The Rogue Court That Paved the Way for Roe’s Demise
The Fifth Circuit is led by four judges who got their start in Texas politics. For these activists, overturning the right to an abortion is only the beginning.
Mike Hall writes about criminals, musicians, the law, and barbecue. Mike graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1979 with a degree in government. He wrote for various publications, including Trouser Press, Third Coast Magazine, the Austin American-Statesman, and the Austin Chronicle. In 1997 he joined Texas Monthly, where he has won two Texas Gavel Awards from the State Bar of Texas and four Stephen Philbin Awards from the Dallas Bar Association. He was named Writer of the Year at the City and Regional Magazine Awards in 2015. His stories have appeared in The Best American Magazine Writing, The Best American Sports Writing, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Da Capo Best Music Writing, the New York Times, and Men’s Journal. Mike is also a musician and has played in Austin bands the Wild Seeds, the Setters, the Lollygaggers, and the Savage Trip. He pitches for the Burkas, the Texas Monthly softball team.
The Fifth Circuit is led by four judges who got their start in Texas politics. For these activists, overturning the right to an abortion is only the beginning.
By Michael Hall
The most dynamic freedom celebration in Texas, begun in the nineteenth century, returns to life.
By Michael Hall
Texas Monthly writer Michael Hall, who profiled Seals in 2020, reflects on some of the musician’s best stories.
By Michael Hall
Bobbie Nelson, pianist and older sister to Texas music icon Willie Nelson, died Thursday morning at 91.
By John Spong and Michael Hall
Some Refugio County locals say it was “kids being kids.” For others, the incident has reopened old wounds.
By Michael Hall
When a homeowner shot and killed a police officer in Midland, the court case that followed pitted two core Texas values against each other.
By Michael Hall
The U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether John Henry Ramirez, a Texan convicted of murder, is entitled to have his pastor by his side when he’s executed.
By Michael Hall
For 68 years, hippies, rednecks, and college kids drank beer at the Austin roadhouse, which received a final sendoff from famed country group Freda and the Firedogs.
By Michael Hall
Texas will put only three inmates to death in 2021. So much for our hang-’em-high reputation.
By Michael Hall
The wild times of a gentle roughneck who beat the Texas criminal-justice system.
By Michael Hall
The Phantom stylishly portrays what most everybody knows: the 27-year-old Texan didn’t kill Wanda Lopez.
By Michael Hall
In 1981 three Black teenagers drowned while in law enforcement custody during a Juneteenth gathering at Lake Mexia. Four decades later, Texas’s proudest Emancipation Day celebration still hasn’t recovered.
By Michael Hall
And 18 months after the police, district attorney, and trial judge all declared the Houston man innocent.
By Michael Hall
Seventeen years after Floyd’s arrest by a notorious Houston cop, his family is seeking a pardon.
By Michael Hall
Her ordeal included one final trauma: ICE showed up to deport her before the Mexican consulate intervened.
By Michael Hall
From ‘Urban Cowboy’ to ‘Northern Exposure’ to ‘No Country for Old Men,’ Texas’s finest character actor isn’t hanging up his spurs just yet.
By Michael Hall
In a nondescript space outside Austin, the team behind these world-renowned guitars carry on the exacting legacy of their founder.
By Michael Hall
The New York–born singer-songwriter got to Texas as soon as he could—and spent the next five decades changing the lives of seemingly everyone he met.
By David Courtney, Michael Hall, Andy Langer, Jeff Salamon, John Spong, Katy Vine and Christian Wallace
The king of the Parrotheads remembers the ups and downs of his half-century friendship with the late cosmic cowboy.
By Michael Hall
After contracting COVID-19 earlier this year, the musician had spent most of this past summer in isolation—where he was still writing songs.
By Michael Hall
DNA evidence proved Lydell Grant's innocence. So why won't the state’s highest criminal court exonerate him?
By Michael Hall
Jim McCloskey, the godfather of the innocence movement, changed the way we think about crime and punishment.
By Michael Hall
At 16, Ayala was just beginning to learn about social movements when police shot him in the head with a ”less-lethal” weapon.
