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Working Life Mike Holt, Prosthetics DesignerWorking Life is a monthly column in which Texans talk about their jobs. Mike Holt, who is 74, is an anaplastologist and owns ARTech Laboratory, a Midlothian workshop that creates custom silicone prostheses.I grew up in construction. My dad was a contractor, my grandfather was a contractor, I was a contractor. My brother was a contractor, until he went to work at the prosthetics company Life-Like Laboratories, in Dallas, and fell in love with anaplastology. He saw how meaningful it was to patients to have realistic limbs that helped them feel like themselves again. And there were not a lot of anaplastology labs, so we started our company in my garage in 1995, and we kept working together until my brother passed away in 2016. Now…

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What’s Up With “Espresso,” a Mysterious New Song Shared by Maren Morris?Shortly after this article was published, “Espresso” was removed from Apple Music. However, the song remains on YouTube. Maren Morris has been something of a chameleon since emerging in 2016 with the R&B-tinged country of her major-label debut, Hero. The Arlington-born star veered into full-on dance-pop in 2018 with the single “The Middle,” a collaboration with producer Zedd and electronic music duo Grey, then brought that sound back with her to Nashville by inflecting her sophomore album, Girl, with a pop-country vibe in 2019. Later that year, she went rootsy, teaming up with Brandi Carlile, Natalie Hemby, and Amanda Shires for the Americana supergroup the Highwomen. As most of the world was emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, she filtered a strong country aesthetic through a nineties…

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Texas Gov. Greg Abbott speaks during the NRA ILA Leadership Forum at the National Rifle Association (NRA) Annual Meeting & Exhibits at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center on May 18, 2024 in Dallas, Texas. The National Rifle Association's annual meeting and exhibit runs through Sunday.The first time she met the woman who would become her state representative, they were both serving as greeters at a polling location in Round Rock. Throughout early and Election Day voting, Jennie Birkholz, a Democrat and public health care consultant, answered voters’ queries about a school board election in the Austin suburbs in November 2022. She recalls Caroline Harris Davila, a Republican running for a seat in the state House of Representatives, shaking hands with would-be constituents and bringing her adorable golden retriever for voters to pet. In between conversations with those about to cast ballots, Birkholz, who has two school-aged children, asked Harris Davila what Birkholz considered to be softball questions related to public schools and how they are funded. Birkholz says the…

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Mark Melton in his home office, in Dallas, on April 22, 2024.Here was Mark Melton, one of Dallas’s most decorated lawyers, stepping out of his milky white Cadillac Escalade as two dozen code-compliance officers swarmed one of the most crime-plagued spots in the city. Melton, who’s in his mid-forties, didn’t look the part of someone who steers billions of dollars’ worth of private equity deals each year. A sweat-stained purple Patagonia cap shaded his scruffy salt-and-pepper beard; an untucked T-shirt dangled loosely over his jeans. Melton has the throaty rasp of a chain smoker, and as he surveyed the spectacle, he deadpanned, “This is pretty normal.”The Rosemont at Meadow Lane apartments, just a few miles southeast of downtown, could easily pass for typical middle-class dwellings. Many of the roughly two hundred units are two-story townhomes, their…

The post A Hotshot Corporate Lawyer Got Angry About Illegal Evictions—And Then Did Something About It appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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Mark Melton in his home office, in Dallas, on April 22, 2024.Here was Mark Melton, one of Dallas’s most decorated lawyers, stepping out of his milky white Cadillac Escalade as two dozen code-compliance officers swarmed one of the most crime-plagued spots in the city. Melton, who’s in his mid-forties, didn’t look the part of someone who steers billions of dollars’ worth of private equity deals each year. A sweat-stained purple Patagonia cap shaded his scruffy salt-and-pepper beard; an untucked T-shirt dangled loosely over his jeans. Melton has the throaty rasp of a chain smoker, and as he surveyed the spectacle, he deadpanned, “This is pretty normal.”The Rosemont at Meadow Lane apartments, just a few miles southeast of downtown, could easily pass for typical middle-class dwellings. Many of the roughly two hundred units are two-story townhomes, their…

