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Katy Vine checks up on the UT-Dallas chess team.
The prison affected me personally. I grew up parking cars at the prison rodeo. I had a stepfather who was a prison guard.
Fernando Spada and Fernando Mendez are the Karpov and Kasparov of Brownsville: chess champions whose lifelong competition has produced a rivalry every bit as fierce as those of Ali and Frazier, McEnroe and Borg, or Nicklaus and Palmer. Did I mention that they’re in the fourth grade?
John Mueller was the heir to one of the great Texas barbecue dynasties. Aaron Franklin was an unknown kid from College Station who worked his counter. John had it all and then threw it all away. Aaron came out of nowhere to create the state’s most coveted brisket. Then John rose from the ashes.
When flames erupted at the West Fertilizer Company plant, the members of the local volunteer fire department pulled on their bunker gear and jumped in their trucks, just like they always do.
For going on five years, my admiration has grown for the weekly paper in the tiny Panhandle town of Miami (above). The New York Times it ain’t, but it tells me everything I could ever want to know about local births and deaths, windblown mail, bad potholes, and good yards. And Theo.
At the Giddings State School, violent teenagers come to terms with their horrific crimes—and learn how to avoid committing them again—through role-playing exercises in a jailhouse version of group therapy. This is what your tax dollars are paying for? Well, it works. For a while, at least.
For Steve Kemble, having as good a time as humanly possible as often as humanly possible is very serious business.
What Samir Patel learned in five years of not winning the national spelling bee (other than the root words of “eremacausis”).
What Samir Patel learned in five years of not winning the national spelling bee (other than the root words of “eremacausis”).