Karen Olsson

GILMER– Rex Shaw, the county clerk for Upshur County, does not harbor any great enthusiasm for vote tabulation, but when the losing candidate in the local state representative’s race asked for a manual recount, it fell to Shaw to take … Read More

Something there is that doesn’t love a teenage girl, said Mary Karr in an interview last month. I confess I am full of that something, and have been ever since I was a teenage girl—when I disliked other teenage girls … Read More

Columbia University Press The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America The Human Stain Lately I’ve been thinking about Monica Lewinsky, off and on. This even though, back when she was all over the news, I tried hard not … Read More

There are some things you never think you’d end up missing until you do, and for me deadline day at The Texas Observer is one of them. Since I left the Observer last year, I’ve missed it. Every other Wednesday, … Read More

THE MAN WHO TRIED TO SAVE THE WORLD:The Dangerous Life and Mysterious In March of 1995, after several weeks of traveling in Russia, a fifty-year-old man named Fred Cuny returned to his small home in the Dallas suburbs. There he … Read More

They keep getting shorter. Prescott Bush, the investment banker and senator from Connecticut, was 6’4″ and aristocratic looking. His son, President George H.W. Bush, grew to a handsome 6’2″. The man they once called Junior, who currently serves as governor … Read More

Al Dewlen’s 1981 novel The Session, about an imaginary session of the Texas Legislature, is the sort of book you wouldn’t recommend to anyone but might end up reading, the way you might end up eating stale candy, if you … Read More

Two incarnations of George W. Bush made appearances during the last week of March. First, Houston Press reporter Tim Fleck revisited the Yalie’s mysterious brief engagement to a Rice student back in 1967, and invoked the received, if somewhat blurry, … Read More