From Luling’s Watermelon Thump Queen to Gilmer’s Queen Yam, small-town Texas is full of festival royalty, and pretty is the head that wears the crown.

Is it the crispiness? The crunchiness? The saltiness? Thankfully, a small cadre of researchers in the Department of Soil and Crop Sciences at Texas A&M has spent much of the past thirty years munching on this question.

And you would be too if you were an itinerant Rollerblader with a passion for pirates who’d reinvented the game of college football, brought joy to Lubbock, beaten UT, and narrowly missed a shot at a national champi- onship. And what you’d be thinking is, “Gangway!”

The future of Texas depends on how well we are able to educate kids who can’t speak English. Has an elementary school in El Paso figured out the best way to do it?

It was the breast of times, it was the worst of times.

An open letter to the lucky new chair of the most dysfunctional agency in Texas, the State Board of Education.

Everyone was shocked when San Angelo’s hugely popular mayor suddenly left town with his gay lover. Everyone, that is, except the citizens of San Angelo.

A year has passed since Hurricane Ike slammed into Galveston, but my hometown is still reeling from a storm without end.

Will hiring a yard guy make me soft?

How Mike Judge got his groove back.

At 73, the Brownsville native has had a recording renaissance.

“I don’t let people run over me. From the very beginning, I’ve never changed my ideas about what music should be.”

Sam Gwynne, David Strohl and Karen Olsson.