Los Miserables
Three academics plumb the rags-to-rags stories that have long been excluded from our state mythology.
Writer-at-large Michael Ennis is a longtime Dallas resident whose writing for Texas Monthly has included award-winning art criticism and political commentary as well as in-depth reporting on business and national defense. A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, with a degree in history and a former Rockefeller Foundation fellow in museum education, he is also the New York Times best-selling author of historical novels that have been published in twenty languages worldwide. He is currently working on a “historical novel set in the future” about the breakup of the United States, the transformation of politics and culture by deeply immersive virtual reality, and the competition among next-generation tech giants to develop human-level artificial intelligence.
Three academics plumb the rags-to-rags stories that have long been excluded from our state mythology.
As five new books make clear, our thirty-sixth president refuses to be consigned to the dustbin of history.
A 181-year-old book reminds us that Texas was once much more German—and far more radical—than we realize.
The secret history of cotton, the crop that transformed the global economy—and kept Texans in poverty for generations.
Larry McMurtry, Bill Wittliff, and Jeff Guinn turn to familiar turf—the Old West—to challenge old-school readers.
With its tight prose, waitress heroine, and stinging insight into urban life, Merritt Tierce’s debut marks an exciting turn in Texas literature.
Journalist Chris Tomlinson delves into the parallel histories of two Texas families with the same last name—one black, one white.
Energy reporter Russell Gold gives us a reason to give a frak about fracking.
Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, should rank alongside the smartphone as this young century’s most transformative technology. Over the past decade, so much oil and gas has been unlocked from previously impervious rock that America’s generation-long energy crisis has all but ended. Instead of a crippling strategic vulnerability—dependence on foreign
Former state demographer Steve H. Murdock is back, with a book that should be required reading for all 26,060,796 of us.
Contrary to what the national media would have you believe, Texas is not politically monochromatic. It is, and always has been, a state with two minds.
For half a century the world has regarded the Dallas of 1963 as a city of hate. But as JFK knew when he got there, that wasn’t the whole story.
The illogical politics of immigration reform.
Why, in books and movies (not to mention politics), we keep returning to the epic frontier struggle between the Comanche and the Texas Rangers.
Acting like a rube used to be the best way to get ahead in politics. Now something crazier is required.
Leadership is lacking in Texas. O Houston, where art thou?
Just over forty years ago, Texas was the kind of place dismissed as hopelessly provincial and culturally mediocre. But then came the Kimbell Art Museum.
Sure, Rick Perry doesn't want to expand Medicaid. But can he afford not to?
When a third of its citizens vote, can Texas really be called a democracy?
America is chasing the myth of Texas. Fortunately, we aren’t.
Dallas’s almost-finished Calatrava bridge may be an emblem of the city’s status. But the smart urban plan for the small neighborhood it leads to says more about the city’s future.
How Jerry Jones made Cowboys Stadium into one of the state’s best art galleries. Seriously!
Contrary to our self-mythology, ideas—and the people who wrote them down—have always been central to Texas history.
A tour of our greatest architectural master-pieces—from the Alamo to the World Birding Center—shows how the collision of the Old World and the New forged a unique style on the Texas frontier.
What University of Texas historian H. W. Brands’s new biography of Franklin Roosevelt tells us about the Obama administration.
Is the answer to our energy crisis really offshore?
During all but two of the past twenty years, someone named Bush had led our nation or led our state. Now we’re moving on.
The historic showdown between Texas and California has been a cold war, a simmering ideological feud between two great powers. And the winner (for now) is . . .
What Dallas has in common with Beijing—and why their shared vision of the twenty-first-century world must carry the day.
Where the great silent majority is taking politics, here and elsewhere.
Remember all that talk of tipping the balance of history on a fulcrum of those “Texas values” everyone was crowing about?
Russell Lee’s rarely seen Texas photographs reveal an artist at the peak of his powers of observation.
Just a few years after nearly being written off the map, the region has become a roaring engine of growth and social transformation.
Independent candidates for governor won’t win this year, but they’ve certainly upended the established order. Democrats and Republicans, you have only yourselves to blame.
What I learned about Iraq from World War II—and what all the president’s men could learn.
He’s still the gold standard by which all chroniclers of our shared experience are judged, but it’s time to look to the new generation. How do his wannabe heirs stack up?
As surprising as our immigrant-friendliness may be to many, it speaks to who we are. To be a Texan is to inhabit a vast bicultural frontera, one that extends far beyond the Rio Grande.
Rethinking the way we do business—and government—down here.
Frozen embryos are destroyed every day in the name of in vitro fertilization. Tell me again what’s so wrong with stem cell research?
For starters, even though its self- image is big and brash, it’s the most politically wimpy city in Texas.
Why Texas could lose the biotech revolution—and end up, once again, an economic also-ran.
We Texans have long considered ourselves, in mythical terms, old cowhands. But we’re waking up to discover that we’re really city slickers.
The idea that U.S. policy bears an indelible made-in- Texas stamp is a rare point of bipartisan consensus. But there's nothing inherently Texan about the president's leadership style.
What sets Dallas apart from other sophisticated American cities? Its unique end-of-the-world industry.
A new anthology of articles about Houston from the journal of the Rice Design Alliance is a sweeping historical overview, a civic memoir, and a municipal self-help guide.
As in Nasher, and everybody should. His $70 million sculpture center is the most eagerly anticipated arts opening in Dallas' history.
The addition of Leo Steinberg's magnificent collection makes it official: UT-Austin's Blanton is one of the best university art museums in the country.
The real revelation of Donald Judd's early work is how far ahead of its time it looksnot simply its own time, but our time as well.
Modernism may yet be proved dead, but if so, it has left an exquisite corpse in Fort Worth's stunning new Modern Art Museum.
Some people look at Houston and see only rough edges. Peter Marzio, the director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, sees a brash upstart that should be proud of its cultural riches.