As ever, we had quite a bit to cover in Texas this yr. The invasion of Ukraine, and its odd tendrils in our state; the massacre at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, and the response from Texas leaders. The changing politics of South Texas, a primary election that spelled the tip of 1 dynasty, and a general election that predictably (no, seriously, really predictably) prolonged one other. Not to say Robert Earl Keen’s final tour, the fiftieth anniversary of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, and the upcoming two-hundredth anniversary of the Texas Rangers. We could go on and on.
But, in fact, we couldn’t cover the whole lot, and lots of other publications did wonderful work about Texas and Texans. Fifteen Texas Monthly staffers selected a story from one other outlet that they want we had done.
I’ll admit, to my shame, that before reading Wil S. Hylton’s incredible profile of Baltimore Ravens kicker Justin Tucker for the Recent York Times Magazine, I hadn’t an inkling that Tucker was Texan. However the graduate of (where else?) Westlake High School in Austin (the alma mater of fellow Super Bowl champs Drew Brees and Nick Foles) is, hands feet down, the best kicker of a football of all time. Kickers practice a woefully underappreciated craft, one in all the few in sports that, I learned on this story, hasn’t been completely “moneyballed”—predicting and understanding the trajectory of a kicked football still defies analytics. It’s a practice mastered through elbow knee grease: repetition, feel, and honed instincts. — Josh Alvarez
I believe concerning the last scene of Roberto José Andrade Franco’s story out of Uvalde almost on daily basis. Written for ESPN, it centers on the lifetime of Tess Maria Mata, one in all the ten-year-old victims of the Robb Elementary School massacre. Tess loved softball, and spent her days perfecting her pitching within the backyard, inspired by her favorite players—her older sister and Houston Astro José Altuve—to attempt to make the Little League all-star team. Franco recounts her story with tenderness and finesse, but what he does with this piece goes way beyond a heartbreaking remembrance. Franco, who grew up in El Paso—one more Texas city still grappling with a horrific mass shooting—deftly traces the role of the Colt revolver in securing the Nueces Strip for Texas, looks back on the history of segregation in Uvalde, and examines the particular crossroads for families like Tess’s amid such violence. But there’s something about telling this story through the prism of sports that makes for an excellent deeper cut. What’s more life-affirming than kids putting all of it on the market on the sphere, their nervous families rooting for them from the bleachers? When Franco takes us to the Little League ceremony that’s missing six of its players—all ten years old—it’s ceaselessly haunting, accurately. — Kathy Blackwell
“The Bodies within the Cave,” Rachel Monroe, The Recent Yorker
Untold archaeological treasures—cave paintings, pottery shards, human bones—lie hidden across Texas. A lot of these things in West and southwest Texas are locked behind gates and fences on ranches, nonetheless, because greater than 95 percent of the state’s land is private. In some cases, pay-to-dig profiteers trade in these artifacts; in others, vulnerable sites languish or are looted. That is all perfectly legal, but often deeply unethical. Rachel Monroe, the Recent Yorker’s Marfa-based Texas contributor, delves deep into these questions in her story on the Spirit Eye cave in Presidio County. She speaks with the Texas archaeologists who’ve conducted research there, in addition to with Xoxi Nayapiltzin, who grew up nearby. DNA testing linked his ancestry to that of ancient stays present in the cave. Nayapiltzin joins a growing variety of Indigenous Texans who’re petitioning for the best to rebury sacred stays. “It doesn’t surprise me that my ancestors are here,” he told Monroe. — Rose Cahalan
“Anatomy of a Murder Confession,” Maurice Chammah, The Marshall Project
Need to hear for yourself how false confessions occur? There have been loads of stories on how and why people confess to something they didn’t do. What Maurice Chammah does on this story is offer you a first-hand listen. The titular murder confession was given by Larry Driskill in Parker County in 2015 to James Holland, a Texas Ranger famed for his ability to get killers to speak (the Los Angeles Times once called him a “serial killer whisperer”). A girl had been murdered in 2005, and Holland was on the case. Though Driskill swore he couldn’t remember anything about that night ten years before, Holland used his good-old-boy charm, a well-placed lie or two (which is completely legal), and the judicious use of the word “hypothetically.” Initially of their talks, you’ll be able to hear Driskill ask if he’s in trouble, and Holland assures him, “No, we expect you would possibly give you the option to assist us.” At first, Driskill denies the whole lot, eventually saying, “I’m sorry if I took anyone’s life but I don’t think I did”—but finally offers, “I suppose I choked her down.” You may hear the uncertainty in his voice, identical to you’ll be able to hear the resolve in Holland’s. Chammah knows how you can listen (he’s a violinist) and he knows how you can write, and “Anatomy of a Murder Confession” is an enchanting addition to the criminal justice reporting canon.
