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Luby’s, LuAnn Platters, and Me
This story originally published on June 8, 2020. It has been updated with new information. On a rainy Sunday in May, after Governor Abbott allowed restaurants to reopen at limited capacity (and before...
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Dallas’s Taco Stop Is Therapeutic
This story originally published on June 9, 2020. My mood lifts as soon as I pull up to Taco Stop, a walk-up taqueria along Dallas’s Irving Boulevard. The building is brightly painted in the red, green,...
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A Parent’s Problematic Pandemic Bequest
This story originally published on June 16, 2020. It has been updated with new information. My mom, Deborah, passed away in May.It wasn’t COVID-19. Complications of complications from the cancer that...
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Greg Abbott’s Penchant for the Path of Least Resistance Has Led Texas to the...
This story originally published on July 17, 2020. It has been updated with new information. In the thirty years between 1984, when Greg Abbott graduated from law school, and 2014, when he became...
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The Texanist: What’s the Strangest Thing You’ve Eaten in Texas?
This originally published on July 17, 2020. Q: As a Texan (currently deployed overseas with the Texas Army National Guard), I have eaten my fair share of strange things. I’ve come to love deep-fried...
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The Quest for Better Beef
When some 8,500 ranchers, stockers, feeders, and meat-packers began arriving at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center, in San Antonio, for the annual National Cattlemen’s Beef Association conference...
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Jonathan Majors, the Star of HBO’s ‘Lovecraft Country,’ Transforms His Rage...
When he was growing up, actor Jonathan Majors found solace in the countryside at his grandmother’s farm, where he spent summers. That peace was harder to find in his hometown of Cedar Hill, and he...
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At UT and A&M, Visionary Takes on Yearbooks Celebrate the Beauty of Blackness
I have always loved my hands. In their deftness, flexibility, and deep brown color, they represent my strength and totality. My freshman year of college, though, my love for them wavered. One afternoon...
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Passing the Time With the Ghosts in the Dirt
The fences have been mended. The roads have been patched. Our front gate is finally fixed. There is plenty to do when sheltering in place on a remote cattle ranch, and during the week my husband and I...
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Vivian Stephens Helped Turn Romance Writing Into a Billion-Dollar Industry....
If it hadn’t been for the pandemic and the near impossibility of visiting Vivian Stephens in person, I’m not sure I would have been so attuned to her voice. It is gay and mellifluous; she always...
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Airbnb for the Outdoor Set
Sure, you could drop a few hundred bucks to “camp” in a luxury tree house or air-conditioned yurt, but for many Texans camping still means roughing it outdoors. However, securing a site at a state or...
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September 2020: Roar of the Crowd
Patch Together Thank you for the thought-provoking article in July’s issue on the role renewable energy may play in the Texas economy [“What Lies Ahead”]. I have worked in oil and gas in both field and...
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The Wildest Insurance Fraud Scheme Texas Has Ever Seen
When federal agent Jim Reed drove in to a small airport in the East Texas city of Athens mid-morning on September 15, 2014, he was expecting to find a straightforward case of arson—an easy case for the...
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The Better Beef Buying Guide
Beef terminology—phrases like all-natural, grass-fed, grass-finished, organic, and Wagyu—can be tricky to understand. Thankfully, upscale grocery chains such as Central Market and Whole Foods publish...
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What’s Harvard’s Beef With Texas A&M?
John Sharp didn’t mince words when he fired off an angry letter to Harvard University’s president back in January. The chancellor of the Texas A&M University system wrote to decry the actions of...
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The Statues Are Coming Down. Maybe That’s a Missed Opportunity.
Statues, the best of them, have a puzzling power. They cast a spell of stillness. The placid, unassertive way a bronze figure stands there, gazing out at some middle distance, creates an illusion that...
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From the Editor, September 2020: “Knives Out”
Lots of our readers love red meat. They love steaks and burgers. They love barbecued beef and pork, as well as tacos stuffed with those meats—which is why we employ a barbecue editor and a taco editor....
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This Plant-Based Chili Has No Meat (or Beans)
Unlike regular beef, Beyond Meat’s Beyond Beef product—a plant-based ground meat substitute whose sales have surged in the past few years as beef has come under fire for its environmental...
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