The Gods of Padre Island
Between watching girls and getting a great tan, lifeguards occasionally have to save lives.
Between watching girls and getting a great tan, lifeguards occasionally have to save lives.
God created Texas, and then He created people who would love it.
A Dallas engineer you’ve probably never heard of has done more to change our daily lives than almost anyone else alive. How? He invented the silicon chip.
George Jones really lives the way he says he lives in the songs he sings.
He was wildly eccentric, he lived in a shanty on the Gulf, he subsisted as a bait fisherman, he had bizarre notions of eternal life. He may have been the best artist Texas has ever produced.
A photographic tour of the timeless Rio Grande, from its origins in the mountains of Colorado to the Padre Island dunes at the tip of Texas.
Multiple-choice question: UT’s Tom Philpott is (a) the best professor on campus, a selfless reformer, and the victim of an assassination attempt; (b) the worst professor on campus, a publicity hound, and a nut who staged his own shooting.
Welcome to Houston, the cutting edge of architecture. The local boys are turning a gentlemen’s profession into a business, the stylish out-of-towners are creating a new aesthetic, and neither group is filled with admiration for the other.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals confirms your worst fears about lawyers and judges and the impotence of the criminal justice system.
On the surface, Mexico’s presidential election looks a lot like ours—rallies, placards, speeches—but the outcome there is never in doubt.
Saint Paul said that a little wine is a fine thing. He must have known something.
Hugh Roy Cullen found the oil and made one of Houston’s great fortunes; now his grandson is spending his inheritance like there is no tomorrow, and suing for more.
If you leave your child at a day care center, you are hardly unique. If you know what your child does there all day, you are indeed unique.
For years no one would drink Lone Star beer because rednecks did; then one enterprising man figured out that if it was marketed right, everyone would want to drink Lone Star precisely because rednecks did.
People still think of cotton as a Dixieland crop, but the heart of the nation’s production is on the dry, flat, and windswept High Plains of Texas.
Whenever you buy or sell a house, hundreds of dollars of your money goes for something called title insurance. Title insurance is a great deal—for the title company.
Rusty Hardin is a prosecutor. Most of the time, his job is to put people in jail. This time, he wants a man dead.
They used to be virtuous and wooden and they were good. Now they’re commercial and plastic and they’re great.
The life—promising beginning, overripe middle, bloody end—of Lee Chagra, the biggest drug lawyer in El Paso.
Four performers in Dallas are making a new kind of music that combines precision, grace, and crazy humor.
The city boy moved to the country and life was good. And then he bought four pigs.
When it comes to flops and fiascos, Texans can outdo anyone.
Everybody knows the story about the young Texan who goes into business, works hard, and makes millions. But what happens when his luck runs out?
Drew Pearson, Tony Hill, and Butch Johnson are wide receivers for the Dallas Cowboys—in other words, they’re artists, egomaniacs, fierce competitors, and the heart of the team.
Vesta Cawley turned to the city bureaucracy for help with a problem that didn’t matter to any of the other 900,000 residents of Dallas. But it should have mattered more to city hall.
All this twenty-year-old University of Houston student wants to do is jump farther and run faster than anyone else ever has.
Thousands of people from the North, broke and out of work, are streaming into the state. This is the true story of two of them who abandoned Detroit for Houston, learned about cockroaches, tacos, and freeways, and finally discovered happiness in broken air conditioners.
Parceling out three new seats in Congress sounds like an easy job, but the Texas Legislature tried for two months and couldn’t do it.
Why knock yourself out for two grueling weeks at a piano competition in Fort Worth? For $12,000—and a string of concert bookings money can’t buy.
Texas cities are full of people who grew up in the country—and want everybody they meet to know it.
From giant freshwater prawns to bikini-clad coeds, from ancient Indian artifacts to swimming pigs, there’s something for everyone on the San Marcos River.
Archbishop Patrick Flores acts like a country priest, but he has a tough job: he is the most powerful Catholic clergyman in Texas, and perhaps the most powerful Mexican American as well.
The last word on tortillas: how to make them, when to eat them, and why they should be in every artist’s studio.
Astronauts used to be dashing pilots. Now they’re doctors, scientists, and . . . sanitary engineers.
The stake is survival—for either the sheep and goat ranchers of West Texas or the smartest predator of all.
West of Fort Worth, General Dynamics builds the F-16, a good little fighter plane that could have been great if the Air Force brass had kept their hands off it.
The most expensive, amazing, dynamic, futuristic, and sexy way not to solve a transit crisis.
A tale of passion in the double-knit aristocracy.
Bill Clements, unmasked at last.
Evangelist James Robison is using the pulpit, prime time television, and Cullen Davis to try to save the world.
How you can—and why you should—go camping in the middle of the week.
For a man and his daughter out for a pleasant day’s fishing, the first sign of danger was a man’s hat floating silently down the stream.
And hello to high prices, high interest rates, high rents, and a new low for the American dream.
Onstage, all happy lounge acts are alike; offstage, all unhappy lounge acts are unhappy in their own ways.
What to eat, how to shop, and where to boogie in the most enchanting corner of Texas.
State highway patrolmen hate the 55 mph speed limit almost as much as other Texas motorists do, and for better reasons.
Lock your doors. The police have given up trying to catch burglars.
Zoos are fine for people, but they make animals go crackers.
When buyers and sellers converge on Dallas’s Apparel Mart for a week-long orgy of fashionable commerce, high style and discriminating taste confront the cold reality of the bottom line.
That’s what the Legislature is here to do, and unless we’re lucky, it just may.