The Last Houston Residents Without Power After Beryl Say They Feel “Trapped”
As they wait for CenterPoint to restore electricity, residents in Kingwood, which has suffered twelve days of outages, say hope is waning.
Peter Holley is a seventh-generation Texan and a native Austinite who writes about news and culture across the state of Texas. Before joining Texas Monthly, he was a staff writer at the Washington Post, where he reported on breaking national and international news. Holley has reported from Afghanistan and Iraq and spent a year working for an English-language newspaper in Lahore, Pakistan. He earned a BA in pre-law from American University in Washington, D.C., and holds a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University in New York City. His writing has appeared in the San Antonio Express-News, the New York Post, Newsday, Columbia Journalism Review, the Houston Chronicle, and the New York Times.
As they wait for CenterPoint to restore electricity, residents in Kingwood, which has suffered twelve days of outages, say hope is waning.
By Peter Holley
Its owner says the devices—which he plans to introduce to grocery stores across Texas—make it impossible for minors to buy bullets. Critics say the machines feel like “something out of a dystopian novel.”
By Peter Holley
As climate change worsens and temperatures rise, the dangers posed by hurricanes aren’t limited to high winds and flooding. Moving forward, experts say, Texans will also need to prepare for the dangers posed by extreme heat.
By Peter Holley
The much-criticized drivers (and their devoted fans) gathered in Gatesville to swap stories, spin doughnuts, and use flamethrowers.
By Peter Holley
The Tesla CEO has brought jobs to a historic community in Central Texas. Along the way, some locals say, his companies and suppliers have degraded the environment and upended a way of life.
By Peter Holley
The bad news: Texas beaches really do have a fecal pollution problem. The good news: it’s complicated.
By Peter Holley
For weeks now, motorists have puzzled over a billboard advertising a senior citizen’s desire to find love in—and relocate to—tiny Sweetwater, Texas. Is it a sincere bid for companionship or an elaborate hoax? Texas Monthly investigates.
By Peter Holley
The area west of Austin and San Antonio will be one of the most popular destinations in America for witnessing the historic phenomenon. Given its rural nature, it also could face the most challenges.
By Peter Holley
On the rolling hills outside Canadian, Texas, where cattle herds were decimated and fertile ranchland has been reduced to a charred wasteland, some things are too painful to discuss.
By Peter Holley
Austin Riley spent decades raising exotic animals in the Texas Hill Country. In a split second, the animal he thought he knew best changed his life forever.
By Peter Holley
Luke Coffee, a Dallas-based actor and filmmaker, is trying to frame himself as a victim of excessive force.
By Peter Holley
Whether it’s a Panhandle blizzard, a Houston thunderstorm, or a South Texas fire hazard, no matter where you are in Texas, there’s no escaping the chaos.
By Peter Holley
This week, the women-focused dating app joined dozens of other Texas companies that say ambiguity around life-saving medical care is bad for business.
By Peter Holley
In their new book ‘Chokeholds,’ researchers argue Lee Harvey Oswald was just one piece of a sprawling conspiracy—one that other investigators claim never existed at all.
By Peter Holley
After Hurricane Katrina, Darresha George moved her family to Texas. When school officials suspended her son for refusing to cut his hair, it unleashed a storm that shows no signs of easing.
By Peter Holley
A pastor in Austin asked the artificial intelligence chatbot to write an entire Sunday service. It bombed.
By Peter Holley
Pecan trees are dying across Central Texas during the second-hottest summer on record, prompting farmers to consider the future of the beloved state tree.
By Peter Holley
In far West Texas, where loneliness abounds, one man is on a quest to redefine the meaning of love and companionship.
By Peter Holley
A Dallas billionaire says his new luxury resort in a near-pristine parcel west of Austin is a model of sustainability. The caretaker of the nature reserve next door isn’t buying it.
By Peter Holley
A new era of climate change–fueled heat waves is pushing the high priests of Texas barbecue to their limit.
By Peter Holley
Austin's signature green space is at the center of a long-running debate over how much the city should cling to its past as it prepares for the future.
By Peter Holley
In his new book, ‘The Heat Will Kill You First,’ Austin-based journalist Jeff Goodell examines climate change in its most essential form: temperature rise.
