Countdown to Liftoff
Sleek, shiny rockets on sleepy, shifty sands: as SpaceX prepares to build in South Texas, I wonder if my old stomping grounds can handle the inevitable collision of cultures. I sure hope so.
Sleek, shiny rockets on sleepy, shifty sands: as SpaceX prepares to build in South Texas, I wonder if my old stomping grounds can handle the inevitable collision of cultures. I sure hope so.
The country’s largest group of Muslims live in Texas, yet many of them don’t feel welcome here. A few young and progressive leaders—like Irving imam Omar Suleiman—are working to change that.
In 1982 three teenagers were killed near the shores of Lake Waco in a seemingly inexplicable crime. More than three decades later, the tragic and disturbing case still casts a long, dark shadow.
The great trail drives head for the last roundup.
I never knew my father, a decorated World War II pilot who died before I was born. But a trek at age 67 to the site where his airplane crashed brought me closer to him than I’d ever dared hope.
Jason Hernandez was only 21 when he was sentenced to life without parole. But his brother’s death in prison led the former crack dealer to a life of advocacy—and freedom.
Two decades after killing Marjorie Nugent, Bernie Tiede was sentenced this spring for her murder—again. So what do we make of him now?
Welcome to the Texas border, home of the two busiest federal court districts in the nation.
Is there anything sweeter than crawfish in season? Come along for the best eats in Louisiana and Texas.
How one woman’s fight for freedom inspired Houston’s lawyers and artists more than a century and a half later.
Katharine Hayhoe has made it her life’s mission to proclaim the truth about climate change. Can she get the skeptics to listen?
An excerpt from Harvey Penick: The Life and Wisdom of the Man Who Wrote the Book on Golf by Kevin Robbins reveals how one of golf's greatest minds came to share his knowledge with the world.
An exclusive excerpt from The Midnight Assassin: Panic, Scandal, and the Hunt for America's First Serial Killer reveals a forgotten time in Austin history, when a series of brutal, unsolved slayings terrified officials and left them wondering if a madman was on the loose.
Making the guns that won the West.
Guns have always been part of my life, and I’ve never forgotten the lesson I learned the first time I fired one.
Welcome to the Frisco Gun Club, where the elite pack heat.
A Texas documentarian tries to see how far he can bend the truth.
A hipster paradise, a high-tech nirvana, a festival wonderland. Today Austin barely resembles the sleepy college town I moved to in the seventies. How it changed is the story of a lifetime.
If you don’t know it, can’t remember it, or won’t sing it, what good is it?
Colt Keo-Meier is Texas’s preeminent researcher on transgender issues. But for him, it’s not just about the science. It’s personal.
Michael McManus was one of thousands of men and women who embellish their military service. But his story casts a different light on stolen valor.
For children with debilitating epilepsy, an unprecedented medical trial in Fort Worth offers a glimmer of hope. But if it works, is the state ready to embrace medical marijuana?
How the kindest, gentlest family man in Nacogdoches began writing some of the creepiest, grisliest fiction in the country.
Inside Stanley Drug Company, the last hoodoo shop in Texas.
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.