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Hailed by some as egalitarian but decried by others as a cattle call, the open boarding process at Southwest Airlines is on the way out. The Dallas-based carrier on Thursday said that it will soon offer assigned seats for the first time systemwide in its 53-year history.In a barrage of corporate jargon, Southwest called the change a “product evolution,” one of many “transformational commercial initiatives” aimed at “driving shareholder value” and improving “operational efficiency.” The bottom line? The airline decided it can make more money with assigned seats than without.For many customers, open seating was the last notable difference between Southwest and its competitors, including crosstown rival American Airlines and longtime competitor United Airlines. Southwest has come to resemble those competitors by flying bigger planes,…

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The first thing you notice when you walk into Women & Their Work, an East Austin contemporary art gallery and nonprofit, is the butt of a missile. The six-foot-high shape is suspended in a fragment of wall, decorated with white and gray brick-patterned wallpaper. Illuminated by the gallery’s front windows, the light bouncing off the harsh contours of the missile’s Mylar surface draws your eye away from the pile of rubble beneath it, the glowing outline almost disappearing into the wall itself. This sculpture, The Strike, is part of “Bending Light” (on view through August 22), a group exhibition designed to explore “the intricacies of Black femininity and queer identity.” Its four Texas-based artists depict adversity and strength in pieces that employ disparate materials from…

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My hands trembled a little as I locked my car in the parking lot of a small, blue, windowless building off Burnet Road with an image of John Wayne spray-painted on a boarded-up side door. There was nothing to be anxious about, I tried to remind myself. Still, my voice came out a pitch higher than I was aiming for. “Hey! I’m here to see about the beertender job,” I squeaked. Duane Johnson was behind the bar at Buddy’s Place. His blond hair was thinning but hanging in there, framing his round cheeks as he flashed me a welcoming smile. His face was flushed pink, undoubtedly because he was fixing something between taking care of customers. Duane was always fixing things at the 65-year-old bar. He…

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Sporting work boots, cargo pants, a camo tee, and a bottom lip packed with dip, Jason Wilson looks like the sort of guy who wouldn’t be caught dead in a Prius. And yet that’s what he pulls up in when he meets me at a ranch gate off Interstate 10 more than a hundred miles south of Midland. Beyond the fence line, a handful of cattle graze. As we pass through one gate, then another and another, there’s no hint that this land is used for anything other than ranching. Then, about six miles down the road, the industrial scaffolding of an electrical substation appears in the distance, surrounded by a chain-link fence. Wilson, my personal tour guide, parks his Prius outside a prefab building that…

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He grew up in a working-class neighborhood of Brownsville, in a home with few books. But Oscar Cásares was surrounded by avid storytellers, including his parents and the aunts, uncles, and neighbors who would drop by almost daily. His three older siblings had moved out of the house by the time he was ten. “I was,” he said, “basically raised as an only child.” So he spent lots of time in the presence of adults, hearing them gossip about friends and relatives, recount family legends, and tell amusing stories from their jobs—as a cattle inspector, say, or a pastor, or a union organizer. Oscar studied the way they crafted their spoken stories. “I had these uncles who would tell the same stories over and over but…

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