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.
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.