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Loon Star State: Insurrection Infection
To see more political cartoons from Ben Sargent, visit our Loon Star State section, or find Observer political reporting here. Texas Republicans Fanned the Flames of Insurrection Long Before January 6: For years, Texas Republicans have fueled the toxic politics that led extremists to storm the Capitol. Senators Poke, Prod...
Jung Young Moon’s Strange Novels Cross Continents
When Will Evans met the Korean novelist Jung Young Moon in Seoul in 2014 on a trip sponsored by the Literary Translation Institute of Korea, he fell in love with the novelist’s strange and wonderful voice. Evans, the founder of Deep Vellum, a Dallas-based independent publisher focused on literary translation,...
The Lege This Week: Stimmy for Schools?
Welcome to the 87th Legislative Session. Since the last session came to a close in June 2019, Texas has been hit by an unrestrained pandemic and a crippling economic crisis—and now the fallout from deadly blackouts. Under unprecedented circumstances, lawmakers are faced with a number of urgent challenges. The Texas Observer is following along every step of the way.
Writer Rick Bass Fights for 20 Grizzly Bears
Rick Bass wants us to appreciate the beautiful things in nature and do our best not to squander them. The 63-year-old Tex-pat has long been known as a gifted nature writer and a fierce defender of the natural world, including the pristine timbered wilderness in Montana threatened by loggers that Bass has spent much of his adult life protecting.
‘Luz at Midnight’ Reimagines Blackouts, Polar Vortexes, and Environmental Justice in San Antonio
In the not-too-distant future, San Antonio is scrambling to go carbon neutral. They’re turning refineries into apartments and closing coal plants to build mixed-use developments. But progress is slow. Poor people are being displaced, left vulnerable in a time of increasingly frequent heat waves and extreme weather events. All the while, profiteers are seizing on the vacuum left by the fossil fuel industry to vulture minerals from the South Texas landscape. In an unequal transition away from fossil fuels, could this be the future?
Texas Is Considering a Violence Prevention Effort Outside of Law Enforcement—Without Challenging Gun Rights Head On
This story was originally published by The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. Sign up for its newsletters here. When Rodney McIntosh saw the pistol, his instincts kicked in. He grabbed the armed man’s hand, shoved it down, and pushed him back into his car. It wasn’t McIntosh’s first time in a conflict on the verge of becoming a shooting. It’s his job. “You can’t do this in broad daylight,” McIntosh recalled telling the young man. If he’d pulled the trigger that day, prison wouldn’t be the only concern. “Someone is going to come shoot you, too,” McIntosh told him.
One Researcher’s Quest to Quantify the Environmental Cost of Abandoned Oil Wells
This story is one installment of a larger project by Grist and The Texas Observer. Support comes from the Pulitzer Center. Amy Townsend-Small has been chasing methane her entire professional life. The quest has taken her from Southern California freeways to sewage plants to animal feedlots. Sniffing out the potent greenhouse gas, which traps 86 times as much heat as carbon dioxide after it’s emitted into the atmosphere, has required her to breathalyze cows and take chemical measurements at large manure lagoons. When fracking took off around 2010, Townsend-Small shifted her focus to a new and growing problem: methane leaks from oil and gas activity.
‘No Teeth and No Funding’: How Regulators Failed to Police the Oil Industry
This project was supported by the Pulitzer Center. The fracking boom in the Permian Basin—which straddles West Texas and southeastern New Mexico—largely coincided with Republican control of much of New Mexico’s state government. Many of those elected to office in the early years of the shale rush promptly began dismantling barriers to extracting the most oil and gas at the cheapest price: Soon after winning the governorship in 2010, Republican Susana Martinez shuffled key employees in the environment department into positions where they had little expertise. During her eight-year tenure, the state legislature slashed the budget for the New Mexico Oil Conservation Division (OCD), which oversees the oil and gas industry, by 25 percent. By 2018, half of all inspection and compliance positions were vacant.
The Lege This Week: Elections and Abortions and Grid-Reforms, Oh My!
Welcome to the 87th Legislative Session. Since the last session came to a close in June 2019, Texas has been hit by an unrestrained pandemic and a crippling economic crisis—and now the fallout from deadly blackouts. Under unprecedented circumstances, lawmakers are faced with a number of urgent challenges. The Texas Observer is following along every step of the way.