By Peter Holley
Texans have never been afraid of summer temperatures. This year’s record-breaking heat wave should make us think twice.
By Peter Holley
What began as a baseless theory has turned into a social media frenzy, with the power to frighten the public and hamper police investigations.
By Peter Holley
Customers “tell me it’s better than therapy, actually, and cheaper, too,” said a trainer at one rental facility.
By Peter Holley
As lawmakers consider bills targeting their livelihoods, queer Texans say more members of their community intend to defend themselves.
By Peter Holley
They have swimming pools, dozens of beds, and at least one stripper pole in a backyard school bus (you read that right). Locals say they’re are turning a vulnerable community into a “theme park” for hard-partying tourists.
By Peter Holley
The former football star says his campaign for the U.S. Senate began in his home outside Dallas. Will it end there as well?
By Peter Holley
Calls for independence are growing louder on the right. Maybe that would change if more Texans understood the costs of such a move.
By Peter Holley
Thousands of years after they were wiped out from the area, an obsessed wildlife ecologist has found evidence that the bucktoothed critters are beginning to recolonize.
By Peter Holley
We asked for clarification from 99 Texas legislators who support the law, plus the attorney general who will enforce it, for clarification. Only one granted an interview.
By Peter Holley
A severe pregnancy complication and the state’s strict limits on abortion combined to leave an expectant mother with few options—none of them good.
By Peter Holley
The lovable Buc-ee’s mascot appears to be the latest victim of “hatejacking,” when an extremist group adopts a popular brand to advance its agenda.
By Peter Holley
For decades, Terlingua was a refuge for cowboys, wanderers, and weirdos. Now it’s an increasingly popular getaway for well-heeled urbanites.
By Peter Holley
With an abortion ban looming as the Supreme Court prepares to overturn Roe, the heartbreak of trying to provide reproductive care is too much for some.
By Peter Holley
Charlie Cain and Steve Skarnulis were used to litigating East Texas oil and gas disputes. Then a terrified voting-machine company employee, falsely implicated in the 2020 election’s biggest conspiracy theory, came calling.
By Peter Holley
After surviving a devastating accident that left her disabled, Amber McDaniel felt like she could overcome anything. Then her ten-year-old son contracted a rare condition associated with COVID-19.
By Peter Holley
A few months ago, Jennifer Bridges’s refusal to abide by Houston Methodist’s vaccine mandate thrust her into the national spotlight. Now she’s become a purveyor of conspiracy theories that have fueled the pandemic’s continuation.
By Peter Holley
Who can be sued under Senate Bill 8? What is the “shadow docket”? When will the Supreme Court rule on the merits of the law?
By Peter Holley and Dan Solomon
The island's latest storm has no season.
By Peter Holley
The linebacker arrived in the United States at ten, knowing nothing about football. Now he's stealing the show on HBO's ‘Hard Knocks.’
By Peter Holley
In Rockport, a celebrated artist is planning to install sculptures depicting the first contact between European explorers and the Karankawa. Is it a representation of a key moment in the area’s history, or a glorification of colonialism?
By Peter Holley
Inside the state’s biggest hospitals, doctors say a surge of unvaccinated COVID patients is almost too bewildering to believe.
By Peter Holley
Earlier this month, a federal board removed the word “Negro” from sixteen locations in Texas, but the state map is still rife with slurs.
By Peter Holley
Long hours, longer lines, nonstop bidding wars, and letters penned by pets. Stories from the real estate bonanza.
By Peter Holley
Jennifer Bridges says she isn’t anti-vax, but she's now a cause célèbre among skeptics for threatening to sue her employer for requiring employees get the jab.
By Peter Holley
As vaccination rollout in their country has been slow, wealthy Mexicans have spent thousands on expensive trips abroad to get inoculated.
By Maria Jimenez Moya and Peter Holley
In Houston’s Third Ward, where some residents’ homes were extensively damaged, a fight for repairs has reached a breaking point.
By Peter Holley
Car clubs have gathered for decades at “Chicano Park” in the East Cesar Chavez neighborhood. But residents of a new luxury apartment building have started calling the police to stop them.
By Peter Holley
Luke Coffee, a director and actor who appeared on NBC’s ‘Friday Night Lights,’ found QAnon during the pandemic and then spent a month trying to evade the consequences of the path it led him down.
By Peter Holley