Them’s Fightin’ Words!
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?
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.
Articles by Mimi Swartz
Six Ways To Sunday
The New England Patriots weren't the only winners at the Super Bowl. Houston won too, sort of.
“I Had a Great Future Behind Me”
So says my friend Jost Lunstroth, one of thousands of formerly successful Texans for whom unemployment is more than a statistic.
The Witness
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.
Man Hunt
Executive editor Mimi Swartz talks about Wadih el-Hage and this month's cover story, "The Traitor Next Door."
The Traitor Next Door
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.
How Enron Blew It
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.
Oscar Wyatt
The oil boom is long over, but he and other wildcatters are still thriving.
Good-bye to All That
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.
The Last Resort
Acapulco used to be a favorite destination of beautiful people from Texas and elsewhere. It still should be.
Westheimer, Ho!
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.
Sloane, Alone
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.
Green Eggs and Kao
I thought I’d teach my young son’s Laotian friend about all the essentials of American culture, including Dr. Seuss. I just never imagined how much he’d teach me.
Brenham’s Paradise Lost
An idyllic small town confronts a controversial rape case involving four high school boys and a thirteen-year-old girl and discovers that nothing is certain—except that its children can’t escape the big-city culture of teenage sex.
It Came From Outer Space
The inside story of how industrious NASA scientists discovered signs of life in a Martian rock and boosted the fortunes of the tabloids, Hollywood producers, and even the president.
The High Times of Gerry Goldstein
Texas’ top drug lawyer helps dope dealers and cocaine kingpins beat their raps—and he’s proud of it.
Congressman Clueless
Steve Stockman was supposed to have been a lethal weapon in the Republicans’ fight to unmake the Great Society. Instead the freshman legislator has been a loose cannon—an outsider in his own party.
The Public Hell of Bob Carreiro
A daughter’s gruesome murder became a grieving father’s dark crusade to find her killer and thrust him into an ever-widening spotlight as an advocate for victims of violent crime.
Home, Sweet Homestead
Five chic interior design stores in Fredericksburg are comforting, inspiring, and for the acquisitive, absolutely irresistible.
Silicone City
From invention to litigation, the breast implant has done more for Houston’s economy—and its psyche—than anything since oil.
Sand Dollars
Gigantic homes. Gala parties. Nonstop schmoozing. The hip summer playground of Houston’s high society is … Galveston?
Lonesome Cowboy
A year after Robert James Waller left Iowa for the quieter climes of Big Bend, the best-selling author is discovering that it’s one thing to live like Texan and quite another to be one.
Not What the Doctor Ordered
How an old-fashioned Texas physician fought the takeover of modern medicine by heartless insurance companies—and lost.
How to Marry A Millionaire
Anna Nicole Smith got her man: the full story on the big gal’s marriage to octogenarian oilman J. Howard Marshall.
Harried, With Children
Houston cartoonist Michael Fry takes on the trials of two-career parenting.
Death Watch
In Houston, Kennie Matthews’ wife was killed in a midday robbery. Another senseless murder, and yet another reason why Texans’ fear of crime has never been higher.
The Promised Land
We are sixth-generation Texans and we are Jews. My family’s history is an account of the price we have paid to be both.
The Price of AIDS
After years of decay and death, a Houston neighborhood ravaged by the disease is learning to live with it—and surviving.
Vidor in Black And White
The story of this notorious East Texas city isn’t a simple racist fable. It’s a complicated tragedy about a society that has lost its way.