“No Justice, No Rent:” After Winter Storm Uri, Tenants Go on Strike
Jaider Vara had tried his best to keep his wife and 5-year-old daughter away from the black mold that bloomed on the walls of their apartment in the Villas Del Paseo apartment complex in West Houston. Since a burst pipe flooded their one bedroom after Winter Storm Uri, he’d ripped out the carpet and disinfected the area covered in spores, but there was only so much he could do without tearing down the walls and fixing the leak himself. Then, nearly a month after the mid-February storm, his apartment flooded again after plumbers contracted by the complex botched a repair on the other side of the wall.
Texas Activists Took Their Fight Against a Natural Gas Project Abroad—And They’re Winning
In February, members of the Texas Railroad Commission finally got the message. The three commissioners of the regulatory body that oversees the state’s oil and gas sector voted to crack down on flaring, a practice whereby producers burn usable natural gas they don’t have the capacity to transport. In Texas, flaring releases literal tons of methane, a greenhouse gas much more potent than carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere each year.
A New Group of Sexual Assault Survivors in Texas is Seeking Systemic Reform
Emily LeBlanc never reported her rape. For over a decade, she hardly talked about it. As a therapist and longtime advocate for sexual assault survivors, she’s counseled hundreds of women through similar experiences. But when a friend assaulted her in 2007, LeBlanc tried to convince herself that what happened wasn’t as bad.
How Flawed Death Investigations Can Leave Texas COVID-19 Deaths Uncounted
Rick Hill, a retired high school principal, plays a key role in tracing deaths linked to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. As an elected justice of the peace (JP) in Brazos County and leader of the Texas Justices of the Peace and Constables Association (JPCA), it’s part of his job to help determine just how many Texans the virus has killed. Hill spent decades as a science teacher before running for his position, and is well known in the community for his time as a commentator on local football games. But he has no medical training.
In Houston, a Plan to Expand Interstate 45 Encounters Federal Pushback
When Modesti Cooper returned home to Houston in July 2019 after more than a decade overseas with the United States military, she moved into her dream house on the corner of Nance and Grove streets in Houston’s Fifth Ward. She’d bought a parcel of land and designed the home from scratch in her downtime while touring from Kuwait to Afghanistan to Iraq. It was a relief to finally move in. “It’s a calm, cool, nice area,” Cooper says. “Besides the traffic, there’s no violence, no noise. It’s so quiet, it’s unbelievable. I had rockets and mortars and missiles blown over my head. To come home to peace of mind and say, OK, this is my forever home.”
The Lege This Week: “Another Watershed Moment”
Welcome to the 87th Legislative Session. Since the last session came to a close in June 2019, Texas has been hit by an unrestrained pandemic and a crippling economic crisis—and now the fallout from deadly blackouts. Under unprecedented circumstances, lawmakers are faced with a number of urgent challenges. The Texas Observer is following along every step of the way.
Lady Bird Johnson Was About More Than Wildflowers
Nearly 14 years after her death, Claudia Alta “Lady Bird” Taylor Johnson’s legacy, to most who know anything about her at all, has been boiled down to wildflowers alongside Texas highways. In Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight, Julia Sweig makes the convincing case that Johnson’s role in history is far more complex, interesting, and significant, even central to many of the events of the 1960s that continue to shape our culture and politics.
"News of the World" unsuccessfully tries to redeem the Western at its most harmful.
A version of this story ran in the March/April 2021 issue. More than most Westerns, News of the World is about things which no longer are. Where most entries of the genre take a broader view of the West and its iconography, Paul Greengrass’ latest feature relishes in the historical specificity of Texas in 1870. It’s a world drained by the exhaustion of the Civil War but also hopped up on the lawlessness of Westward Expansion. The United States is turning a page in its own history and those who can’t keep up are sure to be left behind. The film’s focus is on the chaos of change, which is also, unfortunately, where it loses its way.
Strangest State: A Mysterious Monolith and a Fat Cat
From the March/April 2021 issue. LUBBOCK // A Lubbock family awoke early one morning to the sound of an alarm, triggered when a window in their spare bedroom broke. When they went to investigate, they found the intruder was a 15-pound raccoon, KLBK reports. The family used brooms to barricade the room and called animal services, which managed to wrangle the critter after a short struggle. The raccoon has since been released into the wild.
Editorial: Defund the Constables
From the March/April 2021 issue. Texas Republicans’ longtime demand that cities shrink their budgets ran into a thin blue line last year. Austin called their bluff. The city passed a plan to cut or reallocate about $150 million from its police budget in August following nationwide protests for criminal justice reform—which included calls that cities “defund the police.” In response, state leaders have proposed punishing localities that try to trim their law enforcement finances. Some have even discussed a state takeover of Austin police. No need to sort out the inconsistencies. A liberal city did something, so now Texas Republicans want to do the opposite.
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