Culture
Burn It All Down
Eye on Texas: Fiesta Protesta
The Voices From Both Sides festival commemorates the 2002 closure of the border crossing between Lajitas and its Mexican sister city, Paso Lajitas.
Jennifer Boomer In May, I traveled to Lajitas to document the sixth annual Voices From Both Sides festival (also called Fiesta Protesta). The daylong event comm...Read More
Sarah Bird’s Lively New Novel Resurrects a Little-Known Civil War Hero
Bird produces a memorable re-creation of a freed slave who passed as a man to become a Buffalo Soldier — and of the thoroughly racist country in which she suffered and triumphed.
You want to use phrases like “ripping yarn” and “helluva story” for Sarah Bird’s new page-turner, but that makes Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen sou...Read More
‘Presidio’ is a Beautiful, Atmospheric Texas Novel that Doesn’t Cohere
Randy Kennedy’s debut is packed — sometimes bloated — with rich characters and lovely detail that conjures small-town Texas.
Epigraphs from luminaries like John Ashbery, Clarice Lispector and Robert Smithson hint at the high-art ambitions of Randy Kennedy’s debut novel, Presidio. Th...Read More
‘American Hate’ Author on Hate Crimes, Free Speech and Alex Jones
Author and civil rights attorney Arjun Sethi on listening to survivors, the difficulty of prosecuting hate crimes and what the media can do better.
A mosque in Victoria, Texas, burns. Two black girls escape a deadly attack that claims the lives of two in Portland, Oregon. A Jewish family is chased out of th...Read More
100 Ways to Draw a Line
The edge becomes the center at the Transborder Biennial 2018 in El Paso and Ciudad Juárez.
100 Ways to Draw a Line The edge becomes the center at the Transborder Biennial 2018 in El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. Nearly 80,000 people cross the border in the...Read More
A New Documentary on Texas Labor History Offers a Much-Needed Infusion of Hope
“A Strike and an Uprising” chronicles two big wins for labor activists facing long odds.
There’s a scene in A Strike and an Uprising (in Texas), a new documentary on labor history, in which three cafeteria workers sit in an empty classroom at Step...Read More
‘I Can’t Date Jesus’ Chronicles Growing up Black, Queer and Catholic in Houston
Michael Arceneaux’s first book is a logical extension of the polemic, confessional style he’s perfected online.
The book begins, “Before that day, I hadn’t been to church in five Beyoncé albums.” Some people measure time in years; others, like Houston-born, Harlem-...Read More
I Watched Dinesh D’Souza’s New Movie with the Travis County GOP
D’Souza is lying to his audiences on a vast scale, making them more immune to a shared reality.
Dinesh D’Souza’s first words in his new movie, Death of a Nation: Can We Save America A Second Time?, have the unmistakable ring of accidental truth. “Whe...Read More
Tinkering with the Human Heart in ‘Ticker’
Set in Houston, Mimi Swartz’s new book delivers an engrossing human drama populated with off-kilter geniuses.
Early in Mimi Swartz’s fascinating Ticker: The Quest to Create an Artificial Heart, a surgeon with no good options left cuts out a sheep’s heart and...Read More