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Southwest Airlines will host a blockbuster event in Dallas this week, to unveil a service most other carriers began offering decades ago. At its annual Investor Day, Southwest will showcase its first-ever plan for assigning passengers to specific airplane seats, including premium-priced larger ones that will require altering the layouts of the company’s previously egalitarian cabins.Selling a variety of seating options at different price points has long been the practice at Fort Worth–based American Airlines—and at Delta, and United, and most other major carriers around the world. Yet some insiders think Southwest will treat the announcement with the sort of fanfare that accompanied Apple’s introduction of the first iPhone—framing it as a this-changes-everything moment for the company.Even if Southwest CEO Bob Jordan doesn’t don Steve…

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Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

On the final evening of the San Lorenzo Catholic Church kermés, families fill the church grounds as the golden hour casts its light on a vinyl sign hanging above the busiest booth at the bazaar.The sign reads: “Gorditas—Heavenly Made.”The line in front of the booth, which more than tripled in length that past hour, suggests visitors are willing to wait for a taste of heaven—deep fried patties made from corn masa, filled with seasoned ground beef plus shredded lettuce and diced tomato.It’s kermés season in El Paso, a marathon of church bazaars from late July through mid-October, hosted mostly by the Catholic parishes.Kermeses serve as the biggest fundraiser of the year for many churches, setting up carnival games, cake walks, and raffles. Larger kermeses, such as…

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Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

Yellowstone’s Rip Wheeler has branded human flesh with a cattle iron, thrown a rattlesnake into a man’s face, and beat the daylights out of a gang of bikers, to name just a few of his escapades. Inspiring a fine bunch of North Texans to line up outside a Walmart before 6 a.m. on a Tuesday is far from the most brutal thing he’s ever done, but it’s pretty rough.It’s okay, though, because there’s coffee! So much coffee. Cole Hauser, the actor who brings Rip to vivid life, is here in Fort Worth to promote his new coffee brand. With three partners from Midland, he bought San Angelo’s Long*Horn Coffee Company, a small local roaster, in 2022. They renamed it Free Rein Coffee Company last year…

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When former President Donald Trump told the national audience in his first, and likely only, debate against Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris that abortion rights are “the vote of the people now,” he was partly right. Since the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade, in June 2022, voters in seven states (California, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, Ohio, and Vermont) have weighed in on abortion policy via ballot referenda. Abortion-rights proponents won in all seven—some by approving state constitutional amendments ensuring abortion rights and others by preventing more-stringent restrictions from going into effect. In November, voters in ten states—Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, and South Dakota—will vote on ballot measures that seek to include forms of abortion-rights protection in the state…

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Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

The WNBA might be the American sports league with the most potential for growth. It’s hard to imagine the NFL or NBA getting that much bigger than they already are, and although Major League Baseball seems to have mostly leveled its decline, the sport isn’t winning new converts by the millions. Soccer, meanwhile, has been five years away from dominating the nation’s sports landscape for several decades now. But women’s basketball is a different story. The game is steadily minting new superstars at the college level. Last spring, for the first time ever, the women’s NCAA championship game drew more viewers than the men’s final. In the pros, one of the major challenges the WNBA has faced is that there simply aren’t enough teams to ensure…

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