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Big Bend, Big Crowds
Big Bend National Park was still unknown to many Texans in 1973. Not yet thirty years old, the park had only recently begun drawing more than 200,000 visitors each year to its abundant attractions—the...
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How to Survive the Texas Legislature
Have you heard? The Eighty-eighth session of the Texas Legislature is underway. For the next 124 days, the Lege, as it’s known ’round here, will meet in its regular session until it adjourns sine die...
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My Quest to Lasso an Aquatic Bronco
I was walking along the banks of a remote stretch of the Pecos River when I spotted something at the water’s edge: a blue plastic box, the size of a small book, out of place in this unpeopled land of...
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Carp Diem! Where to Try and Catch Texas’s Most Underappreciated Fish
Common carp are nearly ubiquitous in Texas fresh water, from the clear streams of the Hill Country to the muddy bayous of Houston. They can be caught in ponds, lakes, rivers, and, yes, even ditches....
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How a Brazen School-Voucher Scheme in Texas Got Derailed
In October, I wrote about a wild, under-the-radar scheme in the Hill Country town of Wimberley to route taxpayer money to private schools around the state. Unbeknownst to almost anyone in the...
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No Media, No Cellphones, No Questions: Greg Abbott Finds a Safe Space for His...
If you watched Governor Greg Abbott’s State of the State address on Thursday night, you were treated to what amounted to an extended political ad, 25 minutes of made-for-TV messaging for a third-term...
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West Texans Are Learning What It Means to Live in Bear Country
Oscar the dumpster-diving bear has acquired a taste for barbecue. The 338-pound male black bear was first sighted at DB’s Rustic Iron BBQ, a food trailer in the Terlingua Ghost Town, on November 6,...
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Saying Goodbye to Fairfield Lake State Park
How do you say goodbye to a state park? On Monday, which was most likely Fairfield Lake State Park’s last day open to the public, hundreds of visitors poured into the 1,420-acre green space to...
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Preaching to the Choir: Greg Abbott Tours Private Christian Schools...
Who would school vouchers really benefit?Governor Greg Abbott is helping to answer that question, not so much through his rhetoric, which is relentlessly on-message (“educational freedom,” “parental...
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The Lege Could Unravel a Hard-Fought Patchwork of Protections Against...
Ten years ago, the eighty-third Texas Legislature had a chance to prove it wasn’t hopelessly corrupted by even the sleaziest of industries. That year, lawmakers considered modest reforms to the payday...
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Dan Patrick Tries Out a Trumpy Nickname for Texas Speaker Dade Phelan
Last week at the Capitol, a battle between the Texas House and the Senate over competing plans to cut Texans’ property taxes grew more contentious. Specifically, the men who run each legislative...
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How an Airbnb Party House Near Austin Became a Legislative Priority for a...
Tom Blauvelt never imagined that he would be discussing the party house at 16601 Jackson Street with state lawmakers. But there he was on an April day in an underground warren of the state Capitol...
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Rural School Districts Are Facing Financial Ruin. Some State Officials Prefer...
Texas doesn’t have a mile-high city, but Fort Davis comes close, at 4,892 feet. The tiny unincorporated town is nestled in the foothills of the Davis Mountains, where bears and mountain lions and elk...
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2023: The Best and Worst Legislators
Sound and fury signifying nothing: that’s the Texas Legislature, the overwhelming majority of the time. Lawmakers yell and scrap for 140 days every other year, nibble around the edges of issues that...
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What Should Texas Do With $1 Billion for State Parks?
For the hundred-year anniversary of the Texas state parks system, lawmakers have come up with a generous gift. In late May, Governor Greg Abbott signed legislation authorizing a billion-dollar fund to...
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This Democrat Is Back in the Texas Lege After 40 Years. He Can’t Believe How...
In Idiocracy, the 2006 Mike Judge classic, the most average man in the U.S. military, Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson), is selected for a government hibernation experiment, but the overseers forget about the...
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Could Texas Really Eliminate Property Taxes?
Imagine a Texas without property taxes. Every October, you, a Texas homeowner, await your annual property tax bill, not with trepidation, but with joy. Behold, there before you is what you must render...
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Fahrenheit 105: Why I No Longer Love the Texas Heat
Name any given year in the last four-plus decades and I can probably tell you a story or a stat about the Texas heat. How about 1980, the year I was born? A persistent heat wave engulfed South Texas...
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Ain’t From Around Here: Is Texas A&M a “Military School in the Lone Star...
It’s not easy being an Aggie these days. The football program is an SEC bottom-feeder. The university’s reputation has been tarnished by back-to-back scandals over academic freedom and political...
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Who’s Killing Jacob’s Well?
It was a scorching day in July 2022 when I last peered into Jacob’s Well. In a sense, I had come to pay my respects. The artesian spring had stopped flowing again—the consequence of drought and...
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