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

Last year, night after night, Jaime Elizondo and Navin Chatlani stared at each other across the street. Elizondo was working at the second location of his Tejano barbecue joint, Smoke Crafters, a yellow trailer stationed in a McAllen food truck park. Chatlani was running his Mexican seafood restaurant, La Bahia. During the many slow nights, they’d wave to each other. “We would stand outside looking at each other’s businesses, wondering what the hell was going on,” Elizondo says. “It was a really slow year for a lot of businesses, you know, especially us.” Eventually they mustered the confidence to talk to each other. The two Rio Grande Valley natives brainstormed what was and wasn’t working. As the conversations continued, they agreed there was at least one…

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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.

Permian Basin oil grows older and older every day—300 million years and counting. But the Texans aiming to pull that liquid gold up out of the ground? Their ages are headed the other way.Earlier this week, Midland-based Diamondback Energy announced it would acquire rival Endeavor Energy Partners for $26 billion, creating a West Texas colossus. Autry Stephens, age 85, built Endeavor from a single well starting 45 years ago. He told the Wall Street Journal that a recent prostate cancer diagnosis was a “big factor” in his decision to sell.Diamondback is led by 62-year-old Travis Stice, but waiting in the wings is Kaes Van’t Hof, a 37-year-old former tennis phenom from Southern California. Van’t Hof has been elevated to president, a position that in the…

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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.

Sometimes his phone would ring smack in the middle of dinner, while the pasta and sausage were still steaming on his plate. Sometimes it would ring at ten p.m., midnight, two in the morning. On the other end of the phone was a detective, and the conversation would go something like this: “Richard, you’ll want to get here real quick because this one’s a mess. See you soon?” The answer was yes, always yes. He’d shoulder his camera bag, head out the door, and ready himself for the dark hours ahead. Coffee? He’d grab a cup near the murder scene. While embedding with the Dallas Police Department’s homicide unit for nearly a year, Richard Sharum photographed the aftermath of some sixty murders. That doesn’t count the…

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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.

Derek Spence, who is fifty, lives in Fredericksburg with his wife and four children. Besides performing, he makes chainsaw sculptures and owns a ghost-tour business.I played my first gig at fifteen or sixteen, then I went to South Plains College to pursue a music degree. From there I got a job at Fiesta Texas, in San Antonio, before Six Flags bought the park. I played guitar there for a couple years and then moved to Nashville. I was there for five years, and then I moved back to Texas. I was kind of burned out on the music business at that point. This would have been 2000.I started working at the Rockbox Theater, in Fredericksburg, in 2010. If you recall, 2014 is when George was…

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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.

Bee Matthey, a nineteen-year-old junior at Baylor University, feels lucky. As a nonbinary student at the largest Baptist university in the United States, they hear the stories of harassment on campus and know that making it to their junior year relatively unscathed is a blessing. “I’ve never been scared,” Matthey said, shrugging off what they call “random microaggressions.” For example, “I definitely have had people tell me ‘you’re going to go to hell.’ ”Matthey is not alone. Queer students at Christian colleges hear direct or implied condemnation all the time. Baylor alum Veronica Penales, in a high-profile lawsuit following a Title IX complaint filed against Baylor in 2021, reported receiving a Bible with all of the so-called “clobber verses”—Scriptures that appear to condemn homosexuality—highlighted.When leveled at…

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