Coiffing Socialites
Cerón on styling socialites’ hair.
Mimi Swartz, the author, with Sherron Watkins, of Power Failure, The Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron, is an executive editor of Texas Monthly. Previously, she was a staff writer at Talk, from April 1999 to April 2001, and a staff writer at the New Yorker from 1997 to 2001. Prior to joining the New Yorker, she worked at Texas Monthly for thirteen years. In 1996 Swartz was a finalist for two National Magazine Awards and won in the public interest category for “Not What the Doctor Ordered.” She was also a National Magazine Award finalist for her November 2005 issue story on tort reform, titled “Hurt? Injured? Need a Lawyer? Too Bad!” and won the 2006 John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest, Magazine Journalism, for the same story. In 2013 she won her second National Magazine Award (again in the category of public interest), for “Mothers, Sisters, Daughters, Wives,” a compelling look at the state of women's health care in Texas.
Over the years, Swartz’s work has appeared in Vanity Fair, Esquire, Slate, National Geographic, and the New York Times’ op-ed page and Sunday magazine. It has also been collected in Best American Political Writing 2006 and Best American Sportswriting 2007. She has been a member of the Texas Institute of Letters since 1994. Swartz grew up in San Antonio and graduated from Hampshire College, in Amherst, Massachusetts. She now lives in Houston with her husband, John Wilburn, and son, Sam.
Cerón on styling socialites’ hair.
By Mimi Swartz
If you need an example of how the world can change in an instant, here is a small blow by blow.
By Mimi Swartz
Maybe the collapse of the Stanford Group isn’t Enron, but Houston wasn’t about to be left out of the financial scandals.
By Mimi Swartz
Why Texans stand out in crowds.
By Mimi Swartz
The once forgotten corridor emerges as an eclectic enclave.
By Mimi Swartz
Only yesterday, it seems, my mother was taking me to visit colleges. A second later, here I am, enduring this rite of passage from the other side.
By Mimi Swartz
Most American consumers understand that the invasion of Iraq has contributed to the skyrocketing price of oil. But there’s another reason why we’re paying so much per barrel and gallon: The countries where crude is available in abundance are increasingly dangerous places to operate. Russell Spell, of Conroe, can tell
By Mimi Swartz
Summer vacation is right around the corner, but that doesn’t mean you should panic. We’ve rounded up 68 of our favorite things to do with your toddlers, teens, and every kid in between. Dance the hokey pokey. Rope a horse. Eat way too many hot dogs. Zip down a waterslide.
By Skip Hollandsworth, Brian D. Sweany, Paul Burka, Michael Hall, Suzy Banks, Mimi Swartz and Jordan Breal
1. Yes, Lee’s Sandwiches hails from California, but that just means it’s a spot where you can experience Melting Pot America in its myriad glory. Your order is called in Vietnamese and English; it’s a little like being in a train station in seventies Saigon. The baguettes and croissants
By Mimi Swartz
How Houston’s rich got to be the same as you and me—that is, boring.
By Mimi Swartz
In the right light, the ornery octogenarian oilman’s guilty plea can be seen as a victory: After all, he won’t spend the rest of his natural life in jail. But the fact is, he couldn’t beat the rap—and he knew it.
By Mimi Swartz
True-life tales from the files of one of Houston’s top divorce lawyers.
By Mimi Swartz
Westheimer Road, Houston
By Mimi Swartz
Anna Nicole Smith died as she lived: as a bit of tabloid ephemera, sandwiched between a love-crazed astronaut and Britney Spears’s new do. And that’s exactly where she belonged.
By Mimi Swartz
Party tricks from Jackson Hicks.
By Mimi Swartz
Dan Patrick is causing nervous breakdowns of various size and duration—and he’s not even in the Texas Senate yet.
By Mimi Swartz
West Nineteenth, Houston.
By Mimi Swartz
Houston’s Katrina hangover.
