Multiple-choice question: UT’s Tom Philpott is (a) the best professor on campus, a selfless reformer, and the victim of an assassination attempt; (b) the worst professor on campus, a publicity hound, and a nut who staged his own shooting.
The Pachelbel Canon has gone Hollywood and become the best-selling classical piece in the country. Works by Bach, Mozart, and Wagner are managing to hold their own, too.
A new market for unstable oil; Colorado joins the hate-Texas club; Houston lawyers invade Dallas; a Republican litmus test.
A Texas farmer’s bitter harvest; a trucker’s paradise; Louisiana’s tastiest emigrant; NASA’s lunar fringe; the media’s favorite oilman.
Albert Cleage, the self-styled holy patriarch of an ambitious sect, has already won over blacks in Detroit and Atlanta. Now he’s set his sights on Houston.
Diner recalls the unbeatable glow when the gang was all together. The two friends in My Dinner With Andre find that not seeing eye to eye doesn’t keep them from talking heart to heart.
Sounds like a joke, right? Cowboy chic was funny too, until it caught on.
How a Houston boy forgot his family’s advice about staying out of politics and became the White House chief of staff.
Welcome—well, sort of—to San Antonio’s dowager bastion.
Anybody can get a job as a security guard. Anybody.
The Dallas Ballet’s new director is moving the company from traditional works into daring—and sometimes absurd—modern choreography.
Used correctly, the polygraph can tell whether or not an accused criminal’s claim that he didn’t do it is true. Too bad the police can’t take that to court.
Beyond Greed is the tale of the Hunts’ journey from silver spoon to silver lust. In Sing Me Back Home Merle Haggard takes a quick look at his life (too quick). Billy Clayton has Gavels, Grit & Glory--or so says his biographer.
Welcome to Houston, the cutting edge of architecture. The local boys are turning a gentlemen’s profession into a business, the stylish out-of-towners are creating a new aesthetic, and neither group is filled with admiration for the other.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals confirms your worst fears about lawyers and judges and the impotence of the criminal justice system.
Outside the back door stretches the lonely prairie; there is deep silence broken sometimes by gunshots and things that go bump in the night. But here on the edge of Dallas’s suburbs, you can always retreat to the whirlpool in the bathroom.
The New Federalism gets the old raspberry; will Jim Baker run the country or the bank?; a political test for Texas labor; a law Houston’s new police chief would love to break.
Hug the baby; buggy burners
The countdown begins in the Dallas newspaper fight; Victor Garza is going your way--if you’re going to Laredo; one of Houston’s legal monoliths cracks; Clements has a lukewarm record, but the Democratic challengers aren’t so hot, either.
The air is muggy, the sky turns an eerie green, then you hear a sound like a fleet of freight trains. Beware, Texas, it’s that time of year again.
Jack Nicholson is looking for his angel of redemption in The Border. In Personal Best, Victor/Victoria, and Making Love, everyone is looking for anyone but a member of the opposite sex.
The greatness of Paul Desmond, the staying power of Art Blakey, the de-fusion of Stan Gertz--all these are on record, and more.
It was simple, really. With Charlie’s Angels, television discovered sex.
El Paso’s Ysleta Mission, the oldest church in Texas, is also one of the liveliest; what Houston Christian Scientists lack in testimonial passion they make up for in self-possession.
Texas’ hottest oil patch is cooling down.
The new organization man.
On the surface, Mexico’s presidential election looks a lot like ours—rallies, placards, speeches—but the outcome there is never in doubt.
Mudding up, twisting off, and other mysteries in the life of a roughneck.
Drilling for oil on hallowed ground; nannies invade Dallas; McKnight of the living dead; does the Voting Rights Act really help Mexican Americans?
In hiring football coach Jackie Sherrill, the A&M regents were acting life shrewd businessmen, but that may not be the best way to run a university.
Steers charge, Wildcats retreat, scorpions to eat.
Private eyes are peeled for oil thieves; Lightnin’ Hopkin’s death left Houston singin’ the blues; Zenter’s steakhouses hoof it across Texas; folks are MADD as hell about DWI; Places Rated Almanac flunks the rating game.
It’s only a humble weed, but just try to imagine West Texas without it.
Shoot the Moon is about domestic warfare with tenderness and humor between the skirmishes; One From the Heart succeeds as art but fails as real life; Willie Nelson is just one of several good reasons to go see Barbarosa.
When liquor by the drink went into effect in 1971, Texas changed forever.
Saint Paul said that a little wine is a fine thing. He must have known something.
Hugh Roy Cullen found the oil and made one of Houston’s great fortunes; now his grandson is spending his inheritance like there is no tomorrow, and suing for more.
From their antipastos to their cannoli, three restaurants are leading Texans to the pure, simple pleasures of classical Italian cooking.
Two young conductors are rousing audiences in Houston and making motions toward becoming the country’s finest maestros.
Another Life, the Christian Broadcasting Network’s born-again soap, hasn’t discarded the essentials of the genre: sex, crime, and violence.
Dignity and groovy threads.
Celebrity is Thomas Thompson’s flawed venture into fiction; The Last Texas Hero deserves a twenty-yard penalty; Peeper is to be read only to find out who the real Tom is.
If you leave your child at a day care center, you are hardly unique. If you know what your child does there all day, you are indeed unique.
For years no one would drink Lone Star beer because rednecks did; then one enterprising man figured out that if it was marketed right, everyone would want to drink Lone Star precisely because rednecks did.
People still think of cotton as a Dixieland crop, but the heart of the nation’s production is on the dry, flat, and windswept High Plains of Texas.
All the carefree young bachelor wanted was a few pieces of Tupperware. He never dreamed of what he’d have to go through to get it.
Selling the streets of Laredo; the next big oil play; the bar breaks up over a Supreme Court race; it’s true what they say about office Christmas parties.
Over the river and through the swamp.
A lawyer takes aim at handgun makers; Texas journalism gets hugh on society; politicians see red over fire ants; Dallas tries to master its aversion to master plans.
This clunky piece of machinery made Howard Hughes very rich. It is the first in our series of things that every Texan should know.