Driskill was paroled in September after serving seven years behind bars; his lawyers with the Innocence Project of Texas are searching for a full exoneration. And he shall be a personality in a six-part podcast hosted by Chammah this March that focuses on Holland’s investigation. It’s called “Just Say You’re Sorry.” — Michael Hall
“Pay to Play,” Zach Despart, Houston Chronicle
This blockbuster investigation by Houston Chronicle reporter Zach Despart revealed that Harris County commissioners relied on county vendors for 79 percent of their campaign contributions from 2020 through 2021. Despart, who now writes for the Texas Tribune, also found that county commissioners awarded 93 percent of all appraisal, architecture, engineering, and surveying work to firms that gave to their campaigns, suggesting a brazen and entrenched pay-to-play system. Of the five commissioners, only Lina Hidalgo refuses to take contributions from county vendors. The opposite 4—two Democrats and two Republicans—denied that they were steering contracts to campaign donors. “I do not know what pay to play means,” Adrian Garcia, one commissioner, told Despart relatively unconvincingly. — Michael Hardy
“The Post-Roe Abortion Underground,” Stephania Taladrid, The Recent Yorker
For years, as abortion remained illegal in much of Mexico, a fearless network of volunteers and mutual aid communities distributed abortion pills to those in need across the country. This yr, the Recent Yorker’s Stephania Taladrid embedded with a bunch of the activists who’ve expanded their “abortion underground” north in Texas. It’s a story of resistance, but additionally a tale of two countries: in Mexico, abortion has been decriminalized, and the procedure has turn into legal in multiple states, including Coahuila, right across the border from West Texas. In the USA, in fact, we’re getting into the other way. Taladrid’s article focuses on individual women greater than it does on policy, and the result’s powerful. — Jack Herrera
Setting the Table podcast, Deb Freeman, Whetstone Radio Collective
A lot of our most beloved American foods—barbecue, mac and cheese, and ice cream, to call a number of—have their roots in African American cuisine and culture. This podcast, produced by Whetstone magazine and hosted by author Deb Freeman, explains how African Americans have contributed to or laid the groundwork for distilling, brewing, farming, baking, and barbecue within the U.S. A variety of these stories begin within the South, and guests resembling barbecue expert Adrian Miller and Fort Price–based cookbook creator Scotty Scott had me reflecting on the origins of dishes we enjoy in Texas. I learned something recent in every episode, and was motivated to read and research further, which is what all effective media should encourage in its listeners, viewers, and readers. — Kimya Kavehkar
How does a famous child actress simply disappear? I had never heard of Texan Lora Lee Michel, and never seen any of her movies, however the headline of this story drew me in. I started off skimming and ended up devouring all 10,454 words of Stacy Perman’s investigation into Lora Lee’s life—her troubled early childhood in Schulenberg, her rise to stardom in Hollywood, and the court order that sent her back to Texas at age 9, kicking off a lifetime of instability, crime, and loneliness. At one memorable point within the narrative, Perman recounts how a reporter asked a jailed, 22-year-old Lora Lee what happened to her profession. Her response: “I grew up.” Perman’s exhaustive reporting exposes all of the drama and heartbreak behind those three words. It makes me wonder what number of other tales of forgotten Texans are on the market waiting to be unearthed. — Lea Konczal
“Megan Thee Stallion Will Not Back Down,” Mankaprr Conteh, Rolling Stone
Megan Thee Stallion’s rise to fame was at all times tinged with a bit of little bit of sadness. In 2019, just as her name was becoming a household staple, she lost her mother, a rapper who went by Holly-Wood, and her great-grandmother inside weeks of one another. After which in 2020, after leaving a celebration with people she then considered friends, she was shot in her feet, requiring surgery and rehabilitation to walk again. The rapper Tory Lanez was found guilty of shooting Megan in late December, but within the time for the reason that incident, you’ll think it was Megan under examination. Quite than imagine her account that a person she once trusted selected to shoot her (a far too common occurrence), too many individuals have spun conspiracy theories that accuse Megan of lying to finish the profession of a less popular musician.
