Most of the time you’re a nice, ordinary businessman. But for one brief, shining moment you were King Antonio, monarch of San Antonio’s Fiesta and semi-beloved ruler of the one Texas city that still loves a good king.
Miniature madness.
It wasn’t business that drew the state’s top politicians to a Trans-Pecos ranch. Their mission: to mark the centennial of the train that linked Texas to the West.
Southwest Airlines’ California gamble pays off - and Texans do the paying: update from Gibgate; why Bellaire is not Park Place; a truly dumb idea from UT.
Taking lives and saving lives.
Times are tough in Laredo; specialty advertisers are unveiled in Dallas; some very old bones stir things up in Leander; a wild turkey comes back to West Texas; newspapers go wild in San Antonio.
Measure for measure.
The last best way to see the real Texas.
Local Hero is undiluted pleasure. Lianna is a little watered-down.
Freddie Hubbard’s attempts to play pop music have been disastrous. But when he tackles a pure mainstream sound, he shows what jazz trumpeting is all about.
Culinary one-upmanship has produced the designer chef, a food whiz who comes from afar to lend prestige and panache to Texas’ ritziest eateries.
Once touted, now routed, San Antonio’s opera takes its last bow.
Run for the money.
The Great Energy Scam purports to uncover the collusion of the feds and the oil companies, but the real scandal is what the author overlooks. Yet another book on killer Ted Bundy sheds no light on his crimes. Roughneck is a rousing look at America’s most radical labor union.
A high school teacher shot up the First Baptist Church in the East Texas steel town of Daingerfield, and the agony lasted longer than anyone could have imagined.
The long afternoons of the best friend the rich women of Houston have ever had.
Texas' glass artists are leading a revolution in an ancient craft.
Shoot enough portraits of Texans, and you'll have made a portrait of Texas.
Meet some of Texas' secular latter-day saints: volunteers.
What’s red and black and read all over?
Wright is wrong in the Houston mayor’s race; the medical establishment beats the state budget crunch; capital punishment faces death by bureaucracy; will defense put John Tower on the defensive?
No oil in Israel, no crown for the congressman, no Coke at the Last Supper.
Pecos bucks for the title of world’s oldest rodeo; medical students make us pay now so they can make us pay later; Ground Zero radiates good, atomic fun; Texas’ jails get slammed; Fort Worth’s namesake languishes among Yankees.
Go play in the traffic.
West Texas was a desert when this little irrigation device came along. Now it’s a desert that produces more cotton than anywhere else in the country.
Martin Scorcese’s The King of Comedy is about the stock-in-trade of comedians, but who’s the laughingstock? You’ll be smitten with Lovesick. The Year of Living Dangerously teeters precariously between metaphysics and lust.
One man’s ludicrous attempts to trace the origin of a joke led him to a simple truth: life is funny.
Sometimes prison is harder for the people on the other side of the bars.
The graybeard at the fat stock show.
The barren plains of the Southwest and the fertile fields of his mind led architect Bruce Goff to create houses that got curiouser and curiouser.
Can you picture Lbj in a Datsun?
It’s Houston's driveway, a twenty-mile kaleidoscope of bankers, punkers, strippers, surgeons, students, grackles, and cars.
If you think Texas is pretty much the same as it was ten years ago, you’re wrong. Nineteen seventy-three remade the state overnight.
Can Texans be won over to the antique tradition of tea and little sandwiches in the afternoon? Dallas’ and Houston’s new gilded hotels are counting on it.
Treasure hunters want state booty; Republicans aren’t so hot about Phil Gramm; there’s hope for Texans with money in Mexico; Texas newspapers worry about USA Today.
Sing along, turn around, dip in.
End of the line for a cop, a coach, quilters, and the Confederate Air Force.
The unhealthy politics of emergency medicine; according an accordionist his due; sucking it up for Lite beer; the condo boom that went bust.
Paper tigers.
The Fabulous Thunderbirds storm away on a new album that shows why they’re Texas’ hardiest rhythm and blues band. Eight more releases capture everything from mandolin picking to Balinese monkey chants.
Gandhi presents its title character as all but a god and India as all but a paradise. Starstruck is a lark; Sophie’s Choice is a letdown.
They’re where you went to get your hair cut or to see a picture show or to watch the squirrels on the courthouse lawn.
Charlie Brooks was the first man to die by lethal injection, but everyone wondered whether he or his partner was the real murderer. In his last days, Brooks answered that, and other questions.
And I’m telling you, if you can’t batter it, fry it, spike it with chiles, or bathe it in buttermilk, it’s not worth your time.
Texas opera lovers would have ended the season happily just having seen a lively Rosenkavalier, a magical Rheingold, and a fiery Wozzeck. But then the Houston Grand Opera’s Pagliacci came along and took their breath away.
Dale Steffes can predict the future of the oil business. So why do the majors turn a deaf ear? Because, says Steffes, the news is all bad.
What’s next?
Texas women write about crop dusters and frozen custard and the Dallas-Forth Worth International Airport in the encouraging new anthology Her Work. Life Sentences, though, is a flimsy feminist exercise.
Twelve ran, Mike Andrews won. A saga of ambition, money, power, courage, and the nature of urban politics in Texas.
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.
