Longform
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The Love Story that Upended the Texas Prison System
In 1967, a 56-year-old lawyer met a young inmate with a brilliant mind and horrifying stories about life inside. Their complicated alliance—and even more complicated romance—would shed light on a nationwide scandal, disrupt a system of abuse and virtual slavery across the state, and change incarceration in Texas forever.
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The Cartel Next Door
How prosecutors tied a brazen murder in an upscale Dallas suburb to one of Mexico’s most violent criminal organizations.
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Troubled Waters: A Year After Harvey, Has Houston Learned Anything?
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.
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Schlitterbahn’s Tragic Slide
Jeff Henry often said that his goal in life was to make customers of his family’s legendary water parks happy—“to put a smile on their faces, to give them a thrill or two.” It was a beautiful vision. Until it went horribly wrong.
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The Jackie Robinson of Rodeo
Five decades ago, Myrtis Dightman broke the color barrier in professional rodeo and became one of the best bull riders who ever lived. But his imprint on the sport was only just beginning.
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The Doting Boyfriend Who Robbed Armored Cars
Beginning in 2015, Houston was plagued by a series of brutal armored car robberies that bewildered FBI agents for nearly two years. To finally bring down the unassuming mastermind behind it all, the agents had to stage an elaborate trap—and catch him in the act.
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What We Lost in Austin Bombing Victim Draylen Mason
He was a highlight of Austin’s creative community and, in death, a spotlight on the city’s problems with race.
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War of Words: Meet the Texan Trolling for Putin
In 2014, Russell Bonner Bentley was a middle-aged arborist living in Austin. Now he’s a local celebrity in a war-torn region of Ukraine. His journey reveals a troubling development in Putin’s information war.
- More Recent Longreads
A Celebration of Texas Music
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Gotta Lubbock
Buddy Holly. Waylon Jennings. Carolyn Hester. The Hancocks. The Flatlanders. An oral history of the state’s most storied music scene.
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Y’all in the Family
How did Lloyd Maines get to be a revered guitarist and record producer? How did his daughter Natalie find fame as a Dixie Chick? Chalk it up to musicianship—and kinship.
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The Improbable Rise of Lyle Lovett
Twenty years ago, he was inspired by the redneck rock of Steve Fromholz and Guy Clark. On his new album, he says thanks.
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Junior Achievement
Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Jerry Jeff Walker—and now Junior Brown? The former community college teacher is the latest outlaw to hijack Texas country music, and he may be the greatest.
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Home Girl
Most people from Dallas who make it big in the music business get out of town as soon as they can. “That’s what celebrities do,” Erykah Badu says. “I never wanted to be a celebrity.”
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He Ain’t Going Nowhere
How did Guy Clark become the most revered songwriter in Nashville? One hard-won tune at a time.
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His Mickey Mouse Ways
In a world full of evil dudes pretending to be good guys, Waylon Jennings was a good guy pretending to be an evil dude and never quite succeeding.
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Dreaming of Her
On March 31, 1995, South Texas came to a standstill as the shocking news spread that the hugely popular Tejano singer Selena Quintanilla Perez had been shot and killed in Corpus Christi. Fifteen years later, the people who knew Selena best recall the life and devastating death of a star who touched us all.
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The Great, Late Townes Van Zandt
More than a year after his death, he’s still being remembered as the best Texas songwriter of his time. This month’s star-studded Austin City Limits tribute shows why.
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A Long, Strange Trip
The life of Roky Erickson—one of the most influential Texas rock and rollers of all time—has been one calamity after another. His family and friends have taken care of him with the best of intentions, but you know what they say about the road to hell.
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The Girl Who Played With Firearms
Miranda Lambert has a lot to be happy about—she’s recently married, with a brand-new album and a string of hits that has made her the toast of Nashville. So why is she so twangry?
