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

Keshi 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.

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…

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

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

In May, a House Oversight Committee hearing took a turn into reality TV territory when Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene made a personal jab at Dallas Democrat Jasmine Crockett. “I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading,” Greene said. It looked as though the committee was about to devolve into fisticuffs. Then, moments later, Crockett, under the guise of asking a question, fought back at Greene. “If someone in this committee then starts talking about somebody’s bleach blonde, bad built, butch body,” she asked, “that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?”Overnight, quite literally, a political star was born. A clip of their exchange—which also featured Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of New York, reprimanding Greene with a “baby girl, don’t even play”—quickly made…

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