When I traveled to Nairobi after breaking up with my fiancée, the brisket I found there inspired me to come back home to East Texas.
Alligator snapping turtle populations in Texas were dwindling. One family of smugglers had been poaching them from the state for years.
Photographer Keith Carter explores the otherworldly wetlands of East Texas in a stunning new book.
As the invasive beetle carves a path through Texas, state and federal officials are searching for solutions.
Thank goodness for sunflowers.
Lawmakers just authorized lots of money to acquire new parkland. We asked advocates and conservationists to dream big.
Collected in 1941, A. buceei languished in a drawer for decades.
The career criminal was found dead after a two-day manhunt in East Texas. A writer recalls reporting on the circumstances of Haynes’s death.
How to get the adventure and scenery without having to spend days in your kayak or canoe.
Houston's hapless NFL franchise hired the right man for what seem like the wrong reasons—and it's lucky Smith accepted the job.
Fermat’s last theorem went unsolved for more than 350 years—and the role of the Tyler oil heir who funded its 1994 solution was largely unknown until this week.
Baldwin, who died in December, fought in Korea, met Picasso, traveled the world, and, with his wife, Wendy Watriss, made Houston a photography capital.
The Upshaw family has preserved their history and traditions since the 1870s. Now, amid deaths and other departures, family members worry for their land’s legacy.
With newly perfected sliced brisket, porkstrami, and a chopped brisket and pimento cheese sandwich, East Texas joint Wright On Taco is worthy of the "& BBQ" it just added to its name.
Things unseen moved along the river bank, slithered or crawled or pranced between the thick growths of trees that ran for miles.
The ancient art of falconry is alive and well.
The Hill Country offers fast-flowing streams and some nice bass. But for solitude and diversity of species, the creeks and bayous east of I-45 can’t be beat.
In Jacksonville, Palestine, and Tyler, local entrepreneurs cater to tourists looking for luxury (and a very fine slice of pie) amid the Piney Woods farms and fields.
With apple pie–spiced ribs, juicy brisket, and a rare offering of fresh vegetables, the new joint is a worthy stop in East Texas.
May Cobb’s second novel explores how the members of a women-only shooting club love, betray, and protect one another.
For rural families who lack reliable, high-speed internet, Zoom-style instruction is a luxury.
Contrary to what a viral video suggests, it’s unrelated to the pandemic.
Competing on ’Top Chef’ inspired the Bullard native to bring the flavors of his youth to his Portland, Oregon, restaurant.
The fish stories out of this East Texas reservoir are mostly true, which is why fishermen come with their gear and beer in search of some of the state's biggest monster bass.
Driving through a dangerous curve in Tyler, James Fulton crossed into oncoming traffic and killed a young woman. He wasn’t drunk, and the cops said the crash was an accident. But the Smith County DA saw it differently.
Over the years, Texas Monthly’s most celebrated voices have written about the places that shaped them, from the Panhandle to the border. We revisit some of the classics.
The disgraced former congressman is our third runner-up for his eagerness to enrich himself—or at least pay his kennel bills—in a transparently illegal manner.
Nearly fifteen years after Richard Linklater and I started talking about turning a Texas Monthly story into a major motion picture, it’s finally hitting the big screen, with a little help from Jack Black, Matthew McConaughey, Shirley MacLaine—and a seventy-year-old retired hairdresser from Rusk named Kay Baby Epperson.
Want to see the Texas of Leadbelly, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Mance Lipscomb, and other pioneering musicians of the twentieth century? Your trip through time begins near Washington-on-the-Brazos.
The shocking and sad story of the East Texas kids who beat a horse to death just for the thrill of it.
Steve Stockman was supposed to have been a lethal weapon in the Republicans’ fight to unmake the Great Society. Instead the freshman legislator has been a loose cannon—an outsider in his own party.
Crooning for Caddo Lake.
Once he raced cars; now he builds them. Even at 72, it seems, Carroll Shelby can’t slow down.
In 1990 the state banned the use of dogs to hunt deer. Ever since, a rogue group of East Texas hunters has exacted a fiery revenge.
The death of a thief in the Big Thicket has federal officials probing the conduct of local lawmen—and local lawmen complaining about a federal vendetta against the Texas prison system.
Reflections and recollections of life among the shadows of the Piney Woods.
There are bass in Sam Rayburn Reservoir, and the gals were out to hook ’em. And Rhonda Wilcox hoped to hook the biggest one of all.
Every year communities scattered across Texas hold wet-dry elections. Each one pits the forces of fundamentalism against the forces of realism. This is the story of one such election.
George Jones really lives the way he says he lives in the songs he sings.
Behind the pine curtain of deep East Texas is a world trapped in the past and hidden from the future: lush woods, poor whites, the descendants of slaves, and an aristocracy still breathing the rarefied air of the Old South.
Anybody who thinks Jones, Jones & Baldwin is just a trio of small-time, small-town attorneys is headed for big-time trouble.
