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When he’s asked about Texas history, Steve Harrigan often starts his reply with a caveat: “I’m not a professional historian.” Nonetheless, he’s one of the most astute researchers, thinkers, and writers about our state’s eventful past. His 2019 book, Big Wonderful Thing, was widely praised as his generation’s most thoughtful and engaging chronicle of the Lone Star State. I refer to it often and always enjoy Steve’s surfacing of fascinating and previously overlooked figures, including women and Texans of color. I also appreciate his adoption of what one of my favorite history professors called “moral humility”—the discipline of studying the attitudes and standards of the time about which you’re writing, rather than assuming that we today are somehow of superior conscience. Without in any way…

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In the Wild West of ecocapitalism, where billions of dollars are invested yearly into companies that invoke some measure of sustainability, the ideas spawned by start-ups can feel like elements of the sort of dystopian future dreamed up in a sci-fi movie from the sixties: vodka made from carbon captured out of the atmosphere; sneakers made out of recycled chewing gum; a solar geoengineering project that would’ve sent sunlight-reflecting particles into the atmosphere to cool the planet. That’s why Katy-based start-up NanoTech Materials stood out, said Matthew Peña, director of the Rice Alliance Clean Energy Accelerator, which supports innovative start-ups—its idea was comparatively simple. The company produces a particle that, it claims, is extremely effective at rejecting heat. The “Insulative Ceramic Particle,” when blended into common…

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For more than four decades, the Pinata Party Palace, located on Cesar Chavez Street in East Austin, has remained steadfastly anchored to the past while the world around it has changed. Glassy office buildings and trendy, upscale eateries have flooded the neighborhood, but the beat-up looking, one-story warehouse—bright yellow and covered in sun-bleached advertisements for party supplies—has continued to delight its loyal customers. That sort of proud history might be a cause for preservation. But in East Austin, which remains the throes of a dramatic transformation fueled by gentrification, legacy can often feel like a liability. The shop’s owner, Jorge Salazar, a 50-year-old veteran who served during the Gulf War, grew up in a Victorian-style home a few blocks away from his store. Salazar is warm,…

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The heroines of Dominico Lee’s design sketches look as though they escaped the pages of a storybook. The intentionally frayed hems of the gowns, in silk and tulle, suggest a chase or struggle. The exposed boning of the corsets hints at a lingering sorrow, a heartbreak beneath the glamour, emphasized even more by dark accessories—cowboy hats and boots, all in black.  The allusions are purposeful. Twenty-six-year-old Lee, who grew up in Aransas Pass, near Corpus Christi, says he built his most recent couture collection, “La Doña de la Casa,” around one main idea: “What if there were a Texas version of the Cinderella moment?”  Lee’s rise from self-taught designer to couturier in the national spotlight represents a fairy tale of its own. His first atelier…

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There are two types of people in the world: those who love Jefferson and those who’ve never been. It’s nearly impossible to resist the charm of this small East Texas town, whose walkable streets are filled with antiques shops, restaurants serving up cornbread sandwiches and chicken-fried steak, and historic Greek Revival–style houses now operating as bed-and-breakfasts. In its mid-nineteenth-century heyday, this inland riverport town on Big Cypress Bayou, in Marion County about a thirty-minute drive from the Louisiana border, was the commercial center of northeast Texas. Back then, the place bustled with horse-drawn carriages and New Orleans–bound steamboats loaded high with cotton. During the peak of the river trade, in 1872, Jefferson’s population was just shy of 7,300, while today it hovers at around 1,800.The steamboat…

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