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.
Leading educators and testing experts have studied the exams and find that they are asking kids to understand passages aimed two or more years above their grade level.
He built an oil empire, revitalized the state’s Republican party, gave rise to a political dynasty, and forever changed the Lone Star State. Yet the question dogged him his entire life: Was he a real Texan or merely a Yankee transplant?
Of course it wasn’t any wonder that our Texas senators couldn’t find it in their hearts or minds to consider Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s version of events.
A year after Hurricane Harvey brought Houston to its knees, the city is still wrestling with how to prepare for the next great storm. There’s no shortage of good ideas, but in Houston, that’s never been the problem.
In this exclusive excerpt from 'Ticker: The Quest to Create an Artificial Heart,' world-renowned Houston surgeon Bud Frazier races to help an ailing patient by implanting a revolutionary device that may one day save millions of lives.
Outside a cookie shop in one of Houston’s most idyllic neighborhoods, a West University Place council member spied Trump’s name on a teenager’s shirt and yelled a few of the president’s worst words at her. Then the internet found out. It's springtime in the age of hysteria.
Dear Governor Abbott,I just happened to catch your remarks from yesterday afternoon, the ones you made while visiting the Austin gun range to sign the bill that lowers the cost of gun licenses in Texas. The Dallas Morning News story I read said that you celebrated by firing a 9 mm
Public school parents with special-ed kids often find themselves squaring off against school districts and the taxpayer-funded lawyers who protect them.
Winning the MacArthur “genius grant” was a career highlight for Rice professor Rebecca Richards-Kortum. But it was a visit to Malawi that changed her life.
Since he finished his prison sentence, Andy Fastow, Enron’s disgraced CFO, has been quietly trying to make amends. But is the public ready to accept his apology?
The story of Texas can be reduced to one sentence: somebody has something somebody else wants and will put up a fight to get.In the beginning, these fights were over land. The Spanish explorers came here in the 1500’s; ignoring native peoples, they claimed a vast region that included
Rachel Bonyton's film "Big Men" follows Dallas oilman Jim Musselman as he contracts with the government of Ghana to find and develop the first oil field in that country.
Woodland Heights may not be the fanciest neighborhood in Houston, or the quietest, or the coolest (and it can be a little full of itself), but it’s mine.
Bev Kearney, UT's former celebrated track-and-field coach, filed suit against the university yesterday. The smart thing to do would be to make the whole thing go away—though it might benefit the larger world of college athletics to have the whole sordid mess played out in public.
Last year, UT forced prominent track-and-field coach Bev Kearney to resign because of her affair with a student. Now she’s fighting back, with a lawsuit that opens a window onto the world of high-stakes collegiate athletics—a window that many people would just as soon keep closed.
