's one point that has gone almost unnoticed.
By Sonia Smith and Erica Grieder
The daughter of former Texas governor Ann Richards is at the Capitol Tuesday to support Sen. Wendy Davis as she filibusters SB-5, an omnibus abortion bill that critics say could shutter 37 of the state's 42 abortion providers.
By Sonia Smith and Erica Grieder
Katy Republican Senator Glenn Hegar combined measures that failed to pass during the regular session into an omnibus abortion bill that won approval in the state Senate late Tuesday night.
By Sonia Smith
Proving the skeptics wrong, the Eighty-third Legislature accomplished most of what it planned to do. Our twenty-third roundup of the Capitol’s saints and sinners reveals who we can thank—and who we needn’t.
The legislators that shaped the Eighty-third Legislative session, for good and bad.
By Sonia Smith and Paul Burka
Our favorite recent items from the Lufkin Daily News's police blotter.
By Sonia Smith
Texas's capital was the first stop on the president's new "Middle Class Jobs & Opportunity Tour."
By Sonia Smith
In an interview with Texas Monthly in Washington last week, the freshman congressman from El Paso weighed in on border security, U.S.-Mexico trade, and immigration reform.
By Sonia Smith
Looking back on 43 as the the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum opens its doors.
By Sonia Smith and Paul Burka
After 100 days of relative calm, discord finally erupted in the Senate when Dan Patrick brought up a rare and controversial measure to recall a colleague's bill.
By Sonia Smith
The DUI arrest of Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg could have far-ranging consequences.
By Sonia Smith and Paul Burka
In an exclusive conversation with Texas Monthly, the controversial UT regent opens up about the board, the Legislature, and the future of UT-Austin president Bill Powers.
By Sonia Smith and Brian D. Sweany
Training the wayward pups of Houston’s rich and famous.
By Sonia Smith
Republicans and Democrats agree on drug testing for welfare recipients? Maybe there is something in the water.
By Sonia Smith
The Republican State Senator from Houston made what was his third appearance on the show this year to talk guns Tuesday night.
By Sonia Smith
The Senate Criminal Justice Committee unanimously signed off on a measure Tuesday that would require DNA testing of all biological evidence before capital cases go to trial.
By Sonia Smith
Our favorite recent items from the Lufkin Daily News’ police blotter.
By Sonia Smith
The Senate Education Committee heard four hours of testimony Tuesday on a bill by Senator Dan Patrick that would require the State Board of Education to sign off on all lesson plans included in the online curriculum management tool CSCOPE.
By Sonia Smith