Like most judges, Amber Givens moved much of her court’s business online as the pall of COVID-19 hung over Dallas in the summer of 2021. On August 3, what initially seemed like a routine Zoom meeting with lawyers turned into the impetus for a prolonged public and legal drama with the 43-year-old district judge at its heart.  Givens, who has presided over the 282nd District Court in Dallas since 2015, had trouble logging in to her Zoom account that morning, a familiar woe for all who transitioned to virtual work during the pandemic. It didn’t seem like too much of a problem—she had a relat ..read more

Was yesterday’s performance by the Texas House of Representatives intended to restore public faith in the body’s commitment to the rule of law? Separate the good cops in the GOP from the bad cops? Or prove that a legislature that spent a year cravenly ignoring the pleas of Uvalde victims’ relatives for common-sense gun safety laws before rejecting them outright while rushing through an attempt to put the Ten Commandments in every classroom isn’t really the 10th circle of hell? If so, the hearing leading up to a 121-23 vote to impeach Attorney General Ken Paxton for corruption was an epic fail ..read more

This story was originally published by Global Press Journal. Silk came to these mountains in colonial times.  In 1523, the first Bombyx mori eggs arrived from Spain; 500 years later, artisans in six Zapotec communities continue to raise the offspring of those Spanish silkworms. Moisés Martínez is one of them, a member of Artesanos de Seda de la Sierra Norte, a local manufacturing cooperative, and part of the silkworm sanctuary, a modernist glass-and-concrete structure perched amid the mountains in northern Oaxaca.  The sanctuary was inaugurated in 2020. Well before that, in 2009, a E ..read more

My late father-in-law, an Episcopal priest, had a cartoon taped to his kitchen wall in Sherman that skewers an obnoxious feature of American religion. In the cartoon, a grinning devil, sitting on a throne surrounded by flames, instructs a horned apprentice, suitcase in hand, who is about to head upstairs to torture the human race. “Remember to quote lots of Scripture,” Satan says.  If you work as a reporter for more than four decades in Texas, as I have, you will—regularly—encounter the most inappropriate, unfortunate and downright bizarre invocations of the Almighty. It’s enough to make ..read more

On Wednesday evening, precisely one year to the day since our state’s worst-ever school shooting rocked the southwest Texas town of Uvalde, hundreds gathered for a vigil at an outdoor amphitheater sandwiched between the city’s civic center and the Leona River. The crowd, as Uvaldeans have done at a litany of public events since last May 24, wore custom-made shirts depicting the 19 children and two teachers lost in the Robb Elementary shooting, or maroon t-shirts reading “Uvalde Strong.” It was a family affair, with little kids squirming and playing and occasionally running across the stage at ..read more

This story was supported by the journalism non-profit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. Mondays are Access Esperanza’s busiest days. Some of the women who come seeking care may wait for a couple of hours but, CEO Patricio Gonzales said, “We do not turn away patients.” For his clients—most low-income and uninsured—waiting is worth it because the services are free. Access Esperanza runs four family planning clinics serving roughly 15,000 patients a year in McAllen and nearby cities in the Rio Grande Valley where the average income is less than $20,000 per year. Gonzales said that for ..read more

Like Fast & Furious X, yesterday’s decision by the Texas Legislature to approve SB 14—a bill banning hormone and puberty-blocking treatments as well as surgeries for transgender children—is just the latest release from a franchise with a winning box office formula.  Call it Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization 2.0: The Saga Continues. According to The New York Times, “The bill … positions Texas to become the largest state to ban transition medical care for minors.” It would have been nice if the Times had made some key distinctions that the bill’s creators mushed all together ..read more

Since mid-March this year, when the Texas Education Agency (TEA) announced it would be taking over the Houston Independent School District, the state agency has demurred when asked about the district’s future, saying decisions will be made by a 9-member board of managers to be selected from the local community by TEA Commissioner Mike Morath.  But interviews with and contemporaneous notes from participants in TEA’s April 22-23 board of managers applicants training, as well as an audio recording of the sessions obtained by the Texas Observer, reveal the state plans to limit the board’s rol ..read more

In the Texas State Historical Association’s (TSHA) March 2023 annual meeting program book, J.P. Bryan, the organization’s executive director—and former CEO of a multi-million-dollar energy company—included a poem: The poem, by English writer J. Fairfax-Blakeborough and pulled from Walter Prescott Webb’s book glorifying the Texas Rangers, reads as a declaration of war to many Texas historians. The TSHA, the 125-year-old nonprofit that puts out widely used publications such as the Handbook of Texas, plus well-regarded periodicals and other materials, has become the latest front in conservatives ..read more

Statewide traffic fatalities remain high and big highway projects dominate transportation funding, but a diverse set of mobility advocates known as the Texas Streets Coalition is banding together to overhaul the state’s transportation priorities. Through a set of bills at the Texas Legislature, the recently formed coalition has played a key role in advancing reforms to TxDOT and state road safety law during the 88th legislative session. “We have succeeded at completely changing the discussions [in the Lege],” said Jay Blazek Crossley, a member of the Texas Streets Coalition. “At the very least ..read more