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.
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.
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.
Last year, UT forced prominent track-and-field coach Bev Kearney to resign because of her affair with a student. Now she’s fighting back, with a lawsuit that opens a window onto the world of high-stakes collegiate athletics—a window that many people would just as soon keep closed.
The messy, lonely, and visionary life of the first Texas writer—and the first Latino—to win the vaunted PEN/Faulkner Award.
After ruling the state for a century, Texas Democrats were gradually reduced to irrelevance. Is the reawakening at hand?
Ten years after their remarkable fall from grace, no one is quite sure why the onetime Nashville darlings tumbled so far—and never got back up.
After decades as one of the most admired athletes on the planet and one of the toughest competitors ever to ride a bike, Lance Armstrong is facing a new challenge: how to come back from a very public disgrace.
For thirty years, when she wasn’t writing books or winning genius grants, Sandra Cisneros has been pushing and prodding San Antonio to become a more sophisticated (and more Mexican) city. Now she’s leaving town. did she succeed?
That we didn’t write, but wish we had.
Crisis pregnancy centers served 17,527 clients last year, and that number will likely only grow.
A new profile in Mother Jones describes how Ted Cruz's conservative beliefs were forged in a Houston after-school program.
A new Harper's article claims that the direct-sales beauty empire is merely a "pink pyramid scheme."
Both Esquire and the New York Times published lengthy profiles of LBJ biographer Robert Caro, who has just finished his fourth LBJ tome, The Passage to Power. But who had the better piece?
In an excerpt from his long-awaited fourth volume on LBJ, Robert Caro delves into those fateful hours in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
The Texas Observer's Melissa del Bosque traveled to the Juárez Valley, where the murder rate is 1,600 people killed per 100,000 inhabitants, to report on the violent drug war gripping the region.
Lengthy features in Sports Illustrated and the New York Times celebrate the Bears’ unprecedented sports success and its implications for the university at large.
In a New Yorker profile of Paul, the congressman forgot why he wanted to impeach Judge William Wayne Justice.
One month before the Continental name gets scrapped for good, Businessweek explores the nuts and bolts of merging with United.
Politico published a behind-the-scenes, anonymously-sourced campaign obituary for Rick Perry. But isn’t a bit too soon?
The pioneering Daily Beast blogger supports Paul for the Republican nomination.
Temple-native Bryan Burrough examines how the governor went from being the “anointed” one to a punch-line factory.
Most guitars don’t have names. This one has a voice and a personality, and bears a striking resemblance to his owner.
Bobby Jackson has taught students in the Aransas County school district about the Plains Indians, the Battle of San Jacinto, and Spindletop since the state celebrated its sesquicentennial. How he does it bears no resemblance to the class I took when I was stuck in middle school.
On 50,000 acres that they have mostly to themselves (not including their hounds, mules, horses, cattle, chickens, piglets, and parents), Jasper, Trevor, and Tanner Klein live a life almost untouched by the modern world.
Even after I moved to Los Angeles, there was no question that I’d always be a Texan at heart. But what about my daughter?
My daughter is only two, but I’m already planning to teach her what it means to be a Texan—and a Tejana.
. . . from teaching my fifteen-year-old daughter about her Texas roots. So when I realized I was failing to accomplish this most sacred of duties, I did what any well-meaning parent would do: loaded her (and her friends, of course) into the car and hit the road.
As much as anything, the Texas economic miracle depends on water. Lots of water. So what are all those power plants, refineries, and factories going to do as the state gets drier and drier and drier?
The future is likely going to require us to move large amounts of water from wet but sparsely populated places (a.k.a. East Texas) to thirsty, booming cities. Good thing there’s a plan for that. There is a plan, right?
The Lower Pecos River rock paintings were created four thousand years ago by a long-forgotten people. But their apparent message may be as useful today as it was then: Follow the water.
Austin Mahone is sixteen years old. He doesn’t have a record contract, a tour bus, or a backing band. But he does have more than 650,000 followers on Twitter and the email addresses of 2,000,000 fans. Meet San Antonio’s answer to Justin Bieber.
As the man known to the world as Dallas's J. R. Ewing fends off throat cancer, he gears up to reprise the role that turned him into an icon and looks back on one of the most extraordinary—and eccentric—lives in show business.
In 2004 Dan Rather tarnished his career forever with a much-criticized report on George W. Bush’s National Guard service. Eight years later, the story behind the story can finally be told: what CBS’s top-ranking newsman did, what the president of the United States didn’t do, and how some feuding Texas
In 1996 a powerful South Texas ranching clan accused ExxonMobil of sabotaging wells on the family’s property. Thirteen years, millions of dollars in legal fees, and one state Supreme Court opinion later, the biggest oil field feud of its time is still raging.
Over the past fifteen years, John Friend turned his Woodlands–based Anusara style of yoga into an internationally popular brand. Then, in the space of a few weeks, it became hopelessly twisted amid a wild series of accusations of sexual and financial improprieties.
