Even lifelong Texans may not have heard of my hometown of Lindale. With just under 5,000 people while I lived there, Lindale sits roughly 90 miles east of Dallas and bears many hallmarks of a small Texas town: more than three churches per square mile, roads dominated by trucks, and packed football stadiums on Friday […]

The post I Came from Rural Texas to Harvard’s MD-PhD program. Now, Trump Defunded that Program. appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Just across the Texas border, in cities like Reynosa and Nuevo Laredo, criminal networks are strengthening their hold on drug routes despite increased enforcement efforts by the United States and Mexico.  Rather than rely on individual smugglers crossing unmanned sections of the border, cartels specializing in fentanyl and other synthetic drugs use legal ports of […]

The post U.S.-Mexico Border Militarization Fails to Stop Modern Drug Smuggling Industry appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Manning the main switchboard for the Central Texas Veterans Health Care System requires skills akin to a symphony conductor. Beginning in 2006, Marlon Askew, who spent 15 years in the armed forces and saw combat in Desert Storm, worked as the system’s central teleoperator and then supervisor, connecting thousands of veterans who call each day […]

The post Veterans Who Work in Texas VA Health System: ‘The Dam’s Gonna Break’ appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Late Sunday afternoon, dozens of Texas House Democrats boarded a charter flight at the Austin airport and absconded to the Land of Lincoln in an attempt to halt, if not stop altogether, Republicans’ heavy-handed scheme to redraw the state’s congressional map to increase the GOP advantage by as many as five seats.  Backed by Illinois […]

The post Can Anything Halt the Gerrymandering Arms Race? appeared first on The Texas Observer.

“Everything collapses in the ripping sound of great manifestations,” wrote Suzanne Césaire in 1945. The line purportedly described an immense hurricane in the Caribbean Sea, but knowing Césaire—a formidable theorist, postcolonial and feminist activist, and surrealist from Martinique—“great manifestations” also referred to seismic shifts in history and decolonization. A critic who wrote with the revolutionary […]

The post Recovering Suzanne Césaire’s Legacy appeared first on The Texas Observer.

There are many words you could use to describe Nicole Tompkins, the disabled protagonist of “Shaky,” Audible’s recent 9-part comedy audio series: passionate, wild, talented, messy. But she’s also kind of an asshole.  That’s not a role that disabled people have often been able to play in fiction—neither pure nor villainous, just a regular messed-up […]

The post ‘Shaky’ Audio Series Is a Messy, Real Look at Disabled Life appeared first on The Texas Observer.

To see more political cartoons from Ben Sargent, visit our Loon Star State section or find Observer political reporting here.

The post Loon Star State: Render unto Trump… appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Nearly 1.5 million Texans now live in jurisdictions where sheriffs or police chiefs have agreed to train some of their officers to act as immigration agents in the streets of their communities. These agreements currently cover around 30 Texas law enforcement agencies including: the sheriff’s departments in the populous counties of Jefferson and Smith, home […]

The post ICE ‘Task Force’ Agreements Expand to Galveston, Beaumont appeared first on The Texas Observer.

The opening pages of José Skinner’s new novel The Search Committee seem to promise readers a merciless academic satire set in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley. The first character introduced is a cringey assistant professor, William Quigley, originally from Minnesota and presently decked out in what he calls “his best tierra caliente outfit”—linen pants, guayabera, Panama […]

The post ‘The Search Committee’ Is a Subtle Rebuke of the Border Literary Canon appeared first on The Texas Observer.

M ichael Van Deelen’s home office, on the second floor of his neat two-story house in a north Harris County suburb, sprawls across two studies, each equipped with desks and computers. One contains a library chock full of books, including Black’s Law Dictionary and hefty volumes of state and federal statutes. A sunken room, a […]

The post Rules of the Robe appeared first on The Texas Observer.

I’ve had it with hearing the same story over and over again—another 100-year-plus rainfall event, another tragic result from people occupying the floodplain without an adequate warning system. More pain. More loss. The bottom line is—we Texans keep doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. We are not going to change […]

The post Floodplains Belong to the Rivers appeared first on The Texas Observer.

One poem in Jorge Renaud’s new collection, The Restlessness of Bound Wrists, makes the reader question whether the book in their hands would be allowed into Texas prisons—or whether it would be culled by administrators, left “to burn with other / slashed seditionary / lies, all lies, unfit for our rehabilitation.” Lamentation for Literature (excerpt) […]

The post Penned Poetry: A Formerly Incarcerated Activist’s Turn to Verse appeared first on The Texas Observer.

In 2021, the Republican-dominated Texas Legislature redrew the state’s political maps that determine the lines of power in the Texas House, the Texas Senate, and the representatives in U.S. Congress. Thanks to a decade’s worth of population growth fueled by Latinos, Asian Americans, and African Americans, Texas gained two new congressional seats—bringing the state’s total […]

The post The Texas GOP’s ‘Unprecedented,’ Risky Gerrymandering Scheme appeared first on The Texas Observer.

To see more political cartoons from Ben Sargent, visit our Loon Star State section. Find Observer political reporting here.

The post Loon Star State: Among the Tragically Missing… appeared first on The Texas Observer.

