It’s late June, more than two hours into the 2,518th episode of his mega-popular podcast, and Joe Rogan is critiquing part of James Talarico’s anatomy. With his guest, the conservative-leaning comedian Tim Dillon, Rogan was riffing on possible 2028 presidential contenders. Dillon offered up Jon Ossoff, the well-known senior U.S. Senator from Georgia, prompting a […]

The post Does Joe Rogan Care Who Wins the Texas Senate Race? appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Seventy years ago, Black students in Mansfield went to federal court for the right to attend their own public schools. On August 30, 1956, their effort to enroll at Mansfield High School was met by an angry white mob and three effigies hanging at the school’s doors, even after a federal appeals court ordered Mansfield […]

The post 70 Years After Mansfield’s Desegregation Crisis, a New Debate Over Representation appeared first on The Texas Observer.

On a sizzling Friday night in late May, Houstonians from all over the city flock to the Ensemble Theatre’s lobby. Under fluorescent lights, they greet one another before the show starts. The sound of various generations fills the lobby—a couple with season tickets, a group of millennials enjoying a girls’ night out, lovebirds on a […]

The post Houston’s Historic Black Theater at 50 appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Thanks to Bo French’s racist social media post targeting the ethnicity of students celebrating the University of Texas at Austin’s football win, Texas again is making national and local headlines for anti-South Asian racism. But the state also holds the potential to lead the fight against anti-Asian racism and become a model for the nation. […]

The post How Texas Can Lead in Fighting Anti-Asian Racism appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Should Texas public school students learn about the Bible? Yes, they should—but not in the way Texas education officials are going about it. In June, Texas became the first state to require all public school students to read religious texts, as part of a newly approved list of nearly 200 readings—from “Hickory Dickory Dock” to […]

The post The State’s Bible-Only Reading List Is a Disservice to Texas Kids appeared first on The Texas Observer.

In the 2013 science fiction film Elysium, directed by Neill Blomkamp, the affluent orbit above the Earth’s atmosphere, enjoying a habitat free of hunger, thirst, and suffering. They have medical devices that can cure diseases with a quick scan. Below them, the planet has been depleted into an overcrowded and polluted wasteland where the poor […]

The post Can We Survive Naomi Klein’s Depiction of ‘End Times Fascism’? appeared first on The Texas Observer.

In the era of President Donald Trump, any admission of weakness or wrongdoing has become increasingly rare, but tension over the future of the party could hardly be denied at last week’s midterm Republican convention in Dallas. While the floor and lower levels of the arena were well attended, the upper levels of the arena […]

The post  Free Tickets, Familiar Jokes, and an Unsettled Party Grasping for Unity—and a Fight appeared first on The Texas Observer.

The often overlooked race for the Texas Railroad Commissioner received national attention this past weekend due to a viral tweet from Bo French, the former Tarrant County GOP Chairman who eked out a 1-point primary runoff victory to become the Republican nominee for the statewide position.  On Sunday, French posted a photo of a group […]

The post Not All Texas Republicans Are Condemning Bo French appeared first on The Texas Observer.

The progun shibboleth that “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” has become so commonplace that it’s easy to forget its grisly origin.  In 2012, after a 20-year-old with severe mental illness who was raised by a gun-loving mother killed 20 first graders at […]

The post Why Texans Live and Die by the Gun appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Now is a perfect day, good and fresh, clear and bright,a bridled Autumn sun gently lighting ripe Texas fields, the full-blown trumpet vine finally gets it just right.A life is refined, honed to wisdom; acceptance and joy caught mid-sentence at the kitchen table.His laughter ends in a gasp. The pale blue eyes see the pasture […]

The post Beware the Perfect Day appeared first on The Texas Observer.

On a Thursday in late August, Republican Speaker of the U.S. House Mike Johnson was on a campaign swing through a handful of key congressional districts in South Texas that will be critical to whether he keeps his job next year. One of those stops was an early-afternoon rally for Webb County Judge Tano Tijerina […]

The post In Laredo, a County Judge and MAGA Convert Seeks to Topple Henry Cuellar appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Water is one of many issues at the forefront of Texas politics this election cycle, no place more so than in Corpus Christi.  Texas’ sparkling city by the sea has received national attention in recent months over ever-worsening conditions for residents deluged by years of drought restrictions. Predictions of an impending water emergency have been […]

The post One of the Top Texas House Races Could Come Down to a Single Issue: Water appeared first on The Texas Observer.

This spring, a Permian Basin pastor got an unpleasant surprise: a geyser of more than 1.5 million gallons of toxic brine gushing up through the parking lot of the First Baptist Church in Grandfalls. It was a “zombie well”—what happens when the plug on one of the state’s hundreds of thousands of old wells fails, […]

The post 1.2 Million Oil Wells Are Buried Underneath Texas. Do You Live on Top of a Dangerous One? appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Editor’s Note: This story is the second part of a two-part series supported by the Law & Justice Journalism Project. See part one in the January/February issue. D’Mitri Davis, 36, met his younger brother Dominique Judge for the first time in 2024, when they were both in prison. The two were living at the French […]

The post Texas Is Trying to Punish Its Way Out of a Prison Overdose Crisis 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 Master of Puppets appeared first on The Texas Observer.