In her June 2022 Rolling Stone cover story, Megan gets vulnerable with Mankaprr Conteh, sharing details of the shooting (including why she’d initially kept details about it private). “In some sort of way I became the villain,” Megan says to Conteh. “And I don’t know if people don’t take it seriously because I seem strong. I’m wondering if it’s due to the way in which I look. Is it because I’m not light enough? Is it that I’m not white enough? Am I not the form? The peak? Because I’m not petite? Do I not appear to be I’m price being treated like a lady?” Watching the general public narrative flip around Megan has been an unlucky lesson in misogynoir, the brand of misogyny that casts Black women as unworthy of care and protection. But Conteh’s profile manages to balance that darkness with the lightness that Megan is decided to search out and maintain as her star continues to rise. — Doyin Oyeniyi
In August, Texas’s trigger law—which outlawed abortion within the state, after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June—went into effect. Immediately, questions arose, prompted by real-life cases, about the ban’s exemption for pregnancies that may kill or severely injure a pregnant patient. In reporting on one 27-year-old Texan’s journey to acquire an abortion out of state, the Texas Tribune underlined the fuzziness of the law’s exemption, while making the results of the ban immediate and real.
Lauren Hall was in her second trimester when Roe was overturned. Nevertheless it wasn’t until eighteen weeks into her pregnancy that her fetus was diagnosed with anencephaly, a lethal condition that always ends in miscarriage or stillbirth. Hall was faced with a heartbreaking decision: carry a baby that may die—either within the womb or soon after birth—or travel out of state for an abortion. In telling the story of Hall’s journey to Washington state, Tribune reporter Eleanor Klibanoff managed to show each a micro and macro lens on the myriad considerations that doctors and patients must face as they navigate pregnancy complications under the brand new law. — Taylor Prewitt
I started tracking the opening and success of La Tejana, a breakfast taco spot in Washington, D.C., via social media when my friend and Taco Chronicles producer-director Hallie Davison, a Dallas native and current D.C. resident, texted me in late August. “I can confirm that La Tejana in DC is LEGIT!” she wrote, also sending a blurry photo of two unspooled breakfast tacos on crinkled aluminum foil. I used to be jealous. I desired to catch a red-eye flight to our nation’s capital to face within the ever-growing lines that formed outside La Tejana.
