
February 2008 Issue

Features


Dario Robleto
He did not grow up planning to become an artist: Robleto was captain of the football team at San Antonio’s Robert E. Lee High School and initially chose biology as his major at UT-San Antonio. But in 1993 he quite literally had an epiphany and turned to making art.

Susanne Paul
“She’s the biggest no-brainer I can think of for your February issue. She’s literally the most accomplished female semiconductor designer in the world,” says John Thornton, a general partner at the venture capital firm Austin Ventures, who has put his money where his mouth is by backing Paul’s Black Sand


The Last Drop
Texas has the country’s most precise state water plan. So how is it that every one of our major cities is still on track to run dry in the next fifty years?

Hector Montenegro
Green buildings, awesome movie theaters, and high-speed semiconductors won’t be worth much if we fail to educate our kids, more and more of whom can’t speak English when they enter the school system. Good thing this California native, who was picked by the League of United Latin American Citizens as

Bruce McCarl
Al Gore may be the public face of climate change, but all around the world, researchers are toiling in semi-obscurity to deepen our understanding of the challenge it poses. One of these is McCarl, a Texas A&M University professor who has spent the past twenty years studying the potential effects

Michael MacDougall
If you were the guy who shepherded the largest leveraged buyout in history, you’d be on this list too. It was early in 2007 when we became aware of the Austin-bred honors graduate of both UT and Harvard Business School who now inhabits the off-the-radar-screen world of private equity; he

Tim and Karrie League
Let’s get the groaner of a pun out of the way: These slacker marrieds, the co-founders of the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema chain, are in a league of their own. Then again, there’s something to the idea that the natives of Berkeley, California, and Owensboro, Kentucky, respectively, have revolutionized the moviegoing

Liz Lambert
She’s the avatar of cool for the inn crowd’s in crowd. Thirteen years ago the native Odessan, a UT and UT Law grad, purchased a seedy motel on South Congress Avenue, in Austin, and transformed it, with the help of San Antonio’s Lake/Flato architects and designer pals from California, into

Charles Kuffner
Take it from us: Print is so not dead, and all these “online journalists” are just a bunch of DIY wannabes without credentials or credibility. Some of them even have an agenda! But Kuff (which is what everyone calls him) is different. More substantive. More authoritative. More, well, like us.

Clayton Kershaw
If Josh Beckett is the next Roger Clemens, this six-foot-three-inch lefty with the 96-mile-per-hour fastball could be the next Josh Beckett. After going 13-0 with a 0.77 ERA and 139 strikeouts in 64 innings as a senior at Highland Park High School, in Dallas—including a perfect-game mercy-rule victory in which

Charlie Jones
He didn’t invent the outdoor music festival—perhaps you’ve heard of Woodstock?—but he’s as responsible as anyone for its resurgence as a twenty-first- century form, and he’s just now getting started. As one of three principals at Capital Sports and Entertainment, the College Station native and onetime club booker was the

Susan Hovorka
Here’s a convenient truth for you: All those greenhouse gases polluting the atmosphere—the result of burning and combusting oil and gas and coal—can simply go back where they came from, and the environment, not to mention the world, will be better and cleaner for it. That’s the theory behind the

Donald R. Horton
The population of Texas is rapidly expanding—from just under 24 million today to perhaps 50 million in 2040, according to the state demographer—and someone has to put out the welcome mat for all our neighbors-to-be. It may very well be the founder and chairman of D.R. Horton, one of the


Denise Fulton
Gaming has come a long way since the days of Pong and Asteroids. At the vanguard of the latest wave of interactive, multiplayer video games is this native of Bowling Green, Ohio, one of the few women in the industry to crack the ranks of upper management. As the studio

Ben Fountain
An overnight success at the halfway point in his life—but better late than never, especially when the payoff is an apt comparison to Graham Greene. Born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Fountain majored in English at the University of North Carolina and got a law degree from Duke University. He

Pliny Fisk III & Gail Vittori
Long before concepts like “green building” and “sustainability” were fashionable, this husband-and-wife team envisioned a future in which architectural design and renewable resources worked together. The nonprofit Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, which they co-direct, has collaborated on projects as wide-ranging as the eco-friendly renovation of the Pentagon to

