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My History of Violence - After being assaulted, longtime Observer photographer Alan Pogue reconsiders the role of violence in his own past.
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Powerful Medicine - Austin musician and writer Jesse Sublett recounts the recent health-care troubles of local rock legend Jon Dee Graham as an example of the fate of the self-employed and under-insured.
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A Presidential Audience - The prospect of a giant white concrete bust of Barack Obama leads contributing writer Emily DePrang into the rewarding world of Houston sculptor David Adickes.
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The Writers' Super Bowl - The Writers' Super Bowl: A Farce in Four Quarters
What if they threw a Super Bowl for writers, and only the commentators showed up? -
Junkyard Jim - Dave Richards remembers his friend and colleague Jim Mattox as restless, combative and irrepressible, and as the best Texas attorney general in recent memory.
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Are You My Granddaughter? - Yvonne Georgina Puig writes an evocative essay on the rich life of her grandmother, and the pain and loss of Alzheimer’s disease.
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For Those About to Rock - Jesse Sublett, musician and author, considers an age-old question: Can one ever be too young to rock? He finds that at Austin’s Natural Ear Music Camp for ages 6 to 18, the kids are alright.
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Relearning Black History - Author and journalist Michael Hurd describes the impetus and the promise of his fledgling educational initiative, the Texas Black History Preservation Project, a multi-volume repository of African-American experiences in Texas being undertaken by scholars and historians statewide.
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The Shelf Life of the Presidential Mind - Char Miller writes on presidential reading habits and offers his own reading list for the candidates based on the challenges facing the American West.
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Fever Dreams - Birder and writer Jake Miller recalls his strange adventures at Sabal Palm Audubon Sanctuary and the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge near Brownsville. Now, the refuge is slated for border wall construction, turning Miller’s fairy-tale remembrance into a potential ecological nightmare.
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- Into the Bog
- My Ancestors' Violence
- And the Beats Go On
- The History of Texas Music by Gary Hartman is an anthropological study of Texas as examined through its diverse offering of folk music, offering a historical study of social, ethnic and geographical influence and how they have laid the groundwork for a thriving indie music scene.
- Kuo Vadis
- Heartbreak Hotel
- In American Furies: Crime, Punishment, and Vengeance in the Age of Mass Imprisonment, Sasha Abramsky dissects the folly of a prison system that incarcerates so many and rehabilitates so few.
- True Grit
- Truth of the Matter
- The Third-Party Dynamic
- Review
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The Price of Privatization
Gather ‘round, and a true tale I’ll tell about how privatization does not go so well.
In the past decade or so, public officials have rushed to privatize government functions. Corporations, they cried, can do any public job better and cheaper. So on that theoretical assumption, everything from water ...
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Copyright © 2000-2009 The Texas Observer.
- Investigative reporting is supported in part by a grant from the Open Society Institute.
- Books & the Culture is funded in part by the City of Austin through the Cultural Arts Division and by a grant from the Texas Commission of the Arts.
