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January Subscriber QuizYou’ve had all month to read the latest issue of Texas Monthly. Take this monthly quiz and we’ll tell you how you stack up at the end.And if you got this quiz from a friend: Hello! We hope you enjoy it. If you do: become a subscriber today, and we’ll send next month’s quiz directly to your inbox.

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Art of Texas State Parks Exhibit at Bullock MuseumThe Texas landscape doesn’t get more fantastical than Caddo Lake, a nearly 27,000–acre swamp on the Texas-Louisiana border, thought to have formed around 1800 after centuries of fallen-log pileups. Spanish moss dangles from bald cypress trees, whose roots protrude like termite mounds above the water. Though just nine feet in average depth, the lake teems with all manner of creatures, including alligators, snakes, and paddlefish, which predate the dinosaurs by 50 million years. Some even claim to have seen Bigfoot wandering around.“It’s kind of wondrous,” says artist Billy Hassell. “It looks primeval and mysterious, and you can definitely get lost in there.” Hassell grew up in Dallas and first glimpsed the wild through the taxidermy dioramas at the Museum of Natural History; now he takes sketching…

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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.

Kyle Rittenhouse Rally Against Censorship in ConroeDavid Thomas Roberts took the stage brandishing a rifle and backdropped by a replica of the facade of the Alamo. Inside an exhibition room in the Montgomery County Fairgrounds recently used to host the local kennel club and a reptile show, he was leading the Rally Against Censorship an hour north of Houston. A crowd of a few hundred right-wingers listened intently, as he began his speech with a trigger warning. “I know there are children here, so I’m going to be careful, but I’m pissed off,” he said, before launching into an explanation of his anger.The main outrage of Roberts, a prolific author and the founder of a right-wing press, concerned the media fracas surrounding his rally. In early January, Southern Star Brewing, a…

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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.

A burger from Hobbit Cafe in Houston.In 1972, Raymond Edmonds and his college friends opened a vegetarian sandwich, salad, and smoothie shop in Houston. In the spirit of the counterculture movement of the time, they named it Hobbit Hole Cafe, after the popular J. R. R. Tolkien novels. Today, Edmonds still runs Hobbit Cafe, as it is now known, alongside his son John. The restaurant’s reputation and menu have grown over the past fifty years. While the cafe’s offerings may not be strictly authentic to Middle Earth, fellowship still rings true at this Houston establishment. See more in the latest dispatch from Texas Country Reporter.

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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.

Jose´ JamesErykah Badu is undeniably in the pantheon of singular Texas musicians, alongside Ornette Coleman, Buddy Holly, Esteban Jordan, Willie Nelson, Omar Rodríguez-López, and Sly Stone. Over her 25-year career, the Dallas singer-songwriter-weirdo has helped shape the direction of hip-hop, soul, jazz, and rock and roll. She’s done this without being terribly prolific—she’s only released five studio albums, the most recent of which came out in 2010. (She also put out a live album just nine months after her 1997 debut, and a 2015 mixtape.) But when every release feels like a statement, that lack of regular production just furthers the artist’s mystique. The newest statement to Badu’s timelessness comes not from Badu—we’re still waiting on LP number six—but from New York–based jazz vocalist José James. On…

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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.

fourth slice brisketLeonard Botello IV has spent the last eight years chasing smoked brisket perfection. It began with Truth Barbeque, which he opened in Brenham in 2015, and which made the top ten on our 2017 barbecue list. A gleaming new location in Houston followed two years later, which jumped up to the number-three spot on our 2021 list, based largely on the quality of that smoked brisket. The Truth brand got so big that Botello’s wife (and boutique hotelier), Abbie Byrom-Botello, hired a public relations firm that sent me a pitch. It was strange enough that, unlike every other PR pitch I’ve received in my ten years at Texas Monthly, I pursued it. The subject line referred to the “fourth slice methodology,” which the pitch described…

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When I visited Brownsville on a breezy day back in February 2022, I drove to the SpaceX launchpad site, just meters from the Gulf of Mexico at Boca Chica, a beach on the city’s outskirts. I was shocked by how close I could get to the rockets. The only thing that stopped me from touching the towering metal cylinders was a sense that something was off. “It feels like you’re being monitored,” says Brownsville native Domingo Martinez, author of The Boy Kings of Texas, a 2012 National Book Award finalist for nonfiction. “The back of your neck is tingling.” I had mentioned the incident while Martinez and I were discussing his August 2016 Texas Monthly article “Countdown to Liftoff.” The story braids a personal account of…

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Pearl-snap shirts have traditionally served a utilitarian purpose. The snaps allow a rancher to easily refasten the shirt if it gets snagged on barbed wire—no need to sew on a new four-hole button. The yoke, an extra layer of fabric over the shoulders and partly down the back, provides durability. And a touch of flair is woven into the chain-stitched designs, from yellow roses to Longhorn skulls, across the chest. But why should cowboys have all the fun?Three Texas brands are modernizing the pearl-snap shirt into a style to be worn meeting with friends at the bar on Friday night, toasting newlyweds on Saturday evening, or casting out a line on Sunday morning. According to Houston-based personal stylist Stevie Bingham, the modern take on the…

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Resurgence of the Texas Death MatchTexas has a special place in professional wrestling lore. Countless icons, from “Stone Cold” Steve Austin to Eddie Guerrero to Terry Funk, have called the state home, and in previous eras, when the sport was governed by regional territories, cities like Amarillo, Dallas, and El Paso were thriving hubs of scripted combat. Texas didn’t just conceive famous wrestlers; it also spawned a unique type of match that has forever linked the Lone Star State and hard-core violence in the minds of rasslin’ fans—the Texas Death Match. Created in the Panhandle in the 1960s, the Texas Death Match has retained its place over more than half a century of change, as wrestling transformed from regional entertainment to a global multimedia industry. You won’t see a Texas…

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How Does the Lege Work?Have you heard? The Eighty-eighth session of the Texas Legislature is underway. For the next 124 days, the Lege, as it’s known ’round here, will meet in its regular session until it adjourns sine die on May 29. (“Sine die” is Austinese for “thank goodness it’s over.”)The Lege, God love it, is the oldest and most important institution in Texas, more so even than college football and the Department of Transportation. It is the seat of power of the world’s ninth-largest economy. Its 181 lawmakers regularly make decisions that alter the trajectories of the lives of millions inside and outside the state. The Lege’s numbered sessions form a continuous thread that links every generation in the state’s history down to the present one, which meets…

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