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This Texas Photographer Turns Dead Animals Into Poignant PortraitsBefore Amanda Stronza heads to Botswana or Nepal during the summers for work, she instructs new dog and house sitters about trash days and tricky light switches at her College Station home. She tells them whom to call if a sink goes bust and where to find spare light bulbs. Stronza also makes sure to mention that if her guests stroll around her 1.6-acre yard, they might stumble upon a femur or a vertebra. In fact, if visitors don’t discover some skeletal remains, it would be a little odd.“I tell them not to worry if they find bones,” says Stronza. If the potential house sitter looks unsettled, which sometimes happens, Stronza explains that her passion is memorializing animals of all sizes that have been killed…

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Christian-Nationalism-Texas-EpicenterOn an unseasonably warm Thursday night in February, Sarah Palin’s helicopter landed in the multi-acre field behind the One Shot Distillery and Brewery in the Hill Country town of Dripping Springs. The small aircraft was dwarfed by most of the trucks in the venue’s impromptu overflow parking lot, where several hundred far-right pilgrims had joined a convoy on its way to the Texas-Mexico border. As the one-time Alaska governor and former vice presidential candidate stood in front of the hundreds of flag-waving Texans, she expressed love for the Lone Star State and the various strains of Christian-nationalist rebellion evident among members of the crowd.Referencing the state’s southern border—where tensions were mounting between the Texas National Guard and federal law enforcement over Governor Greg Abbott’s multibillion-dollar…

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Willie Nelson and Susan Tedeschi perform at the 2014 Lockn' FestivalSusan Tedeschi knows family bands. For fourteen years she and her husband, slide guitar virtuoso Derek Trucks, have led the Tedeschi Trucks Band, the Grammy-winning groove-and-blues collective the two formed in 2010, after nearly a decade of sharing bills with their individual bands. Many of those shows also featured Derek’s other group, the Allman Brothers Band, which he’d been playing with since the mid-nineties—and which his uncle, drummer Butch Trucks, had cofounded himself.But even before meeting Derek, Susan knew the family way was best; after her initial appearance at Farm Aid in 1999, she got tight with Willie and his wife Annie. He took Susan under his wing, giving her and her band spots on his tours, where she saw firsthand the musical and emotional…

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joyce slocum tpr presidentJoyce Slocum spent nearly six years working for National Public Radio in Washington, D.C., rising to become its interim chief executive officer. But she was born in Dallas and always wanted to come home to Texas, which was a mystery to many of her friends and colleagues on the East Coast. Isn’t it even hotter there than in Washington?, they would ask. “Well,” Joyce would reply with a drawl, “we don’t have to shovel any heat off of our driveways in Texas.”That was just like Joyce: a formidable executive who was always quick with a quip and a grin. She died on Sunday in San Antonio, at age 66, after a long battle with colon cancer. She left behind, in Texas Public Radio, an institution…

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Besame Mucho Festival AustinA frequent frustration of mine, as a listener who grew up on the pretty boy pop stylings of Enrique Iglesias and Ricky Martin and came of age in the golden era of reggaeton, is the degree to which today’s algorithmic streaming services struggle to parse “Latin” music. Ask Spotify for a radio station based on, say, a hip-hop group from Nuevo Léon, and you might well wind up being served a jarring mix of sultry Cuban boleros, folk vocals from Veracruz, and the latest Bad Bunny banger. It seems, sometimes, as though the robots have been trained to believe that every track in Spanish is of the same ilk.Nowhere does the algo suffer more of late, though, then when attempting to untangle regional Mexican music,…

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Texas primary election results 2024As expected, Donald Trump won the GOP primary, and Joe Biden the Democratic primary. Colin Allred has defeated Roland Gutierrez and eight other opponents in the Democratic race for the nomination to challenge Senator Ted Cruz. Speaker of the House Dade Phelan is heading to a runoff against David Covey. Southwest Texas Congressman Tony Gonzales, once a MAGA faithful now censured by the state GOP, is heading to a runoff against gun influencer Brandon Herrera. That’s All (For Now) Folks Ben Rowen, 1:04 a.m. With most of the day’s big races called, we’re gonna call it a night, folks. Stay tuned tomorrow for more coverage of how Abbott’s school voucher push played out (once some of the closer races are called), how Ken Paxton’s revenge…

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Best Thing in Texas: A Texas Seventh Grader Was Crowned the Winner of Food Network’s ‘Kids Baking Championship’WHO: Lila Smethurst, a seventh grader at Tex Hill Middle School, in San Antonio.WHAT: Food Network’s Kids Baking Championship, a baking-competition TV show in which young bakers, aged eight to thirteen this season, vie to win $25,000 and a feature in Food Network Magazine.WHY IT’S SO GREAT: Smethurst took home the top prize in the elimination-style reality show that challenges young kitchen whizzes to create everything from cupcakes to pastries, all while testing their skills, creativity, and ability to work under pressure.During the season finale of Food Network’s Kids Baking Championship, competitors were tasked with making science fair–style volcano cakes that had to produce smoke. Texan Lila Smethurst created a polar-themed volcano cake that won the judges over.Even though she’s young, the Tex Hill Middle…

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shane and sally video trailerOn July 4, 1988, sixteen-year-old Shane Stewart and eighteen-year-old Sally McNelly went out for the night in the West Texas town of San Angelo. They watched the fireworks, stopped for burgers, and drove out to the lake outside of town.They were never seen alive again.The murders of Shane and Sally have haunted their family and friends, and frustrated generations of investigators—from the local authorities to the FBI—for 35 years. Over the years, key evidence has disappeared. And other clues have appeared just as mysteriously—Sally’s missing driver’s license was found on the floor of the San Angelo Police Department; hair, blood, and a fingernail, along with notes about the murder, were all found in the home of a key suspect. One investigator believes the killer was a former…

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Onion rings at Western Sky Steakhouse.Tucked into a far corner of San Angelo, Western Sky Steakhouse sits unassumingly between a bright orange taqueria and the Sands Motel. I’ve been coming here for as long as I can remember, and its steaks are the only ones I’ll eat when I visit home (aside from my dad’s, of course). It’s so intertwined with my life that at one point last year, a billboard with my cousin’s smiling face advertising a local pediatric clinic rose above the parking lot. With its metal roof, beige exterior, and dirt lot, Western Sky doesn’t look like much, but it might as well be Ruth’s Chris to the cowboys who come through town every rodeo season. When the ropers and riders visit for the stock show and rodeo…

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RGV Water DisputeFrank Schuster’s three-thousand-acre farm lies on the edge of the Rio Grande, punctuated by the rust-colored border wall that cuts through his cropland. Schuster has been tending his land near Pharr, Texas, since 1977, when his father’s early death left him in charge of the family farm at age 24. Now 71, he still pumps the waters of the river into the furrows of his crop rows of cabbages, onions, and turnips.Like the majority of the farms in the semiarid Lower Rio Grande Valley, Schuster’s Val Verde Vegetable Co. depends on the river to sustain crops in the state’s most productive region for vegetables. Without the Rio Grande, farmers would be forced to survive on the area’s sporadic rainfall. “Irrigation from the river built the…

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