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 will lay the bark to the dignity of any public man any time we see fit.” It was the beginning of a long Observer tradition—skewering those who needed it, using both printed words and the sharp sword of cartooning. “The cartoons arrived thi ..read more

On Wednesday, the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) arrested and charged 57 people, including one journalist, with 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. DPS and Governor Greg Abbott’s office did not immediately respond to a Texas Observer request for comment. In a statement to the Observer, a UT-Austin spokesperson said that about half of those arrested were unaffiliated with the university. “Thirteen pro-Palestinian free speech events have tak ..read more

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 but is still listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).  Another species currently listed as “Extinct in the Wild” (the Pére David’s deer, originally native to China) is also available to hunt ..read more

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 migration and the drug trade. My interests have to do mainly with the fact that I started my U.S. academic career as an immigrant, some of my relatives arrived here as undocumented immigrants, and because my father and brother were victims of extortion by Los Z ..read more

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 lands for miles around. Bits have been discovered in grassy coastal areas identified by officials from the nearby U.S. Fish and Wildlife refuge as the territory of the endangered piping plover, a small shorebird with a distinctive black-striped face. But for Rio ..read more

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 the prison system and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton related to its inadequate heat safety measures. On Monday, Tiede’s attorneys filed an amended complaint, along with the nonprofits Texas Prisons Community Advocates, Lioness: Justice Impacted W ..read more

To submit a poem, please send an email, with the poem as an attachment, to poetry@texasobserver.org. 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. The post Poem: elegy for the [insert school shooting] children’s f— appeared first on The Texas Observer ..read more

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 in my stomach at the way Dad draws his mother into his arms. There’s a tumor in Dad’s colon. That’s all anyone knows. Mom has continued to say they’ve caught it early, and Dad has agreed and recovered his nonchalance. But my grandmother’s hands pass over his ba ..read more

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 can either remain silent or try to plead their case to get released on a personal bond instead of cash or surety bail, a magistrate—a judge who handles pre-trial hearings—determines the conditions of release. These routine hearings can have huge im ..read more

Out in West Texas, a pair of aspiring novelists and enterprising small-town newspaper owners, Barbara Brannon and Kay Ellington, were dismayed by the number of publications that were dropping book sections, cutting critics, and otherwise decimating literary coverage, especially in the Lone Star State. By the 2010s, “93 percent of the state’s newspapers offer no regular books coverage of any kind,” they told the Writers’ League of Texas. Both newswomen worried that Texas authors in particular just weren’t getting enough attention—though plenty deserved it. Out of that gaping hole emerged, fitti ..read more