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Jesse Daniel ProfileOn the way to rehearsal at South Austin’s Space ATX, Jesse Daniel stops to check out a billboard advertising his new album, Countin’ the Miles. His look, both in the larger-than-life photo looming above and now, on the street below, is vintage seventies country—Levi’s, serious sideburns, and a pearl-snap shirt. Later, while he and his band practice playing in preparation for his album-release show at the long-standing downtown venue Antone’s the next night, Daniel channels that old-school vibe into his music. It’s stripped down and propulsive and feels authentic. In that small rehearsal room, guitar slung over his shoulder, he gets ready to face the crowd at a pivotal performance in his career.Before Daniel and Jodi Lyford, his fiancée and bandmate, moved to San Marcos, in 2019, they…

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Madelyn Manlove climbs the shelves of the artist studio in Open Dance Project’s Red Landscape: Georgia O’Keeffe in Texas 1912-1918.Five days before the first performance of Open Dance Project’s Red Landscape: Georgia O’Keeffe in Texas 1912-1918, the theater at Rice University’s Moody Center for the Arts is being transformed into a movable dreamscape of rooms.Designer Ryan McGettigan is building the biggest parts of his set in place. A foray into one of O’Keeffe’s meditative pastel flowers this is not: doorframes and windows on casters help to define multiple rooms and enable the spaces to morph like memories. Huge canvases based on the artist’s early paintings and a monumental photograph of Palo Duro Canyon consume the walls, creating a sense of slightly claustrophobic interiority. A bare tree stands in one corner. A bookcase full of small objects consumes another, and there’s a large dollhouse with…

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Lee Pace as Joe MacMillan in AMC's Halt and Catch Fire, season 1, episode 1.The phrase “Texas tech” either brings to mind the Lubbock university, clunky Cybertrucks, or those cute yet worrying little delivery robots. As of 2022, Texas’s tech scene was the second biggest in the country and accounted for 6.2 percent of the state’s workforce. But the state’s technology industry isn’t new. As longtime residents—and fans of the television show Halt & Catch Fire—know, the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex was dubbed Silicon Prairie in the 1980s, when the region was home to major technology companies such as Texas Instruments and Tandy Corporation, which owned Radio Shack and Computer City. Halt, set in that world, premiered ten years ago at South by Southwest. In a full Texas circle, the show’s creators, producers, and crew gathered to celebrate that anniversary…

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Head coach Wade Phillips of the San Antonio Brahmas watches during game against the Arlington Renegades at Alamodome on May 19, 2024 in San Antonio, Texas.Someone once called Wade Phillips a lousy head coach. That someone was Wade Phillips. He said this back in 2015, during a press conference at which he was introduced as the Denver Broncos’ new defensive coordinator. The now 76-year-old son of legendary Stetson-clad Houston Oilers coach Bum Phillips had worked for the Broncos before, both as a coordinator and then, for two inglorious seasons in 1993 and 1994, as head coach. Phillips went 16–16 and was fired. More head-coaching opportunities would come in the following decades, and Phillips was fired from those too. The Buffalo Bills canned Phillips in 2000 after three seasons. Jerry Jones and the Dallas Cowboys axed him midway through the 2010 season—his fourth in Dallas. Phillips figured a less-than-stellar reputation had preceded…

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Detroit Tigers relief pitcher Shelby Miller strikes out Chicago White Sox's Dominic Fletcher to end the team's winning game on March 30, 2024, in Chicago.Shelby Miller has been playing professional baseball for fifteen years, since he was a first-round MLB draft pick out of central Texas’s Brownwood High School in 2009.The 6-foot-3 right-hander was pitching in the major league playoffs at age 21, even before he nearly won Rookie of the Year. At 24, he was an All-Star. He was also a key figure in two high-profile trades early in his career, sending him from the St. Louis Cardinals to the Atlanta Braves to the Arizona Diamondbacks. It was in Arizona, when he injured his throwing arm in 2017 and needed Tommy John surgery to reconstruct his elbow, that Miller’s career took a drastic turn for the worse.Miller went 15–9 as a rookie and collected 37 total wins before…

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