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.
In the town George Parr once dominated, a nineteen-year-old mother was gang-raped by her neighbors. In the aftermath of the crime, the old horrors of San Diego have surfaced anew.
When Houston’s Hermann Hospital sought a cure for its financial ills, it decided to perform major surgery on its agreement with the UT medical school next door.
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.
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.
In 2011 the Legislature slashed family planning funds, passed a new sonogram law, and waged an all-out war on Planned Parenthood that has dramatically shifted the state’s public health priorities. In the eighteen months since then, the conflict has continued to simmer in the courts, on the campaign trail, and
Dallas journalist Roxanna Asgarian’s new book, ‘We Were Once a Family,’ examines a murder-suicide that made national news—and finds that the story behind the story is even worse than we thought.
In the eighties, petroleum prices went through the roof, and Texans, flush with cash, went a little crazy—before it all came crashing down. Will we ever learn?
Decades before the recent police violence in Memphis, a brutally beaten Latino man was tossed by officers into a Houston bayou and drowned. The protests that followed continue to echo in the city to this day.
For more than fifty years, the state I call home has repeatedly surprised me. The Texas of 2023? Well, it’s got me thinking a lot about how far we have, and haven’t, come.
Gregg Phillips, a former Texas official who claims that “2,000 mules” stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump, has raised millions of dollars to chase nonexistent fraudulent votes.
Fifteen years after the popular journalist’s death, we’re living in the world she saw coming—and struggling to follow her example of joyful opposition.
Jonathan Mitchell, who cooked up the Texas “vigilante” law that effectively made abortion illegal in the state, argues the quiet parts of the majority opinion out loud.
After a quarter century in statewide office, Texas’s most popular politician remains an enigma—even to the folks who keep electing him. But the truth about the governor is hiding in plain sight.
The Houston social media influencer is a gay Black man with a gift for the absurd and a passion for platform heels. He’s also a star dancer in one of the world’s most rigid, gendered, and segregated art forms.
Ann Richards, Farrah Fawcett, Beyoncé. An excerpt from TM’s new book, ‘Being Texan,’ explores a strain of toughness in the iconography of the state’s females.
Charles Butt’s Holdsworth Center offers leadership training—and much-needed respect—for superintendents, principals, and teachers at Texas public schools.
Before a Democratic walkout blocked the passage of an "election integrity" bill in the Texas Lege, members of the partnership had split over how to respond to the legislation.
Tony Buzbee, who is representing the plaintiffs, and Rusty Hardin, who is defending the Texans quarterback, are trying to navigate deftly in the #MeToo era.
