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Casandra Sowards, who is 26, is the lead sculptor for Billings Productions, which is based in Allen and makes animatronic creatures for museums, zoos, and other exhibits.I just loved dinosaurs when I was growing up in Maryland. I was ten or eleven when I saw Jurassic Park. I had to beg my parents to let me watch it because they were like, “Oh, it’s loud and scary.” It’s been my favorite movie since.In high school, I started watching Face Off, a reality-TV competition between prosthetic makeup artists. I was like, “I want to do this.” So I went to college for special effects makeup, and then I started working at Billings Productions in 2019.Everyone wants bigger dinosaurs. We’re working on a bigger Stegosaurus, because we…

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Glen Powell in Hit Man.Netflix has announced that Hit Man, starring Glen Powell and based on the Texas Monthly story by Skip Hollandsworth, will officially premiere on the streaming service on Friday, June 7, 2024, after a limited theatrical release. Entertainment Weekly also released the official teaser trailer on Monday. Watch the full video below. Hit Man has received much attention since premiering at the Venice Film Festival back in September. The film ultimately sold to Netflix for $20 million after its North American premiere. Since then, Hit Man has been placed on a number of “most anticipated” lists for the year by publications such as Time, Esquire, New York magazine, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, and more. These exciting announcements come as Richard Linklater, Glen Powell, and others are in Park City promoting…

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Ty Mitchell ProfileOn a dusty April morning in 2021, with his bedroll and cast-iron skillet in tow, Ty Mitchell arrived at a gated community in Bartlesville, Oklahoma—more than seven hundred miles from his Presidio County ranch, where he runs a cow-calf operation. He walked up to the empty three-story home he would stay in for the next six months, just a few doors down from Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro. The high-ceilinged foyer echoed as he clanged his pan against the granite countertop. “Cowboys don’t need an open floor plan,” he thought to himself. After a few nights, Mitchell began to feel fenced in by that gated community. “I just need a little old place to roll my bedroll,” he tells me. “So, I asked production if…

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texanist line dancing february 0224Q: A lifelong dream of mine was to go ranching and horseback riding in the U.S., and finally last year my best friend, Maxinne, and I visited Nashville, Memphis, and New Orleans and had the time of our lives, so in February we’re doing it again. This time, Texas: horses, country music, and, of course, cowboys (only kidding; I’m married). We’re staying at a ranch in Bandera and then on to the rodeo in San Antonio. What advice can you offer to ensure that we have the safest and best time ever? We are both 56, look 46, and feel 26.Jenny Calverley, Corscombe, EnglandA: Welcome to Texas! By all accounts y’all seem to be a pair of fun-loving lasses, unafraid to cast off the prim-and-proper stereotype…

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Torta ahogada stuffed with carnitas and smothered in salsa.With a multitude of fillings, such as pork and pineapple or tamales, the Mexican torta boasts nearly endless varieties. In the case of a typical torta, the bread is a crusty, oblong bolillo roll or the shorter, squishier telera. One torta, though, stands apart from the rest.“Torta ahogada” translates as “drowned sandwich,” and you’ll know why when you see it. This torta is filled with carnitas (pork cooked in its own lard) and a swipe of refried beans and gets a finishing touch of mild tomato salsa, the spicier tomato-based salsa roja, or both poured over half or all of it. The sandwich maintains its integrity thanks to its uniquely sturdy bread, birote. The product of one of Mexico’s many cross-cultural collaborations, a birote is…

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"Little Tilde," a Thomas Dambo troll sculpture, in Vallensbæk Mose, Denmark.These days, Texans are more likely to encounter trolls on the internet (or at the Capitol) than in a forest or under a bridge. But starting this March, they’ll have a chance to meet the oversized, folkloric kind in Austin’s Pease Park.Since 2013, Danish artist Thomas Dambo has turned discarded pallets, scrap lumber, and twigs into more than 120 enormous wooden trolls that lurk in parks around the globe. Actually, “lurk” isn’t the best word—these giants are the gentle sort, with friendly faces and Scandinavian charm that have earned them a cult following. The Austin sculpture is Dambo’s first Texas troll, and it’ll occupy a wooded alcove in Pease Park, just northwest of downtown.Dambo has already assembled the creature’s head, hands, and feet at his…

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Will Ferrell and Harper Steele in Will & Harper.This year, in celebration of its fortieth anniversary, the Sundance Film Festival asked more than five hundred industry professionals and film buffs to pick their favorite films that premiered at Sundance over the years. The resulting top-ten list is a road map of the past four decades of independent film—and it runs straight through Texas.Austin-based director Richard Linklater is the only filmmaker to make the list twice, first for his Vienna-set Gen X backpacker romance Before Sunrise and again for his 2014 Oscar contender Boyhood, which was shot in Houston, San Marcos, and Big Bend National Park, among other Texas locations. Another spot on the list goes to Blood Simple, the 1984 debut film by brothers Joel and Ethan Coen, set in Texas and shot…

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Sarah Ellison Lewis at her home in Anderson, in southeast Texas, on December 5, 2023.Now a cold-season staple, the duster came straight out of the Old West. With a hem that pooled around the ankles, the long, rugged coat shielded cowboys from the elements on cattle drives. When open-air motorcars came along, women began wearing refined, elaborate versions. In recent years, these classic pieces have become part of a Western-wear craze that has ushered in boutique hat bars, cowboy boots at fashion week, and “coastal cowgirls.” Designer Sarah Ellison Lewis has joined the revival with Texas Duster Company, an apparel brand that marries modern design with vintage flair.“The duster was the original workwear,” she says, adding that it’s as versatile as the little black dress or the classic white button-down.Lewis grew up in the tiny town of Anderson, about…

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A 2010s photo of Cooke on a wellpad near the North Texas town of Bowie.I first encountered Claude Cooke on the internet, when he and his wife, Joyce, briefly became viral sensations. In a YouTube clip viewed more than three million times since it was posted, in 2007, they dance down a suburban Houston street to a rap song while their canary-yellow car slowly glides—driverless—between them. “Ghost Ridin’ Grandma” would have been a classic of its genre, if there were a genre of such videos. Cooke was 77 years old at the time and danced with youthful enthusiasm.The second time I encountered Cooke, he called out of the blue to talk to me about fracking. This was a few years later, amid growing concerns about whether the use of hydraulic fracturing would lead to widespread water contamination. When something went wrong…

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What a Texan Looks Like, According to A.I.Quick: imagine a Texan. If you thought of a rugged white guy in a cowboy hat, artificial intelligence agrees with you—almost.Inspired by a Rest of World story that examined cultural stereotypes in the popular AI image generator Midjourney, we asked the program to create one hundred images in response to various Texas-related prompts, such as “a Texan,” “a house in Texas,” and “a plate of Texan food.” Of the 100 individuals Midjourney spat out in response to “a Texan,” 92 wore cowboy hats. Five sported other types of hats (three of which looked merely like cowboy hats gone wrong), and only 3 were hatless. Surprisingly, women were the majority­—the prompt returned images of 63 women, 36 men, and one cow (wearing, of course, a cowboy…

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