A year of antagonistic attorneys, beleaguered Bushes, costumed cacti, dead dogs, espied Elvises, falling Fledermause, garbled grapes, hemline histrionics, imprudent impeachings, journalistic judges, kinky kindling, legislative largesse, mock McMurtrys, novelist’s nooks, overrated Odessas, phantom pharaohs, qualified quail, Ruby’s revolvers, spurious spies, tardy transcribers, U-charistic Uthanasians, vandalized vans, weird wienersm X-onerated X-ecutives, yapping Yankees, and zippered zoos.

It wasn’t nostalgia that brought me back to my hometown. It was a black man’s violent death in a jail cell.

The troubled Parks and Wildlife Department is supposed to protect the state’s natural resources. Instead, it protects its friends and, above all, itself.

To find their true masculine selves, wildmen dance and sweat, bond and meditate, renounce their mothers and grunt, “Ho!” I thought, “Hmmm.”

Snapping turtles are cantankerous, grotesque, and savage. And those are just a few of the reasons I like them.

But for this ever-so-practical invention, Texas history as we know it would be gone with the wind.

The young—and even the not-so-young-can travel back through the state’s glorious past simply by opening up any one of these fourteen children’s classics.

When his luck ran out, A.W. Gray ended up behind bars. Now he’s on a winning streak as a crime novelist.

With liquid diets, the pounds just seem to melt away. But what it takes to keep that unwanted weight off is sometimes even harder to swallow.

A customs seizure raises a perplexing question: Who owns our past-Texas or Mexico?

Bonfire-crazed yell leaders Keving Fitzgerald and Brant Ince foresee defeat for fire’s foes.

Tim Johnson came out smelling like a rose when San Franciscans detected broken gas lines.

Shopper Ethel Sexton is dressed to the nines in her garage-sale finery.

Discovering the hero in every person; getting off the ground without ever leaving the airport; paying our respects to an ancient tree.

The right angle for striking oil; making book on the Bush library; a roving eye for GOP money; reining in rogue cops.