Sandy Jenkins was a quiet accountant at the Collin Street Bakery who felt overlooked and dreamed of living the good life. He found it (for a while) by embezzling nearly $17 million from the famed fruitcake maker.
How the once troubled Texas Forensic Science Commission put the state at the forefront of the criminal justice reform movement.
A team of Bigfoot believers, a legion of “Haters,” more than one Walmart parking lot, and the showman at the center of it all.
In Africa Texas Special Forces unit are trying to help win the War on Terror, teaching one lesson at a time.
Houston’s super-rich are learning to love the brand-new, very ritzy, much-heralded River Oaks District. (Maybe.)
I always knew that the work my dad did as an Episcopal priest and grief counselor was important. But I didn’t understand how important until the birth of my son.
In the war against campus sexual assault, why are we not talking about drinking?
In search of the mysterious, absurdist, and lyrical East Texas writer William Goyen.
A dark incident almost twenty years ago put Greg Torti on the sex offender registry for life. But the real story, he insists, is much more complicated.
Will border politics crush Mission’s attempt to brand itself as the butterfly capital of America before that dream takes wing?
You know you’ve seen it: condos multiplying, home prices tripling, realtors scrambling, buyers overbidding. Does our state’s fevered real estate craze make us the country’s best housing market—or the most overvalued? I went on a tour of our four largest cities to find out.
Critics denounce this arm of forensic science as bogus and subjective.
How the Houston-based writer went from ”this sounds super f—ing boring” to the author of a new book.
A decade and a half after I wrote about the poor quality of Texas wines for this magazine, Lone Star vintners are starting to turn heads.
In 2012 Austin Tice answered a calling: to become a war photographer and tell the world what was happening in Syria. But then he went missing.
How did smog-breathing, gridlock-prone Houston become the newest natural wonder of the urban world?
A group of UT computer scientists tries to program a team of machines to play soccer like the pros.
What can an anarchist from Iceland teach America about politics? More than some might think.
He’s the best defensive player in the NFL but writes his own Christmas cards. He has thousands of fans who’d love to party, but he goes to bed at seven-thirty. He could be the league’s next MVP but enjoys buying his own groceries. Is Houston’s J. J. Watt for real?
Twenty years after her death, who gets to love Selena (and how)?
The DuPont chemical plant in La Porte was once hailed as the safest around. Until the deaths of four workers exposed a darker truth.
My family and their hometown helped change LBJ’s views on equal rights. Did his later policies change the reality for those in South Texas?
Seven years since it was last ravaged by a hurricane, Galveston is doing as well as ever. Will it always be so fortunate?
He wasn’t diplomatic and he wasn’t subtle, but Curtis Graves forged a political path for black Texans—and altered history forever.
In 2011 Callie Quinn moved from Austin to Chile to experience a new way of life. Then she met a charming fellow foreigner—and almost lost everything.
Catherine Grove walked away from the Church of Wells last month. Now, she and the elders of the East Texas church explain why she left—and why she returned to the congregation that many call a cult.
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.
Can we save our beloved ant-eating, blood-spurting, quickly disappearing state reptile?
For the first time in its history, Blue Bell is in a right sticky mess.
How a trip to South Padre Island, a grand theft auto, and an English folk singer forever changed my life’s course.
How a few gun rights activists hijacked the political debate over open carry.
Growing up in the Permian Basin, I thought I had a sense of what it was like working the oilfields. Turns out I didn’t know a damn thing.
Last summer, Theresa Roemer’s three-story closet made her the country’s most famous social climber. But she was only getting started.
Twenty-year-old Hayden Pedigo is making the most innovative, audacious music in the country. So why is he still in Amarillo?
In a 5–4 ruling on June 26, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the Constitution guarantees the right for same-sex couples to marry across the country. Here is the story of two women who fought for that historic decision in Texas—and helped to make it a reality.
In most states, as the old saying goes, fifteen will get you twenty. In Texas, twenty can get you twenty, if you are employed by a school district in any capacity.
Growing up in my family, there were things you just didn’t talk about. Like feelings. Or sex. Or dying from AIDS.
Texas’s criminal justice system has seen some staggering changes in the past decade. Thank Cathy Cochran.
He’s the brashest, most generous, most foul-mouthed trial attorney in the country. And at 89, Joe Jamail can still command a courtroom, mother%*!$#@.
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.
The Reverend Charles Moore ardently dedicated his life to the service of God and his fellow man. But when he couldn’t shake the thought that he hadn’t done enough, he drove to a desolate parking lot in his hometown of Grand Saline for one final act of faith.
The next lieutenant governor is a former radio shock jock who became one of the most conservative members of the Legislature. How will Dan Patrick act now that he is one of the most powerful officials in Texas?
For more than a decade, Michelle Lyons’s job required her to watch condemned criminals be put to death. After 278 executions, she won't ever be the same.
How Johnny Gimble became one of the greatest fiddlers of all time—and showed me and my son a thing or two about playing music.
Scott Catt was a single dad who held up banks to make ends meet. As his greed intensified, he knew just whom to enlist as accomplices: his kids.
In 1998 famously tough Montague County district attorney Tim Cole sent a teenager to prison for life for his part in a brutal murder. The punishment haunts him to this day.
Twenty-seven-year-old Catherine Grove is a member of a small, insular, and eccentric church in East Texas. Her parents think she’s being brainwashed. She insists she’s being saved.
My life with horses.
It’s not all sweetness and light in the grapefruit groves of the Rio Grande Valley.
A son of the oil patch chases the new boom in South Texas.
