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Texas Prairie DogsBy sunrise on an August morning, the landscaping crew at the Marathon Grasslands Preserve in Brewster County is hard at work. Plump, sandy brown bodies scamper across the gently sloping ground at this 2,700-acre preserve about ten miles northeast of Marathon, pausing where a piece of too-tall grass needs to be chewed down. Dirt flies as a digger cleans out a burrow, her black-tipped tail bouncing as she works. It’s a social bunch that touch noses as they pass one another and keep up a steady chatter of birdlike chirps. Meanwhile, a sentry keeps watch for predators from her perch on top of a mound. She stands alert, her stumpy little T. Rex arms resting on her white belly, and scans the landscape.This industrious bunch…

The post Texas Ranchers Used to Hate Prairie Dogs. Now Some Are Fans. appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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ACL Walkup: If You're Excited About These Headliners, Arrive Early to See These Texas ArtistsThe organizers of the Austin City Limits Festival work hard to balance the ticket with headliners, not-quite headliners, and a big smattering of up-and-comers to fill out the program and make sure fans have almost ten full hours of music each day. While the big names who close out each night are incredibly famous, the odds are that even the most voracious music lover hasn’t heard of every act booked at noon on Saturday. Most of those artists are local Austin- or Texas-based musicians who are at the very start of their careers; many of them don’t even have a full album out yet. But sifting through the dozens of unfamiliar names is a lot of work for even the most dedicated fan, especially because…

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keshi austin texas concert photoKeshi stays vigilant at his local H-E-B. Is anyone following him through the produce section? Did that shopper’s gaze linger as he waited in line to check out? “I’m always surprised where I’ll get caught,” he told me in August. He isn’t concerned with watchful store clerks—he’s not juggling tomatoes or pocketing Juicy Fruit. Instead, he’s bracing for the passersby who will recognize him and whip out their iPhones, the ones whose faces register “omigod it’s Keshi squeeeee!!!”In the years since Keshi’s first SoundCloud post, in 2017, the 29-year-old prince of lo-fi pop R&B has been finding it increasingly difficult to maintain anonymity in public, whether he’s strolling the New York City streets, dining after a show in Shanghai, or running errands around Houston. And…

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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.

New treatment for rare fetal blood diseaseDaisy Farrar loves swimming, watching Bluey, and collecting stuffed animals. Some days the four-year-old pretends to be a princess, wearing sparkly shoes and a pink dress with a tulle skirt while she roams her family’s wooded three-acre property in rural North Carolina. Other days she’s more into robots, playing with Optimus Prime figurines with her dad. “To me, she is perfect,” says her mom, Brandi Starling Farrar. It’s a sentiment any loving parent might express—but in Daisy’s case, the fact that she is a happy, healthy kid is nothing short of incredible.Daisy made history before she was born—she was the first person to receive nipocalimab, an experimental drug that helped her survive a rare fetal disease. Daisy and Brandi were among thirteen pairs of expectant…

The post A Rare Disease Causes a Mother’s Body to Attack Her Unborn Child. Now a Texas Doctor Has Found a Drug to Stop It. appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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What Happens When a Country Hit Namechecks a Boot Brand?The old joke goes that if you listen to a country song backward, you get your girl back, then your truck back, and, finally, your dog back. The joke works, in part, because country music often expresses abstract ideas—take grief, for instance—by focusing on concrete objects. It’s a genre that likes to show first and tell second.Thanks also to a persistent pressure to perform authenticity, country lyrics tend to be populated with the lifestyle’s—occasionally repetitive—objects and brands. Stetson hats, Ford trucks, and JBL speakers have been name-checked by the likes of Lyle Lovett, Tim McGraw, and John Morgan. Lil Nas X and Miranda Lambert are lyrically united in their love of Wrangler jeans. Recently, Texas boot companies have appeared in popular country songs by artists…

The post Why Country Artists Can’t Stop Singing About Their Luccheses appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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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.

What Happens When a Country Hit Namechecks a Boot Brand?The old joke goes that if you listen to a country song backward, you get your girl back, then your truck back, and, finally, your dog back. The joke works, in part, because country music often expresses abstract ideas—take grief, for instance—by focusing on concrete objects. It’s a genre that likes to show first and tell second.Thanks also to a persistent pressure to perform authenticity, country lyrics tend to be populated with the lifestyle’s—occasionally repetitive—objects and brands. Stetson hats, Ford trucks, and JBL speakers have been name-checked by the likes of Lyle Lovett, Tim McGraw, and John Morgan. Lil Nas X and Miranda Lambert are lyrically united in their love of Wrangler jeans. Recently, Texas boot companies have appeared in popular country songs by artists…

The post Why Country Artists Can’t Stop Singing About Their Luccheses and Tecovas appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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laredo livis mexicue taco photoDavid Ovalle—also known by his DJ handle, D-Rock—has been spinning records for most of his life. He’s played at baseball games, clubs, house parties, and South by Southwest. He even owned his own radio station at one point. On the night before my visit to his Laredo restaurant, Livi’s Mexicue, Ovalle played a gig at a nightclub that was broadcasting a Canelo boxing match. But the 35-year-old, with a trim, light brown beard and a rigid part near the top of his closely cut hair, has recently spent more time remixing other things: barbecue and tacos.DJing came more naturally to Ovalle at first. “It just called to me,” he says. “I love seeing the way that one person can control a whole audience, their emotions.”…

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archival austin photo 1948Spend enough time in our state capital—say, an afternoon—and you’re almost certain to hear a version of “the Austin jeremiad.” It’s a parable of declension, with the narrator wailing that the Austin of today isn’t nearly as appealing as the city of yesteryear. Early iterations of this tale stretch back at least to the dawn of the eighties, prompted by the closure and then the razing of the Armadillo World Headquarters, the legendary music hall that played host to the likes of Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Given the city’s billing as the Live Music Capital of the World, it’s no surprise that subsequent generations have pegged Austin’s fall to the disappearance of other venues, like the Electric Lounge and Liberty Lunch,…

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Nutria HatsIn The New York Times in 1917, a year in which it was forecast that “the civilized world of women will wear more fur than ever before,” a reporter asked a pelt importer what his furs were made of. “Rats and snails and puppy dogs’ tails,” he joked. “It is called by dignified and pleasing names, but as for its ingredients—I think the nursery couplet explains them.” The favored pelt of the moment, the reporter wrote, was “nutria.”Nutria are often mistaken for beavers—both have prehistoric-looking orange teeth—but nutria are typically one-third the size of beavers and one-third as adorable. Beavers have chubby cheeks and paddle tails, and there is a startled quality to the way they hold their little hands in front of them, like…

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Rosa Jimenez updateFour years ago, Rosa Jimenez, 38, sat in a Texas prison, convicted of murdering an Austin toddler back in 2003 by stuffing paper towels down his throat. The truth is, she hadn’t killed him; the boy had likely done it to himself, something numerous experts and lawyers recognized. In fact, over the next 17 years, five different judges had advocated for Jimenez’s innocence and release, but she remained behind bars. Worse, Rosa—five foot two, with long, black hair and a girlish face—was dying from stage-four kidney disease, and a pandemic was raging through Texas prisons, killing inmates like her with weakened immune systems. Even with everything stacked against her, Jimenez—a warm, humble person—remained hopeful. “I’m not going to give up,” she wrote me in September…

The post “I Don’t Have Words”: A Texas Exoneree Receives a Lifesaving Kidney Donation appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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