Culture
Pepe the Frog Mutates from a Far Right Meme Into a Lovable, Far Gone Figure in ‘Feels Good Man’
Filmmaker Giorgio Angelini, who hails from Houston, and debut director Arthur Jones teamed up for a new documentary on the internet that clarifies the current moment.
Matt Furie, a San Francisco-based cartoonist of reluctant notoriety, is a frog lover. He’s always drawn frogs: goofy frogs, peaceful frogs, frogs on bike ride...Read More
Beyoncé Isn’t Possible Without Houston. Houston Isn’t Possible Without the Black Diaspora.
Texas’ artistic innovation is nothing new and continues to be center stage through artists like Beyoncé during yet another period of Black rediscovery.
Beyoncé’s second visual album, Lemonade, is characterized by foreboding visions of weeping willows, dark bayous, and images of Black women decorated in anteb...Read More
Showtime’s ‘Outcry’ is a Nuanced Exploration of a Wrongful Conviction, but Neglects a Longer History of Moral Panic
After Greg Kelley was falsely accused of sexually assaulting a child in Leander, he endured a questionable trial and a drawn out appeals process. A new documentary series captures the case, but not the whole story.
It started with a case in a California preschool. Then another just up Interstate-5. Before long, there were two similar cases in Texas. Bizarre tales of the oc...Read More
How Texas Women Delivered the Nineteenth Amendment
An upcoming documentary and book mark the suffrage centennial, focused on Texas contributions.
In the decade leading up to 1920, suffragists in Texas won a series of dramatic victories for women’s voting rights. They organized to impeach a governor, con...Read More
A New Short-Story Collection Imagines a Texas Town’s Secession
With shades of George Saunders, Why Visit America manages to be both fun and socially perceptive.
“There wasn’t anything special about us,” says the collective narrator of the title story in Matthew Baker’s Why Visit America. “We were just an avera...Read More
Improbable, Prophetic Houston
Two new books about the Bayou City—one about its people, one about its places—explore how the fourth largest city in the U.S. became itself.
Our cities sometimes appear inevitable. Once something is built, it’s difficult to remember what the landscape was like before—before a highway cut through ...Read More
Loon Star: Greg Abbott’s Rickety Ship
Hoist the tops! Lower the tops!
To see more political cartoons from Ben Sargent, visit our Loon Star State section, or find Observer political reporting here. Read more from the Observer:...Read More
Announcing the 2020 Insider Prize Winners
The winners were selected by guest judge Justin Torres.
This post is co-published with American Short Fiction. For the last three years, the Austin-based magazine American Short Fiction has sponsored a contest for in...Read More
‘A Saint From Texas’ Gets the Lone Star State Right
Edmund White chronicles the coming-of-age stories of two Texas sisters in a vivid new novel.
When we first meet Yvonne and Yvette, the twin sisters at the heart of Edmund White’s A Saint From Texas, they seem straight out of The Last Picture Show. The...Read More