Alas, visits to the taqueria have eluded me. So it was with glee and jealousy that two months later I read “A taco-by-taco take a look at the busiest shift of the week at La Tejana” within the Washington Post. The story tracks a morning shift of orders, with embedded photos, to inform the taqueria’s tale. It’s a format I’ve at all times desired to try—and this one covered my beat! Fortunately, Texas Monthly didn’t miss out on spotlighting the restaurant. La Tejana was one in all the restaurants featured in a Texas-food-in-D.C. roundup published in November. I still need—need!—to go to for myself, though. — José R. Ralat
“Stone Skipping Is a Lost Art. Kurt Steiner Wants the World to Find It,” Sean Williams, Outside
Relating to generating great stories, our state has few competitors. But once in a while there’s an incredible yarn that inconveniently happened in one in all those other 49 states, and it becomes a little bit of a parlor game for Texas Monthly to try to search out the Texas angle that may make the story amazing for us. My envy of Sean Williams’ story on a stone-skipping savant for Outside is so immense, I’ve endeavored to search out a Texas angle to justify its inclusion here on a listing of stories we wished we had published. Fortunately, there may be one: the old Guinness World Record for stone skipping—38 hops—was set within the Blanco River in 1992. Williams tells the story of Kurt Steiner, a reclusive Pennsylvanian who broke that record—first in 2002, and nonetheless and again, in pursuit of perfection. (His current high is 88 hops). It’s an incredible story concerning the meditative quality of stone skipping and the extraordinary competitions that puncture that Zen state, in addition to a wonderful tale concerning the loneliness of the pursuit of singular achievement. — Ben Rowen
After I moved back to Texas just over a yr ago, I used to be coming home after a season of private traumas. Here was a spot of recovery, and I used to be quickly embraced by the healing powers of family and space, sunshine and luxury food. For creator and illustrator Fowzia Karimi, becoming a Texan was spurred by her partner’s job on the University of North Texas; she made the move from California amid the lack of her mother, an upending of life, and located comfort here. In her moving May essay in Texas Highways, Karimi explores not only the solace of her recent home state, but additionally the nonlinear means of grieving—each the people we lose and the people we were.
“That yr,” Karimi writes, “I met my recent home of Texas repeatedly, bumping into it softly, waking to it gently. I used to be raw and bruised, and every gentle tug let me know I used to be surrounded by kindness.” I’ve come back to her words multiple times over the past several months. They remind me that death holds constant balance with life and grief brings that reality to the fore. But life peeks through—within the kindness of neighbors, within the landscape of home. — Sandi Villarreal
“A Championship Season in Mariachi Country,” Cecilia Ballí, The Recent York Times Magazine
I’m a longtime fan of my former colleague Cecilia Ballí, but I’m also a friend, and knowing that she grew up within the Valley and played the clarinet as a child, I screamed once I saw “A Championship Season in Mariachi Country.” Not only did she skillfully interpret what was happening within the nail-biting music scenes, when the mariachi players are preparing to compete in the biggest contest of its kind, she portrayed all of it within the context of contemporary Valley challenges resembling constant Border Patrol searches and high rates of Covid. Bonus: breathtaking photographs by Benjamin Lowy, especially the shot of the members of Mariachi Cascabel freaking out over their win. — Katy Vine
“ ‘We Must Take Away Children,’ ” Caitlyn Dickerson, The Atlantic
“We Must Take Away Children” is a difficult read. At almost 30,000 words, Caitlyn’s Dickerson’s investigation into the Trump administration’s family-separation policy is like an archaeological dig into state-sanctioned cruelty, each layer revealing fresh horrors about how government bureaucrats and political appointees orchestrated the forcible taking of hundreds of migrant children from their parents. Perhaps an important revelation is that this moral failing, which required the cooperation of scores of officials across sprawling bureaucracies, was not an unlucky byproduct of prosecuting migrants for illegal entry. Quite, as Dickerson writes, “Separating children was not only a side effect, however the intent. As a substitute of working to reunify families after parents were prosecuted, officials worked to maintain them apart for longer”—purportedly to discourage other families from searching for to enter the U.S. illegally.
Few reporters are enabled to dig so deeply for a single story. Dickerson’s impressively thorough reportage took eighteen months and drew upon 150 interviews and hundreds of documents, lots of which were obtained through a multi-year lawsuit. Without such a commitment from The Atlantic, the reality can have been hidden for years, perhaps ceaselessly. The refusal to maneuver on from a subject that many would sooner forget has yielded a very important contribution to journalism—and to history. — Forrest Wilder