February 2013
Features
Thoughts on the gradual march of civility and urban sprawl across the lost frontier.
For decades, the state’s big urban newspapers helped bind together the inhabitants of our major cities. Now those papers are threatened by a rapidly evolving (some might say collapsing) business model. Is there hope for daily journalism in Texas?
Austin is booming with jobs, condos, festivals, traffic, hipsters, joggers, and high-concept dive bars (anyone for Lone Star and seared foie gras?). Does that mean it’s no longer Austin?
Two questions for Ginger Goodin, of the Texas A&M Transportation Institute.
Midland's Tom Craddick shares a few memories from his forty-plus years in the Legislature.
My unsentimental education in the wheeler-dealer ways of the most American of Texas cities.
In a city that loves its parties, there’s perhaps none so aesthetically significant as Two x Two for AIDS and Art, Dallas’s most cutting-edge fundraiser—and one hell of a good time.
How I’m learning to love the Cowboys. And the Mavericks. And the Rangers. And the Stars. And . . .
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.
All my life we’ve wanted top billing. But in the eyes of the world, we’re forever the sidekick: Dallas–Fort Worth. We’ve tried, over the years, to use that thirty-mile-long hyphen between the cities like a battering ram, deriding our rival for having fewer museums, no Bass brothers, and no sense…
It’s time for Texas to get smart about its westernmost—and most ignored—city, where an old pass tracks the route of our future.
El Paso’s latest urban redevelopment scheme is one of the nation’s most far-reaching and innovative. It is also, as any resident will tell you, one of its most contentious.
Forty years ago I would burrow inside the nose cone of a three-story rocket slide at Album Park. Not Eastwood Park—officials have force-fed El Pasoans that name since the park opened, in 1968, but, like ketchup on hamburgers, we don’t ever use it. Peering through the steel rods that made…
Segundo Barrio, with its turn-of-the-century tenement buildings and dozens of brightly colored murals, is one of the most historic neighborhoods in the country. As the first community that immigrants encounter after crossing the Rio Grande from Juárez, it is known as the Ellis Island of the border, and over the…
Forty years (and more) of the exuberant, eclectic neighborhood where I was born, grew as a writer, and found inspiration for the early pages of this magazine.
When driving down 59 after work you squint at the setting sun that glares redly in your eye, and around you the cars have become an ocean of unmoving metal, come to Hillcroft. Nothing to eat at home except what you might pull out of the freezer. Piles of bills,…
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.
For thirty years, when she wasn’t writing books or winning genius grants, Sandra Cisneros has been pushing and prodding San Antonio to become a more sophisticated (and more Mexican) city. Now she’s leaving town. did she succeed?
Chances are you are reading this in a Texas city. Though our rural population of 3.8 million is still the country’s largest, we are, for the most part, a bunch of city folk. Almost 85 percent of the state’s population now lives in urban areas. That may not be how…
Miscellany
Columns