By Michael Hall
Friends remember Floyd, who grew up in the Third Ward, as a gentle soul, a father, and a talented collaborator of DJ Screw’s.
By Michael Hall
First came the sound of someone running hard on the breezeway outside, then a banging on the apartment door. Irene Vera opened it to see her neighbor, twenty-year-old Rosa Jimenez, holding a little boy who lay limp in her arms. “Help me! Help me!” Jimenez cried hysterically in Spanish. The
By Michael Hall
The recording career of country music’s greatest artist, surveyed, sized up, and sorted on the occasion of his 87th birthday.
By David Courtney, Michael Hall, Max Marshall, Joe Nick Patoski, John Spong and Christian Wallace
The author and journalist has mobilized fans to chip in and help struggling strangers online.
By Michael Hall
The Houston icon, who passed away yesterday, sang a lot of other music too.
By Michael Hall
But we're hard at work creating another way for you to experience this incredible storytelling event.
By Michael Hall
On March 17, we're taking over the Moody Theater for a night of storytelling from some of your favorite Texas artists.
By Michael Hall
The incredible true story of two brothers raised on the hardscrabble country music of rural West Texas who dropped out, tuned in, found God, and helped launch the seventies soft-rock revolution.
By Michael Hall
Pedro Villalobos handles felony cases in Travis County, but his own legal status could be in jeopardy.
By Michael Hall
The stories, the traditions, and the deeper meanings of the boots in their lives.
By Michael Hall, Skip Hollandsworth, Andy Langer, Emily McCullar, Katy Vine and Lauren Smith Ford
Galveston’s Johnny Romano, the youngest professional skateboarder in history, passed away from leukemia.
By Michael Hall
Mezghebe fled East Africa, landed at Texas’s Casa Marianella, and performed with Maggie Rogers in Austin.
By Michael Hall
Both before and after Lee Hazlewood wrote hits for Nancy Sinatra and Duane Eddy, he was a Texas musician.
By Michael Hall
James Fulton reunites with his family, as victim Haile Beasley’s parents decry justice undone.
By Michael Hall
The obscure indie ’Taking Tiger Mountain’ offers a glimpse at the late Hollywood star as a teenager.
By Michael Hall
How does a man wrongly convicted of murder get released twenty years later? It helps to have a wife who loves you, a podcaster who believes in you, and an army of amateur sleuths who won’t stop digging for the truth.
By Michael Hall
Justices grant James Fulton a new sentencing hearing: “Tragic consequences do not elevate ordinary negligence to criminal negligence.”
By Michael Hall
Bob Ruff is working on his fifth Texas case in fewer than four years, this time hoping to prove the innocence of Sandra Melgar in the killing of her husband, Jaime Melgar.
By Michael Hall
Carly Mayo, eighteen, is now back in Tyler and living with her mom as she reckons with her past.
By Michael Hall
Driving through a dangerous curve in Tyler, James Fulton crossed into oncoming traffic and killed a young woman. He wasn’t drunk, and the cops said the crash was an accident. But the Smith County DA saw it differently.
By Michael Hall
Appreciations by current and former staffers who know them all too well.
By John Spong, John Nova Lomax, Larry L. King and Michael Hall
Found guilty in 1987, the freed man will be paid $2.5 million by the state of Texas, which he'll use to support his prison ministry.
By Michael Hall
The documentary, premiering on PBS December 17, looks to the elderly minister's hometown of Grand Saline to uncover why he set himself alight.
By Michael Hall
A controversial Dallas civil rights lawyer is holding police accountable—and being held accountable, too.
By Michael Hall
Brandley died last week, 31 years after the state of Texas tried and failed to kill him.
By Michael Hall
How a motley crew of young Texas lawyers, a burly Michigan podcaster, and his army of amateur sleuths—including actor Jon Cryer—helped free a man convicted of a murder he swears he didn’t commit.
By Michael Hall
He worked 80-hour weeks to send money home to his family. The driver who ran him over had been in and out of trouble for years.
By Michael Hall