By Mimi Swartz
But not just any. The Prime and Tanger outlets, in San Marcos, with Neiman’s Last Call and Saks Off Fifth and Polo Ralph Lauren and Zegna among their more than 225 stores, are the fourth most popular tourist attraction in Texas. Maximizing a trip to such a massive shopping mecca
By Mimi Swartz
Hot enough for you?
By Mimi Swartz
Kenny, we hardly knew ye. Okay, maybe we knew you too well. The jury, at least, seems to have pegged you just right. You too, Skilling.
By Mimi Swartz
Scenes from the Enron reality show.
By Mimi Swartz
If the war is an unpleasant abstraction in the rest of the country, it’s omnipresent at Killeen Shoemaker, where many of the children of the enlisted men and women of Fort Hood are enrolled—and pray for peace every single day.
By Mimi Swartz
Last Call.
By Mimi Swartz
One evening Ike and Tina came over for dinner to my mom and dad’s house. Tina kissed me on the forehead before I went to bed.
By Mimi Swartz
My San Antonio was an overgrown small town, socially stratified and inbred, controlled by a handful of old, wealthy families.
By Mimi Swartz
What tort reform has done to Texans in need would be grounds for a lawsuit—if there still were any lawsuits.
By Mimi Swartz
The marriage of Baylor College of Medicine and Methodist Hospital should have been made in heaven—and until recently, it was. Their nasty breakup is a bell tolling for American medicine.
By Mimi Swartz
The fairy tale is long over, but reality hasn’t necessarily set in.
By Mimi Swartz
An exit interview with Hockaday’s headmistress.
By Mimi Swartz
All over the world, and all over this country, the Texas stereotype is mocked and maligned (so what else is new?). Does it matter, really, if everyone thinks we're fat, violent, prudish yahoos?
By Mimi Swartz
For Sharon Bush, membership in the world's most powerful family had its privileges. But as she discovered after her husband of 23 years—the brother of one president and the son of another—ended their marriage via e-mail, it can be revoked without warning.
By Mimi Swartz
The New England Patriots weren't the only winners at the Super Bowl. Houston won too, sort of.
By Mimi Swartz
So says my friend Jost Lunstroth, one of thousands of formerly successful Texans for whom unemployment is more than a statistic.
By Mimi Swartz
For forty years Nellie Connally has been talking about that day, when she was in that car and saw that tragedy unfold. She's still talking—and now she's writing too.
By Mimi Swartz
Will Houston's next mayor be White?
By Mimi Swartz
Executive editor Mimi Swartz talks about Wadih el-Hage and this month's cover story, "The Traitor Next Door."
By Mimi Swartz
His name was Wadih el-Hage. He had an American wife and American kids, a home in Arlington, a job at a tire store in Fort Worth, and a secret past that led straight to Osama bin Laden.
By Mimi Swartz
Mimi Swartz sizes up the legacy of Stanley Marcus.
By Mimi Swartz
Enron, rest in pieces.
By Mimi Swartz
Mimi Swartz finds fear at home.
By Mimi Swartz
The Houston-based energy giant put the pursuit of profits ahead of all other corporate goals, which fostered a climate of workaholism and paranoia. And that was only part of the problem.
By Mimi Swartz
The oil boom is long over, but he and other wildcatters are still thriving.
By Mimi Swartz
Mimi Schwartz considers the wake of Tropical Storm Allison.
By Mimi Swartz
Austinites thought the high-tech boom wouldn't change them, but it turned their city into something that more closely resembled Houston or Dallas in the golden eighties. Now they're paying the price.
By Mimi Swartz
Acapulco used to be a favorite destination of beautiful people from Texas and elsewhere. It still should be.
By Mimi Swartz
Master builders.
By Mimi Swartz
She’s got a secret.
By Mimi Swartz
Accessories for sexual adventurers, columns for your Craftsman bungalow, tasteful tables made from old manhole covers: You can find it all on this reborn Houston strip.
By Mimi Swartz
Dallas’ Sloane Simpson was a society queen who enchanted New York, seduced Mexico City, and turned Acapulco into a jet-set getaway. But when she died last year at age eighty, she was almost completely forgotten.
By Mimi Swartz