Daniel N. DiNardo
On November 24, 2007, the archbishop of Galveston- Houston knelt before Pope Benedict XVI at St. Peter’s Basilica, in Vatican City, received his red hat, and ascended to the top ranks of the Catholic clergy as the first-ever cardinal from Texas, as well as the first-ever from the southern United

George P. Bush
Yes, he’s that George Bush—the dynastic spawn, the son of Jebby, nephew of W., and grandson of 41, who famously referred to him, once upon a time, as “the little brown one” (his mother, Columba, is Mexican). But he’s also very much his own man, and in short order he’s

Elizabeth Avellan
To the extent that the fabled Third Coast exists, it’s a bit of a patriarchy: of men and by men, including, most prominently, the indie visionary Rick Linklater and the boyish wonder Robert Rodriguez. But then there’s Avellán, Rodriguez’s ex, who continues to move mountains to make movies happen in

El Gobernador
The first Hispanic to lead Texas will be a Basque jai alai phenom, Dallas attorney, and Democratic state representative whose election, in 2018, will relegate the GOP to semi- permanent minority status. Wanna bet?

Dave Stephenson
If you think high school sports are too slick, too big-time, or too professional, just wait. When this Ohio transplant has his way—and he will—they’re going to get slicker, bigger, and much more pro. Stephenson, the former president of Dave Campbell’s Texas Football, founded Titus Sports Marketing in 2003. The

Cat Osterman
The Cypress Springs High School grad’s résumé at UT-Austin was almost unbelievable. Eighty-two complete-game shutouts? Seventy-nine and two thirds consecutive innings without an earned run? Twenty strikeouts in a single seven-inning game? No player had won the USA Softball Collegiate National Player of the Year more than once; Osterman did


Ort Varona
His LFT is a BFD—those f’s are for “fashion”—and therefore he is too. Following a hugely successful maiden foray into upscale retail with Octane and Premium93, both going strong as storefronts in the West Village neighborhood of Dallas, Varona opened Lifestyle Fashion Terminal last March at Victory Park, northwest of

Sunil K. Ahuja
The mysteries of AIDS are starting to unravel in the laboratory of this professor of medicine, microbiology, immunology, and biochemistry at the UT Health Science Center at San Antonio. Working with, among others, Dr. Matthew Dolan, formerly of the Wilford Hall Medical Center, at Lackland Air Force Base, Ahuja has


Andrew Weissman
What Stephan Pyles, Dean Fearing, and Robert Del Grande were to the last generation—the state’s biggest-brand celebrities in the fine-dining arena—this Alamo City native may well be to the next. A broadcast journalist by training (he has a degree in radio-TV-film from the University of North Texas, in Denton), Weissman
The Skinny On Obesity
What Comptroller Susan Combs is doing to make sure that everything is not always bigger in Texas.


Eat Their Words
What will dining, both out and in, be like in decades to come? We asked the state’s top chefs and food folk, from Dean Fearing and Hugo Ortega to David Bull and Charles Butt.

Mark Westhusin
How many Aggies does it take to turn one tabby or tin-can-eater into two? The no-joke answer is perhaps a dozen—the number of researchers, students, and staff working under Westhusin in the Reproductive Sciences Laboratory at Texas A&M’s College of Veterinary Medicine. The Plainville, Kansas, native, who has a degree

The Gospel According to Matthew
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.

Chamillionaire
Two thousand five will always be remembered as the year that Texas hip-hop finally got its due. Sure, Houston’s Geto Boys were already considered rap legends, and Port Arthur’s UGK, through Jay-Z’s smash hit single “Big Pimpin’,” had already introduced the world to “them Texas boys comin’ down in candy

Joe Straus III
The ideological pendulum at the Lege is swinging, finally and inevitably, back toward the center, so moderate Republicans—the golden-cheeked warblers of Texas politics—may soon reemerge as a force to be reckoned with. When that happens, we’re betting on this pedigreed, patrician lawmaker from tony District 121 (Alamo Heights, Olmos Park)
Columns

Will to Power
After the Texas Youth Commission imploded last year, one of the state’s fiercest advocates for criminal justice reform was tapped to help rebuild. Inside his yet-to-be-completed slog.

