Anna Nicole Myth
Anna Nicole Smith’s bar mitzvah brouhaha.
Evan Smith is a senior adviser at Emerson Collective, for which he advises nonprofit local news orgs around the country. He’s also a senior adviser at the Texas Tribune, the pioneering nonprofit digital news organization he cofounded in 2009 and led for more than thirteen years as CEO; a Distinguished Fellow in Journalism at the University of Virginia’s Karsh Institute of Democracy; and a contributing writer at the Atlantic. Previously he spent eighteen years at Texas Monthly, including nine years as the magazine’s editor in chief and a year as its president. Evan is the host of Overheard with Evan Smith, a weekly half-hour interview program that airs on PBS stations around the country. A native of New York, he's a graduate of Hamilton College, which awarded him an honorary degree in 2023, and Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, which inducted him into its Hall of Achievement in 2006.
Anna Nicole Smith’s bar mitzvah brouhaha.
By Evan Smith
Red McCombs, still on the sidelines
By Evan Smith
Signs of intelligent life in Dallas.
By Evan Smith
Paula Jones and Texas.
By Evan Smith
A Houston congresswoman’s space case.
By Evan Smith
For Robert James Waller, life imitates art—and irritates wife.
By Evan Smith
The governor’s media guru is accused of spousal abuse.
By Evan Smith
Why everyone’s dazed and confused about Richard Linklater’s age.
By Evan Smith
A Dallas lawyer’s roman à Clinton.
By Evan Smith
That’s what Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall got on their recent trip to West Texas. West Texas retailers got it too.
By Evan Smith
If you’re a celebrity who wants to pen a book, who you gonna call? Ghostwriters.
By Evan Smith
The Texas Observer could be on its last legs (again).
By Evan Smith
Why a great horror movie starring Matthew McConaughey and Renée Zellweger could get buried.
By Evan Smith
summary: What’s the best hotel in Texas? (Hint: It’s not the Mansion on Turtle Creek).
By Evan Smith
Why Texas’ best-known homeless writer is back on the streets.
By Evan Smith
Dick Morris’ other other woman.
By Evan Smith
Hot CDsAlong with Nat “King” Cole, Texas City native Charles Brown became the father of late-night “cocktail blues” in Los Angeles in the forties. Half a century later, Honey Dripper (Verve/Gitanes) vividly conjures up Brown’s suave, stylish world. His voice is sweet and smoky like a rich cigar and as
By Evan Smith
The University of Houston thinks Frank Stella is frankly stellar.
By Evan Smith
Hot CDsTwo years after their wildly successful debut, Elida y Avante bounce back from label troubles with Algo Entero (Tejas). For my money, Mercedes-born Elida Reyna is tejano’s next female superstar. Her husky, throbbing voice is mature well beyond her 24 years—she has the archetypal blend of innocence and experience—and
By Evan Smith
Anyone who knows executive editor Paul Burka would have a hard time imagining him as a cowboy, so perhaps it seems farfetched that he was the one to write this month’s story about the plight of a small working ranch in Uvalde (“Home on the Range”). “I’m a
By Evan Smith
A Spielberg-backed cyberguide comes to Texas.
By Evan Smith
In the summer of 1992, when Jason Cohen was a relatively unknown journalist and Matthew McConaughey was an extremely unknown actor, the two met on the Austin set of Dazed and Confused. “He looked so weird,” recalls 28-year-old Cohen, who was writing about the movie for Details. “He had
By Evan Smith
Those whispers about Melissa Etheridge are true: She will play Port Arthur–born Janis Joplin in a forthcoming feature film. Director Mark Rocco (Murder in the First) has secured the rights to Myra Friedman’s 1973 Joplin bio, Buried Alive, and the rights to Joplin’s songs, and he’s talking to Etheridge’s label,
By Evan Smith
JUST AS HE WAS FINISHING up “Poisoning Daddy”, his tale of a Fort Worth teenager who killed her father, senior editor Skip Hollandsworth set out to interview the sibling models featured on this month’s Face page. As it happened, one of the sisters, Wende Parks, had been
By Evan Smith
Ann Richards gets ready for prime time.
By Evan Smith
We didn’t know it at the time, but there was something karmically appropriate about asking senior editor Mimi Swartz to write about riding around the state with Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Victor Morales in his dented white pickup truck (see “Truckin’,”). At first, it seemed to make sense
By Evan Smith
Molly Ivins and Bob Wade on TV.
By Evan Smith
Edgar and Johnny Winter sing the blues over a comic book.
By Evan Smith
Texas writers go Hollywood.
By Evan Smith
With high school basketball playoffs just around the bend, our thoughts turned to the mechanics of the game—and so we called head boys coach Robert Hughes of Dunbar High School in Fort Worth, whose lifetime record of 1,082-192 makes him the fourth-winningest coach in the country. A two-time All-American at
By Evan Smith
Celebrity land deals—not.
By Evan Smith
It’s not enough to say that associate editor Helen Thorpe was a fish out of water while reporting her story on the new oil plays in the Gulf of Mexico (“Oil and Water,”). She was really a fish out of water on the water. Three different times, the
By Evan Smith
Gauging Barney’s Universal appeal.
By Evan Smith
I played a few sports at Snyder High School, but my big thing was football. I played quarterback and defensive back until my senior year, when I quit to start acting in plays. You know what a big deal high school football is: When I quit, some of the coaches
By Evan Smith
Where Microsft wants to go today.
By Evan Smith
Ross Perot defends his wife.
By Evan Smith
Anne Richards Stages a comeback.
By Evan Smith
By Evan Smith
A ban against hunting dogs is turning some East Texas hunters into backwoods pyros.
By Evan Smith
The University of Texas at Dallas gets a new president—and a healthy does of controversy.
By Evan Smith
Forget how she looks. For fifty years, Tyler’s Sarah McClendon has been the most vigilant White House correspondent.
By Evan Smith
After ten low-key years, country singer turned mystery novelist Kinky Friedman is once again poised to hit the big time.
By Evan Smith