On May 26, former Tarrant County GOP Chairman Bo French eked out a 1-point victory over incumbent Jim Wright in the Republican runoff for a seat on the state’s poorly named oil and gas regulatory agency: the Railroad Commission (RRC). As the Texas Observer has reported, French, a 56-year-old oil-industry nepo baby, received over half […]

The post Who Stands Between Texas and a Fascist Railroad Commission? appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Inside a cluster of windowless tents, detainees describe losing their sense of time as they spend weeks and even months beneath the flicker of industrial lightbulbs.  Camp East Montana—the largest immigrant detention facility in the country—has quickly become a symbol of the second Trump administration’s aggressive approach to immigration enforcement. Located on the Fort Bliss […]

The post ICE Contractor for Controversial Camp East Montana Is Trailed by Fraud Allegations appeared first on The Texas Observer.

By the beginning of the 2024 electoral cycle, I’d spent enough time as a progressive-leaning observer of Texas politics to have developed a certain telltale armor. No one was going to convince me that Colin Allred was about to succeed where Beto O’Rourke had failed, or that Texas was prepared to reject Trump. And, while […]

The post The Year for Magical Thinking appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Just days after United States immigration agents detained Daniel Ramirez last month near his home in Brownsville, the 30-year-old Texas resident found himself shackled to a thinly cushioned seat on a deportation flight with other Mexican nationals. He listened to the pre-flight safety instructions with some skepticism.  “How are we going to put the life […]

The post Mexico’s Deportation Capital appeared first on The Texas Observer.

On his second Saturday as the 63rd mayor of Houston, former state Senator John Whitmire drove to Yale Street Grill, a no-frills diner in the Heights neighborhood, to rendezvous with Bill King, a former Houston Chronicle columnist and current fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute, who, in 2015, had very nearly become mayor himself.  Whitmire’s […]

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Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here. Environmental regulators in Texas issued an emergency order on Tuesday evening suspending requirements for the drought-stricken city of Corpus Christi to release water from its reservoir system […]

The post Corpus Christi Withholds Water to Wetlands While Lifting Restrictions on Lawns appeared first on The Texas Observer.

It’s a Thursday evening, and Kam Franklin is already onstage, prepping for the show she’ll be doing an hour later at Shoeshine Charley’s Big Top Lounge, a dive bar and music venue in Midtown Houston.  With Ed “Blacknintendo” Prevost on the keys, she performs two covers—Joy Oladokun’s “If You Got a Problem” and R.E.M.’s “Everybody […]

The post Kam Franklin Goes Solo appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Last Sunday at a venue in the Austin suburb of Kyle, Merideth Keller delivered a speech to local attendees that took square aim at a man she once voted for back in 2014: Governor Greg Abbott. Over the course of her 12 years on the school board of Hays Consolidated Independent School District, a position […]

The post Will a Coalition of ‘MAGA Moms’ Rally Behind Gina Hinojosa’s Bid for Texas Governor? appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Texas Observer reader, As I write this, Texas families are getting ready to send kids back to school in districts where campuses have been vanishing. As Josephine Lee recently reported, in the first half of this year alone, boards of trustees voted to shutter more than 50 schools around the state. The reasons for this […]

The post Editor’s Letter: Introducing Our September/October 2026 Issue appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Deep in the Rio Grande Valley, Brenda Dumas and her family are adjusting to a new normal.  One family member, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal from the federal government, has a work permit. He has to leave from his home in Olmito, a tiny town off Highway 69 between Harlingen and Brownsville, early […]

The post ‘Living like Vampires’: ICE Surge Fractures Daily Life in Deep South Texas appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Last Wednesday morning, I welcomed students back into my high school library. Perhaps they were trying to escape the sweltering August heat, but regardless of why they walked in, the first-day-of-school energy in Abilene was contagious. I was sleep deprived from the to-do list running through my head the previous evening, but I felt energized […]

The post Come and Take Them, Dan Patrick appeared first on The Texas Observer.

The first time I heard of Alejandra Driskell was in 2014, when the Texas Attorney General’s Office filed a lawsuit in Bexar County accusing her of practicing immigration law without a license. The assistant attorney general who’d filed the lawsuit against Driskell, her then-husband, and others was kind enough to include in the public record […]

The post Immigrants Keep Saying She’s Ripping Them Off. Why Won’t Texas Stop Her? appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Texas is in a state of fiscal crisis. Or, at least many of its school districts and municipalities are. All across Texas, from the biggest urban ISDs and metros to the smallest towns and exurban counties, local governmental bodies are feeling the increasingly painful fiscal pinch—and resorting to rigid austerity measures.  The state’s 10 largest […]

The post A Texas Austerity Crisis Is Playing Out City by City, School by School appeared first on The Texas Observer.

To submit a poem, please send an email with the poem attached to poetry@texasobserver.org. We’re looking for previously unpublished works of no more than 30 lines by Texas poets who have not been published by the Observer in the last two years. Pay is $100 on publication. Poems are selected by Poetry Editor Lupe Mendez, […]

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