MEET the DePRESSed
The digital natives are restless, and traditional journalism just won’t cut it.

Army of One
There is no more important job than reshaping the military to confront a dark and dangerous future—and Pete Geren is reporting for duty.
Reporter

Lakewood Church, Servicio en Español
DENOMINATION None PASTOR Marcos Witt ADDRESS 3700 Southwest Freeway PHONE 713-635-4154 ON THE INTERNET lakewood.cc SERVICIO EN ESPAÑOL Sundays at 1:30 P.M.By now, most people who pay attention to such things know that Houston’s Lakewood Church, led by Joel Osteen, draws more than 42,000 souls to four

Bruce Sterling
The Brownsville native and longtime Austinite has spent most of his adult life contemplating the future: A progenitor of the scruffy cyberpunk fiction movement (he edited the short-story anthology Mirrorshades and co-authored The Difference Engine with William Gibson), he has penned ten sci-fi novels and several works of nonfiction, including

Nan Hall Linke, Astrologer
Born and raised in Houston, Linke is a third-generation Texan. She has been a professional astrologer since 1971. She also holds a master’s degree in behavioral science from the University of Houston– Clearlake and did her clinical training in marriage counseling and family therapy.The future represents the unknown, and the

New Chinatown, Houston
1. Yes, Lee’s Sandwiches hails from California, but that just means it’s a spot where you can experience Melting Pot America in its myriad glory. Your order is called in Vietnamese and English; it’s a little like being in a train station in seventies Saigon. The baguettes and croissants



2028: The Year in Sports.
UT and A&M Form Second Football TeamsAfter the top fifty NCAA programs were privatized, record revenues and stock splits made the IPO spin-offs inevitable. An antitrust lawsuit filed by Texas Tech and UTEP, whose teams remain not-for-profit university entities, was dismissed in federal court.¡Viva Los Cowboys!Dallas Cowboys head coach and





Web
The Gritty Truth
A criminal justice reform activist in Texas on overcrowded prisons, Tulia, the Texas Youth Commission, and the criminalization of mental illness.

Au Petit Paris
If I close my eyes tight, I can still taste the cloudlike custard filling of Au Petit Paris’s tartelette de tomates confit, with its milky hint of mozzarella and sweet, delicate bits of tomato; the warm, flaky pastry crust is simply museum quality. On the side is a pristine salad
Appetite for the Future
What will dining be like in decades to come? We asked the state’s top chefs and foodies.
Cream of Mushroom Soup
2 pounds button mushrooms, washed 1 tablespoon butter plus 1 teaspoon 1 shallot, chopped 5 ounces heavy cream 2 cups chicken broth, homemade or canned Salt and pepper to taste Croutons (optional)Roughly chop 1 1/2 pounds of the mushrooms and set aside. Put 1 tablespoon butter in a medium-size, heavy-bottomed

Toilet Tales
In summer months, Houstonians are drinking ice cold . . . toilet water. Courtesy of Dallas.

Sneak Peak
Texas Monthly talks with two online energy experts concerning peak oil and the future of energy demand.

New and Noteworthy
Café CentralEl Paso What’s new at venerable Café Central? The decor, for one thing. The border stalwart has shed its animal-print upholstery and New York–bistro look in favor of a classic redo, with sleek chocolate-brown chairs, chrome sculptures, unusual art, and floor-to-ceiling beveled mirrors along the back wall. Given
Miscellany

Ha-ha! We’re 35!
Somewhere out there is a sourpuss (there’s always one) who’ll ask, after picking up this special issue, what the fuss is all about. And he’ll have a point, sort of. Thirty-five years? Lots of publications have been around that long or longer. Just last year, one of the most iconic

Steak Your Claim
I enjoyed your story on the 38 best steakhouses in Texas [“Meat Your Maker,” December 2007]. However, I was disappointed that Western Sky Steakhouse, in San Angelo, was not mentioned. I live in Kerrville, and for nearly thirty years I have been flying friends and clients out to Western