Thirty years ago, people couldnt believe it: The old man’s elixir boosted crops, ate up sewage, and made the desert bloom. Today half a dozen Texas companies claim the elixir does all that and a whole lot more.
Who came first—Indiana Jones of Hollywood or Vendyl Jones of Arlington, the archaeologist who has spent years trying to dig up the fabled Ark of the Covenant?
Rock and Country music met in Austin. That friendship may make the state.
The head of the Texas Film Commission hustles Hollywood movie-makers into putting more of Texas in the can.
The controversial home of an embattled college president is a symbol of a Panhandle brawl full of conspiracies.
In word and deed, the George W. Bush now residing in the White House bears little resemblance to the Texas governor I gladly sent to Washington. That's why I'm so ambivalent about reelecting him.
“All you’ve got is a famous name,” a Republican operative told George W. Bush. But six years later he was governor, and six years after that he was president. And six years after that, his place in history—not to mention the fate of the world—is a little uncertain.
What’s so important about a stack of wood? Every Aggie knows that the answer is tradition—which is why, after a catastrophe that took the lives of twelve young men and women, the decision of whether to continue, change, or call a halt to the bonfire looms so large at Texas
The lovesick antics of diapered astronaut Lisa Nowak are some combination of funny and sad but seemingly not revealing of anything larger, until you realize that her tragic, tabloidy breakdown says everything you need to know about NASA’s many troubles.
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.
Director Oliver Stone may not be sure who did it or how, but he is sure he knows why.
While politicians and bureaucrats endlessly debate the best ways to secure our borders, undocumented immigrants are dying to get into America—literally.
How has the state’s most storied ranch managed to survive and thrive in the twenty-first century? By operating in a way that its founder, Captain Richard King, would scarcely recognize.
A violent tackle in a high school football game paralyzed John McClamrock for life. His mother made sure it was a life worth living.
In suburban Fort Worth the frail psyche of a football prodigy collided with the crazed ambition of his dad, who himself had been a high school football star way back when. The consequences were deadly.
The short, slight, mentally disabled black man was found on the side of a road in Linden, huddled in a fetal position. He was bloody and unconscious—the victim of a violent crime. But another tragedy was how residents of the East Texas town reacted.
My best friend from high school is no longer the uncool, baseball-card-collecting goofball he once was. He’s a Navy surgeon and commander, and for two horrific weeks I got to watch him calmly and bravely save lives in wartime—not just Americans’ and not just soldiers’—in one of the most dangerous
No one in McAllen saw Irene Garza leave Sacred Heart that night in 1960. The next morning, her car was still parked down the street from the church. She never came home.
His dreams. His fears. The truth about his love life. A candid chat with Texas’ most misunderstood sports hero.
Decades after his family controlled Galveston’s liquor and gambling, 89-year-old Vic Maceo is clinging to his gangster past—and to his pistol.
In one year the eyes of the world will turn to Dallas's Dealey Plaza for the fiftieth anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination. Is the city ready?
Her husband, Fred Baron, helped bankroll John Edwards's presidential campaign, only to die of cancer amid the most sordid political scandal in recent history. But before long, Dallas's newest rainmaker had emerged from the wreckage—with every hair in place.
Meet the two preteen sisters from Alvin who compete against, and beat, adult runners.
And the story of how I started spelling it that way (with the accent) begins with a kidnapping.
Joe Hagan profiles the Bush dynasty for New York magazine.
The only American ever to design scarves for the exclusive French fashion house Hermès is Kermit Oliver, a 69-year-old postal worker from Waco who lives in a strange and beautiful world all his own.
For the past four years, a group of passionate reformers has been steadily trying to remake how higher education works in Texas—over the screams and howls of many professors and school presidents. Last year the battle came to UT. And the bombs are still flying.
Sending a Texan off into the world—and hoping he’ll return.
Every year, hundreds of Texas high schoolers are aggressively recruited by the nation’s top college football programs. It’s a dream come true, but some kids must go through the bewildering process alone. And according to the rules of the NCAA, there aren’t many places they can turn to for help.
Read this National Magazine Award-winning story about how the Legislature slashed funding for women’s health programs in 2011 and launched an all-out war on Planned Parenthood that has dramatically changed the state’s priorities. The battle continues raging, and the stakes could not be higher.
Canadian journalist and author Ryan Knighton—who is blind—communes with reptiles he can't see for VICE magazine.
A new book, Flagrant Conduct: The Story of Lawrence v. Texas, explores the history of the men behind the landmark Supreme Court case and questions the conventional wisdom of the story.
For a quarter of a century, the Art Guys, Michael Galbreth and Jack Massing, have been Houston’s master provocateurs, stirring up discussion with their wacky, thoughtful, and tenaciously marketed “social sculptures.” But have they finally gone too far?
A culinary obsession that began decades ago in my grandmother’s kitchen sent me on a quest through Central Texas (and way beyond) for kolaches—not the best ones but the ones that would lead me to myself.
Dallas Wiens, a Fort Worth man who lost his face after brushing against a power line, was profiled by the New Yorker's Raffi Khatchadourian.
When Rick Perry, the longest-serving governor in Texas history loses his first campaign ever, what happens to him? More importantly, what happens to us?
On October 3, 2006, a four-year-old boy named Andrew Burd died in a Corpus Christi hospital. The cause of death was determined to be salt poisoning, an extremely unusual occurrence. Even more shocking was what happened next: his foster mother, Hannah Overton, was found guilty of killing him. But could
Texas Monthly senior editor Michael Hall on why GQ's story about Jerry Joseph, the too-good-to-be-true athlete in Odessa, was one of his favorites of the year.
Writer Guy Martin talks to Ted Flato, one half of the visionary architect duo from San Antonio, about the merciless sun, the Texas breeze, and Tommy Lee Jones.
Biologists are worried that the U.S.-Mexico border fence adversely impacts endangered species and other animals.
Four strippers from Abilene are suing their employer in hopes of recouping overtime and unpaid wages they would have been entitled to if they were considered employees instead of contractors.
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram lands an interview with John O’Brien, the main suspect in the “rooftop burglaries.”
No state has defied the federal government’s environmental regulations more fiercely than Texas, and no governor has been more outspoken about the “job-killing” policies of the EPA than Rick Perry. But does that mean we can all breathe easy?
A 5,000-word piece in Religious Dispatches details the “spiritual” war on abortion in Texas under Rick Perry’s watch.
Since leaving the Bush White House, Karl Rove has become “the dominant private citizen in the Republican Party,“ according to a new profile in the New Republic.
Texas A&M’s announcement that it was bolting the Big 12 for the SEC signaled the end of a passionate rivalry with the University of Texas that has defined the two schools for more than a century. But what does the end of Aggies versus Longhorns mean for the rest of
Dallas’s ritzy Park Cities is the sort of place where Jerry Jones Jr. can buy a four-story castle with twelve bathrooms and a nine-car underground garage for a reported $8.7 million and some people regard it as a steal. Welcome to the fabulous world of Erin Mathews, the very discreet
