What Houston’s Reaction to the Equal Rights Ordinance Says About My City
HERO evokes another era—one we shouldn’t be proud of.
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.
HERO evokes another era—one we shouldn’t be proud of.
By Mimi Swartz
The election only determines who will lead the nation's fourth-largest city, no big deal.
By Mimi Swartz
How did smog-breathing, gridlock-prone Houston become the newest natural wonder of the urban world?
By Mimi Swartz
Mimi Swartz cross-examines the Court of Criminal Appeals’ unprecedented sanctions against a death penalty lawyer.
By Mimi Swartz
For the first time in its history, Blue Bell is in a right sticky mess.
By Mimi Swartz
Mimi Swartz wonders why, in this day and age, there are so few Hispanics serving on the boards of Texas nonprofits.
By Mimi Swartz
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
By Texas Monthly and Mimi Swartz
Mimi Swartz on what Houston’s fractious mayoral race says about the city.
By Mimi Swartz
How did he perform in eight areas that are critical to the state? The grade book is now open.
Bryan Cranston’s portrayal of LBJ was just another sad caricature of what the world thinks a Texan ought to act like.
By Mimi Swartz
Mimi Swartz on how the rise of our cities will lead to a new kind of government.
By Mimi Swartz
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.
By Mimi Swartz
First Bettina Siegel went after the beef industry. Now she’s tackling the Chinese government.
By Mimi Swartz
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.
By Mimi Swartz
If you have kids, being a caregiver to an elderly parent may feel a bit familiar.
By Mimi Swartz
Is Charlotte Allen Houston's true founder?
By Mimi Swartz and Texas Monthly
The lessons of a family heirloom.
By Mimi Swartz
Houston put a man on the moon and performed the first artificial heart transplant. So why can’t it save the Eighth Wonder of the World?
By Mimi Swartz
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.
By Mimi Swartz
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.
By Mimi Swartz
As my son graduates from college, I’m learning to say goodbye to him—again.
By Mimi Swartz
The estate sale from the residence of the late Mildred Yount Manion II, an heiress from an "Important Texas Oil Family," proved too hard to resist.
By Mimi Swartz and Texas Monthly
I used to think my hometown was a sleepy, slow-moving place where nothing much would ever happen. But forty years after I left, the city is a bustling, economically vibrant, progressive place I hardly recognize—in a good way.
By Mimi Swartz
Houston and that brilliant artist of light James Turrell have proved to be an enduring couple, what with the California native’s inspiring work at the Live Oak Friends Meeting house and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. But the Skyspace installation Turrell created to honor Rice University’s centennial is perhaps
By Mimi Swartz
For too many veterans, the emotional scars of war go untreated. An innovative group of Harris County politicians, judges, attorneys, and health care workers—most of whom are veterans themselves—is aiming to fix that.
By Mimi Swartz
The author of Private Empire: ExxonMobile and American Power answers the question: In terms of difficulty, how would you compare reporting on Exxon with the reporting you did for your previous book, The Bin Ladens?
By Mimi Swartz
In 1996 a powerful South Texas ranching clan accused ExxonMobil of sabotaging wells on the family’s property. Thirteen years, millions of dollars in legal fees, and one state Supreme Court opinion later, the biggest oil field feud of its time is still raging.
By Mimi Swartz
Over the past fifteen years, John Friend turned his Woodlands–based Anusara style of yoga into an internationally popular brand. Then, in the space of a few weeks, it became hopelessly twisted amid a wild series of accusations of sexual and financial improprieties.
By Mimi Swartz
The New Yorker writer talks about his latest book, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power.
By Mimi Swartz
Terry Grier is the hard-charging, reform-minded, optimistic superintendent of the largest school district in the state. He’s also the most divisive, embattled, and despised man in Houston. Did it have to be this way?
By Mimi Swartz
For more than seven decades, Camp Mystic has been one of the prettiest, happiest, and most exclusive destinations in Texas. But after a bitter, multimillion-dollar legal battle, the very thing that the owners cherished—family—may be the force that tears the camp apart for good.
By Mimi Swartz
There are prettier women in Hollywood. There are more-talented actresses on TV and in the movies. So how to explain the charmed, celebrated existence that is la vida Longoria?
By Mimi Swartz
Mickey Rosmarin on selling high-end women's fashion.
By Mimi Swartz
The nouvelle stars of Houston society are none other than Becca Cason and Holly Moore, the founders of the hippest, most with-it PR machine in the city.
By Mimi Swartz
During his lifetime, he captivated Houston with his courtroom brilliance, outsized ambition, and high-dollar lifestyle. But in the year since John O’Quinn’s tragic death, a bitter estate battle has revealed who he really was.
By Mimi Swartz
In the year since my mother died, I’ve learned a lot of things—like how to spend time with my dad.
By Mimi Swartz
Is Survivor’s Colby Donaldson for real? Over lunch, the last old-fashioned Texas man talks about why he threw the game and what he’ll do next.
By Mimi Swartz
The BP oil spill hit the small world of Houston’s oil and gas business hard. So now that the well is plugged, who’s up and who’s down?
By Mimi Swartz
The lessons of the eighties boom have been internalized by today’s energy entrepreneurs, who seem nothing like their risk-loving forebears. They’re happy playing it safe, which is why their preferred commodity is gas, not oil.
By Mimi Swartz
In the post-Washington game, former attorney general Alberto Gonzales has fared worse than any other member of the Bush administration. Why?
By Mimi Swartz
Increasingly so. Surprise, surprise.
By Mimi Swartz
Why does a rich Houston investment banker spend his days traveling the globe, preaching to the uninformed and indifferent that the world’s supply of crude oil is in steep decline and the end of life as we know it is very, very near? Maybe because it is.
By Mimi Swartz
The most formidable candidate in the race for Houston’s next mayor may be the outgoing chief himself.
By Mimi Swartz
They may disagree on just about everything, but Rick Perry and Bill White have one thing in common: a Texas childhood.
By Mimi Swartz and Jake Silverstein
Brent Coon’s back to take on BP.
By Mimi Swartz
After James and Linda Rowe were killed in a grisly refinery explosion in Texas City in 2005, their wild-child daughter could have taken a modest settlement and started to rebuild her life in a small Louisiana border town. Instead, she chose to fight—and brought a multibillion-dollar oil company to its
By Mimi Swartz
Is she a “saccharine phony”? A closet liberal? A foot soldier—or a rebel—in the culture wars? The truth about Laura Bush is that her ambiguity makes her a model first lady: a blank screen upon which the public can project its own ideas about womanhood.
By Mimi Swartz
Clyde Wilson is more than a private investigator. He’s the historian of Houston’s dark side—and that makes him the most dangerous man in town.
By Mimi Swartz
Inside the fantastic rise and catastrophic fall of Sir Allen Stanford—that high-flying egomaniac with the offshore bank, gold helicopter, Caribbean island, and knack for disposing of other people’s money.
By Mimi Swartz
If the crash that followed the boom hasn’t exactly been our fault, the result has been that same sad sense that maybe we’ll never have fun again.
By Mimi Swartz