Books
An Incendiary New Book Reveals How Politics in El Paso Are Rigged
Who Rules El Paso? shows how a coterie of rich, primarily white Republicans control local government.
Written by El Paso social justice activists including an attorney, two emeritus professors, and a former county employee, Who Rules El Paso? is the most oblique...Read More
How George Foreman Went From Champion Boxer to Evangelical Grillmaster
No Way but to Fight follows the boxer from a rough childhood in Houston to international sports stardom, peddling grills, and preaching.
In the moments after he lost to Jimmy Young in 1977, George Foreman vomited. His sweating body shook uncontrollably. In the dressing room, Foreman climbed a tab...Read More
17 Great Books on the Border to Read Instead of ‘American Dirt’
There’s no shortage of talented Latinx writers with all kinds of stories to tell. Let’s make space for them.
If you’ve been online in the past few months, you’ve probably seen ads for American Dirt, Jeanine Cummins’ heavily promoted new novel about Mexican-Americ...Read More
The Internet Broke Democracy. To Fix It, Design for Human Rights.
Author Samuel Woolley argues that a slew of new technologies will further degrade political life unless we rein them in.
In 2013, when Samuel Woolley began studying online misinformation as a graduate student at the University of Washington, hardly anyone was worried about the sub...Read More
The 30 Best Texas Books of The Decade, from Amarillo to Utopia
As you scramble for a holiday gift or ponder what you’d like to peruse by the fire, we’ve got 10 years of Texas books to suggest.
The twists and turns of these 30 Texas novels, nonfiction narratives, and other works published between January 2010 and December 2019 reveal undercurrents that...Read More
A World Without Immigrant Prisons
Law professor and author César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández wants you to believe it’s possible.
“I imagine a future that looks more like United States history than United States present. I imagine a future in which immigration prisons do not exist.” Th...Read More
Two New Books Explore the Limits of the #MeToo Movement in Texas and Beyond
Two years after women started speaking out and revealing powerful predators, are too many Texas secrets still locked away in a “whisper network”?
In 2017, women nationwide began sharing painful and personal stories of harassment and abuse in what became known as the #MeToo movement—starting a national c...Read More
I’ve Lived in East Austin for 60 Years, and I Don’t Recognize it Anymore
As gentrification reshapes my neighborhood, I fear we’re losing something of real value to our city.
As the cost of living in Texas’ cities continues to climb, gentrification is reshaping neighborhoods across the state. These changes might be starkest in East...Read More
American Cities Weren’t Revitalized by the White ‘Creative Class.’ Immigrants Made Them Great.
Barrio America weaves together several strands of urban studies to tell a story that transcends what might seem like irrevocable barriers of race and class.
In the 1960s, the Chicago neighborhood of South Lawndale—also known as Little Village—was one of the country’s most extreme examples of white flight. Pro-...Read More