From The Texas Observer
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An East Texas County Fights a Bitter Battle Over a Reborn Hospital
This story is part of “The Holdouts,” a collaborative project led by Public Health Watch that focuses on the 10 states that have not expanded Medicaid. The dueling election signs beckoning voters to choose their next hospital district board have popped up in yards, on street corners, and in the windows of businesses across the […]
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70 Years of Skewering: Political Cartooning at the Texas Observer
In its first issue, on December 13, 1954, the Texas Observer ran a political cartoon by Don Bartlett taking a swipe at the Republican-leaning tendencies of Democratic Governor Allan Shivers. Beside it ran Observer founding editor Ronnie Dugger’s ambitious, if eccentric, manifesto. “We will twit the self-important and honor the truly important,” he wrote. “We […]
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Did Texas Police Violate First Amendment Rights of Pro-Palestine Protesters?
On Wednesday, police arrested 57 people, including one journalist, on charges of criminal trespassing on the University of Texas at Austin’s campus during a protest against Israel’s ongoing attacks on Gaza and the university’s investments in weapons manufacturing. In a statement to the Observer, a UT-Austin spokesperson said that about half of those arrested were […]
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Texas Exotic Hunts Are Dangerously Unregulated
Addax antelope for $8,000, scimitar-horned oryx for $7,500—both endangered species advertised as available to hunt at a private game reserve in Texas as of April 2024. The scimitar-horned oryx, a species declared “Extinct in the Wild” 24 years ago, was reintroduced into Chad’s Ouadi Achim Faunal Reserve in February 2023 thanks to conservation breeding programs […]
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Eye on Texas: An Unwinnable Drug War
I was born and raised in Mexico and lived at the Texas-Mexico border for eight years. As a professor at the University of Texas at Brownsville, now the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, I began to research Mexican organized crime groups that operate transnationally. Since 2009, I have studied illicit networks involved in U.S.-bound […]
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The SpaceX Land Swap Is Only the Latest Texas Public Park Giveaway
Whenever SpaceX rockets blast off from the sandy property that Elon Musk controls near Brownsville, the road to Boca Chica Beach—including Boca Chica State Park—closes by order of the county judge (as well as other days when the company deems it necessary). At times, rockets have exploded and showered down debris on public and private […]
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'There Have to Be Limits': Lawsuit Urges Scorching Prisons to Cool Down
Last June, Bernhardt Tiede suffered a likely stroke while living in a prison cell that regularly got up to around 110 degrees Fahrenheit. The 65-year-old—whose story inspired the 2011 Richard Linklater film “Bernie”—is housed at the Estelle Unit in Huntsville. Now, several new parties have joined and expanded a lawsuit Tiede filed last year against […]
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Poem: elegy for the [insert school shooting] children’s f—
To submit a poem, please send an email, with the poem as an attachment, to [email protected]. We are 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.
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New Memoir: 'Forever Chemicals,' Religion, and Family Tragedy in Texas
Editor’s Note: This excerpt is adapted from Loose of Earth: A Memoir (April 2024) with permission from University of Texas Press. The Environmental Protection Agency announced limits on PFAS in drinking water earlier this month. A blade of light glances off my grandparents’ white Lincoln. They park at the curb. A torque of despair turns […]
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The Epic Texas Panhandle Fire Is Just a Preview
Editor’s Note: This article is reprinted with permission from the Sierra Club magazine. On February 26, a tiny flame sparked a mile north of the ranching community of Stinnett, Texas. This part of the Texas Panhandle is sparsely populated—Hutchinson County has 20,000 people and roughly the same number of cows—so no one saw the smoldering […]
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In Travis County, a Fight over Bail Hearings Has Big Stakes for Criminal Defendants
In Travis County, the magistration process—the initial bail hearing after someone is arrested—isn’t cinematic. Arrestees are either led to a small room within the jail’s central booking area, or a Travis County Sheriff’s Office (TCSO) employee might bring a computer to their holding cell. At the end of a short conversation, during which the arrestee […]