We forget what we don’t want to remember. While I understand that impulse, there are dangers embedded in our forgetfulness. This is especially true for anyone living in Flash Flood Alley, or what we like to call the Hill Country (a concept that softens the nature of this flood-sculpted and -scoured terrain). So I have […]

The post The San Antonio Flood of 1921 Held Lessons We Refuse to Learn appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Carmel Swann moved to Texas in June 2021 looking for a fresh start and a chance to leave bad decisions behind. But, within weeks, she was in the Harris County Jail after an altercation with the man she’d moved in with. Then, she discovered she was pregnant from a prior relationship. She began working on […]

The post The Adoption Trap appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Last week, the Family Research Council’s longtime president Tony Perkins exulted over the win the Trump administration delivered to the Christian right: “Churches will now be unshackled,” he declared.   In a federal court filing, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) signaled it would reinterpret a longstanding ban on candidate endorsements by tax-exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofits. The so-called […]

The post  How Trump’s IRS May Unshackle Churches from Their Political Restraints appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Attorneys for Robert Roberson and for the State of Texas went toe-to-toe in a Palestine courtroom Wednesday, arguing over the fate of the man whose 2024 execution date was halted in a dramatic eleventh-hour intervention by state legislators—and whose appeals have raised the question of whether a crime occurred at all. After hearing arguments, Smith […]

The post Robert Roberson Faces New Execution Date in Controversial ‘Shaken Baby Syndrome’ Case appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Houstonian Mike Peppercorn bought property along Lake Livingston in 2008, choosing timberland where his family would have privacy and pasture where they could raise cattle for Future Farmers of America projects. He and his neighbors with acreage along Barrett’s Landing Road all figured that surely this lake—which serves as a reservoir for the City of […]

The post Proposed Transmission Line Threatens Texas’ Largest Reservoir  appeared first on The Texas Observer.

I’ll admit: Having grown addicted to the treats of literary nonfiction, I don’t make it through too many academic histories these days. If I’m going to, there’d better at least be a decent lede—and the Marxian opening to a new history of the eugenics movement in Texas fits the bill. “Monsters haunted the imaginations of […]

The post The History of Eugenics in Texas Isn’t What You Think appeared first on The Texas Observer.

I remember the river,  flowing so peacefully and slowly you could almost miss its motion I remember the river, mirroring the vastness of the starry sky stretched far beyond the nestled valley I remember the river,  with its deep, dreamy green reflecting neighboring, billowing trees  I remember the river, offering its soft morning mist to […]

The post Poem for the Guadalupe River from a previous Mystic camper appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Search and rescue teams were still combing the mangled banks of the Guadalupe River Tuesday at Patti and Kent Richardson’s mildewing home in Center Point. Vultures and helicopters circled overhead, looking for the same thing the Richardsons had so recently just narrowly avoided: death. As they were making their morning coffee early on July 5, […]

The post ‘I Think We’re Gonna Stay’: Texans Hang On in Tragedy-Stricken Hill Country appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Avantika Gori is an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Houston’s Rice University who is currently examining how to improve flood hazard detection and resilience in rural counties in Texas. Her three-year project began in 2025—so far it’s been funded with $1 million from the National Science Foundation. That’s only enough, she says, […]

The post In the Hill Country and Beyond, Rural Texas Counties Lack Resources for Flood Detection appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune. The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org. Camp Mystic, the private summer camp that now symbolizes the deadly Central Texas floods, sat on a tract of land known to be at high […]

The post ‘Disasters Are a Human Choice’: Texas Counties Have Little Power to Stop Building in Flood-Prone Areas appeared first on The Texas Observer.

On July 4, 2002, my childhood home just south of Kerr County flooded after a heavy rainstorm moved through the Texas Hill Country, hitting the headwaters that feed the Medina and Guadalupe rivers hard. That morning 23 years ago, I, age 8, woke up in a cabin at an overnight summer camp near Kerrville rattled […]

The post I Remember the 2002 Fourth of July Hill Country Floods. This Year, the Water Returned. appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared at Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here. Heavy rains over the weekend that pushed the Guadalupe River in Texas’ Hill Country to its second-highest height on record had by Tuesday resulted in more […]

The post Climate Change Helped Fuel Heavy Rains that Led to Devastating Hill Country Flood appeared first on The Texas Observer.

The first data center in the Stargate project—a $500 billion artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure initiative backed by OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank—is being built in a surprising location: Abilene.  The data center is set to cost $1.1 billion, and, to hear local officials say it, Abilene and its 130,000 residents have just struck gold. “It will […]

The post In Abilene, Stargate Project Puts AI Boom Ahead of Human Health appeared first on The Texas Observer.

When police removed four photographs by Sally Mann from the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in early January, Marshall K. Harris, a former NFL player-turned-local artist, wasn’t surprised. Local politics had been shifting to the right recently, especially since the election of conservative firebrand Tim O’Hare as Tarrant County judge in 2022. Furthermore, a […]

The post Can a Great Museum City Survive the Censorious Right? appeared first on The Texas Observer.

To see more political cartoons from Ben Sargent, visit our Loon Star State section. Find Observer political reporting here.

The post Loon Star State: What the Lege Won’t Be Doing… appeared first on The Texas Observer.

President Donald Trump’s commitment to “energy dominance” would seem to be good news for the Texas economy. But in the administration’s reversal of environmental policies—including via the chaos of DOGE trashing federal agencies—it is easy to overlook changes that are of particular importance for the state.  Federal resources for managing climate-augmented weather disasters are being […]

The post Trump’s DOGE Cuts Are Texas-Sized Disaster appeared first on The Texas Observer.