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The Slow Life and Fast Death of DJ Screw
He was one of the most influential cultural figures in Texas—a generous godfather to a generation of rappers, an entrepreneur of Houston’s mean streets, the master of a scene fueled by codeine cough syrup and hip-hop beats. When he overdosed in November at the age of 29, it was easy to dismiss him as yet another musician who succumbed to his own success. But his story is more complicated than that.
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The Secret History of Texas Music
This state has been shaped by its songs. And as these 25 tales show, the stories behind them are often as great as the songs themselves.
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The Last Ride of King George
After a career that’s spanned more than thirty years, George Strait is wrapping up his 48-stop farewell tour this month. For those of us whose lives he has captured so inimitably in song, country music will never be the same.
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It’s a Family Affair
For all her talent and poise, Beyoncé didn’t become the biggest star in the world without help. And she got plenty of it from the people who know her best.
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That ’70s Show
Forty years ago, Willie, Waylon, Jerry Jeff, and a whole host of Texas misfits grew their hair long, snubbed Nashville, and brought the hippies and rednecks together. The birth of outlaw country changed country music forever.
@TMTrove
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Fit for a Queen
A look back at San Antonio Fiesta gowns reveals how the dresses have gone from elegant to excessive.
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Whoever Said It Was a Grand Old Party
Elephants never forget, but Texas Reaganites wish they could.
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How Enron Blew It
The Houston-based energy giant put the pursuit of profits ahead of all other corporate goals, which fostered a climate of workaholism and paranoia. And that was only part of the problem.
Oral Histories
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96 Minutes
At 11:48 a.m. on August 1, 1966, Charles Whitman began firing his rifle from the top of the University of Texas Tower at anyone and everyone in his sights. At 1:24 p.m., he was gunned down himself. The lives of the people who witnessed the sniper’s spree firsthand would never be the same again.
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Hap and Leonard: From East Texas to Hollywood
A brief oral history of the television show based on Joe R. Lansdale’s books—and how Hollywood learned to love the Nacogdoches native.
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Urban Cowboy Turns 35
It was part musical, part dance movie, and part love story, and in June 1980 it unleashed an unprecedented fervor for country music, Western wear, and, yes, mechanical bulls. More than three decades later, the film’s stars (including John Travolta, Debra Winger, Mickey Gilley, and Johnny Lee) and many Gilley’s regulars recall the movie that made America fall in love with Texas.
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Breaking the Silence
Five Rio Grande Valley–based reporters talk about covering the drug war in Mexico over the past decade.
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True Crime
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A Tree Is Known By Its Fruit
When the 85-year-old matriarch of a prominent pecan-farming clan in San Saba was murdered, her death shook the town—and exposed how obsession and greed can fell a family from within.
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The Murders at the Lake
In 1982 three teenagers were killed near the shores of Lake Waco in a seemingly inexplicable crime. More than three decades later, the tragic and disturbing case still casts a long, dark shadow.
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Cops and Robbers
They were some of the toughest narcs on the border, known for busting smugglers, staging raids, seizing cartel cocaine—and being dirty.
National Magazine Award Winners
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Still Life
A violent tackle in a high school football game paralyzed John McClamrock for life. His mother made sure it was a life worth living.
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The Innocent Man, Part One
The National Magazine Award–winning story about Michael Morton, a man who came home from work one day in 1986 to find that his wife had been brutally murdered. What happened next was one of the most profound miscarriages of justice in Texas history.
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The Innocent Man, Part Two
Michael Morton spent 25 years wrongfully imprisoned for the brutal murder of his wife. How did it happen? And who is to blame?
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From the Archives
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Forgotten Places
Of canyons, creeks, and craters: the Big Bend as few have seen it.
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Leroy’s Revenge
Ringside as two dogs—father and son—fight to the death.
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Busting Out of Mexico
Two self-styled Texas soldiers of fortune engineered one of the more bizarre jailbreaks in history. Here’s how it happened.
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The Passions of the Common Man
That’s what country music is, and that’s why it plays in Peoria.