Tag Archives: Austin
‘Life Was Her Art’: Nadine Eckhardt Remembered as an Influential Cultural Conduit in Texas and Washington
A lifelong progressive activist, Eckhardt always managed to straddle both the establishment and counterculture.
Nadine Brammer Eckhardt, first wife and muse of novelist Billy Lee Brammer (The Gay Place) and second wife of Texas Democratic Congressman Robert C. Eckhardt, d...Read More
Eye on Texas: Ghosts of the City
Sandy Carson Since 2011, I’ve been working on a project called “Ghosts of the City.” The idea is to document Austin landmarks that have recently undergone...Read More
New Contract Could Give Austin One of the Most Transparent Police Departments in the Country
Activists are claiming victory after a drawn-out fight over police accountability, and encouraging other cities to follow suit.
After 18 months of tense negotiations over a police union contract, the Austin City Council and the city’s police union have agreed to reforms that anti-polic...Read More
A New Pray-the-Gay-Away Drama Suggests Conversion is Possible (Just Not the Kind You Think)
Poignant awards-season fare, Boy Erased makes the case against the Christian “cure” for homosexuality.
What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object? That, more or less, is the question asked by the new Joel Edgerton-directed film Boy Erased, w...Read More
Meet Mikael Love, the OB-GYN Who Doesn’t Prescribe Birth Control
Love, who has delivered babies in the capital city for more than two decades, has a long track record of anti-abortion politics.
This summer, during a federal trial over Texas’ fetal burial law, an attorney for the Center for Reproductive Rights set out to demonstrate the anti-abortion ...Read More
Can John Bucy Break the GOP Hold on Williamson County?
The race for Texas House District 136 is light on fireworks. The Republican incumbent, Tony Dale, is a relative moderate disliked by the state’s far-right cru...Read More
Dolores Huerta is Still Knocking on Doors and Registering Voters at 88
The iconic labor activist talks about the Latino vote, Howard Zinn and the ‘year of the woman.’
At 88, Dolores Huerta is still making you look bad. In 1962, Huerta and César Chávez co-founded the organization that would become the United Farm Workers, th...Read More
Can Beto O’Rourke Harness the Elusive Power of the College Student Vote?
Many have tried; few have succeeded. But the latest political phenom thinks he’ll be more effective at courting young voters.
With the Retama Auditorium filled to capacity, hundreds of students packed outside the entrance, hoping to get a glimpse of Beto O’Rourke as he swung through...Read More
Leaving the Gay Place Lights a Candle for the Patron Saint of Austin’s Counterculture
Tracy Daugherty’s new biography of The Gay Place author Billy Lee Brammer is part poetic ode, part oral history — and always a wild ride.
The greatest novel ever written about Austin was penned by a man from Dallas, and it did not mention the capital city by name. Still, when Billy Lee Brammer’s...Read More