Editor’s Letter: Introducing Our September/October 2026 Issue

Texas Observer reader,

As I write this, Texas families are getting ready to send kids back to school in districts where campuses have been vanishing. As Josephine Lee recently reported, in the first half of this year alone, boards of trustees voted to shutter more than 50 schools around the state. The reasons for this are numerous (and to learn more, just turn to the next page to read Justin Miller’s column on the subject), but what’s impossible to miss is the growing presence of shamelessly excessive wealth alongside this austerity. 

Elon Musk (albeit briefly) becomes a trillionaire while your kid’s school closes. That’s a fair summation of Texas today. 

It’s not that everything is bad. There’s lots of economic opportunity in our state; that’s why people keep moving here. And the barbecue… blah blah blah, I’ll leave that part to Texas Monthly.

It’s that the inequality is sharpening. We are destabilizing the institutions that bring at least the poor and the middle class under one roof, ratcheting up the pressure on everyone to find the best lifeboat they can afford and jump ship. Of course, there will never be enough boats for everyone—but, hey, that’s why we have our sprawling prison system, which we’re no longer even trying to shrink or reform. That’s why we have our police forces, legislatively defund-proofed, expanding into every school, and our newly fused state-immigration police, which can use all the tools of the criminal code to terrorize our unauthorized working class. It’s not, after all, that we aren’t willing to invest in a certain genre of “solution.” 

These trends are percolating beneath this year’s growing (projected) blue wave, but all of this is bigger and longer-standing than Trump, and flipping one U.S. Senate seat would do very little to address any of it. At best, this year’s election can be the first step of a long hard march. 

Now, I swear I’m not directing this depressing screed at you for no reason. What I want to say, Observer reader, is that it’s within this rather overwhelming context that we’re working hard to offer you a properly calibrated journalistic product. Some hyper-specific investigative journalism that points to small-bore harm reduction; a lookback into history that reminds us that not only change but massive change is possible; even poetry to, perhaps, gift that quick upswell of feeling when your attention alights on something timeless.

Ah well, you get the idea; it’s a magazine. It won’t reopen the doors of your neighborhood school (unless you get very creative and use quite a few issues), but I hope some part of it does fuel you for the fights ahead.

Solidarity,

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