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Abner Haynes's Death is Reminder that Leon King Should be in the Texas Football Hall of Fame With HimWhen football great Abner Haynes died last Thursday, at age 86 (his cause of death has not been reported), the news prompted loving reflections on the Texas Sports Hall of Fame inductee’s storied athletic career. Haynes was the most valuable player of the American Football League as a rookie in 1960, when he suited up for his hometown Dallas Texans. He helped Dallas win the 1962 AFL championship, before the franchise up and left to become the Kansas City Chiefs.Before beginning his eight-season pro career, Haynes helped break the football color barrier for Texas’s four-year colleges in 1956, when he joined the team at North Texas State College (now the University of North Texas), in Denton. That was eight years before Warren McVea signed with…

The post Abner Haynes Wasn’t Alone in Breaking Texas College Football’s Color Line 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.

Lloyd Doggett Q&ALloyd Doggett has had a storied career. The Democratic congressman has served in the House of Representatives since 1995, holding on to a seat that’s represented, through various redistricting processes across three decades, Austin, San Antonio, and portions of the Rio Grande Valley. Before serving in Congress, where he’s a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, he spent eleven years in the Texas Senate, where he was a member of the famed “Killer Bee” quorum breakers, then served on the Texas Supreme Court from 1989 to 1994. But he became the answer to a trivia question a little less than three weeks ago, when he became the first Democrat in Congress to call on President Joe Biden to end his 2024 campaign, expressing concern over Biden’s…

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water waste

The post Who’s Wasting Our Water? 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.

Okinawan taco riceThe Tex-Mexplainer series explores the ingredients, techniques, history, and culture of Mexican food in Texas. Leo Davila, the chef-owner of Stixs & Stone taqueria, in San Antonio, had never heard of taco rice until his Korean girlfriend, Kendra Billinghurst, who was raised on the southern Japanese island of Okinawa, mentioned the dish topped with ground beef, lettuce, tomato, and cheese. “It kind of reminds me of taco night at one of my white friend’s houses growing up,” Davila says, “except it’s on steamed rice.” I hadn’t gotten a chance to taste it until I was invited to Cafe Hana, in Irving, by co-owner Sara Nam. Her version, cooked by Okinawa-born employee Aya Ibuka, is a bowl of short-grain white rice topped with saucy ground beef seasoned with garlic,…

The post Not a Taco Salad and Not a Taco Bowl, Taco Rice Is Its Own Delicacy 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.

An irrigation system on Glenn Schur’s farm, near Plainview.As Texas’s population booms and the state grows hotter and drier, it’s more important than ever to understand: Who’s wasting our water? The rains don’t come like they used to, and Glenn Schur can’t rely on the once bountiful water beneath the clay loam soil of the South Plains—the largest cotton-producing area in the world. In the past, his pumps pulled up as much as he needed to irrigate his crops. But recent years have brought drier weather to Schur’s 2,500 acres near Plainview, a town of 20,000 between Lubbock and Amarillo. The Ogallala Aquifer yields less and less. “My granddad dug the well. My dad pumped the well,” said the 65-year-old farmer. “And I’m going to be the generation that capped the well.”The Ogallala,…

The post As the Ogallala Aquifer Dwindles, West Texas Farmers Face a Future Without Irrigated Crops appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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Who's-Wasting-Our-Water-Development-Housing-Katy-SinkholeAs Texas’s population booms and the state grows hotter and drier, it’s more important than ever to understand: Who’s wasting our water? Longhorns used to graze across the street from the house where Ozzy Tirmizi settled with his family in Katy, a western exurb of Houston. He grew up in southern Pakistan, but his dad’s job in oil and gas brought them to Texas in 2011, when Tirmizi was eighteen. Over the following decade, he watched as pastureland was paved over. Strip malls replaced the grass, and the bovine neighbors disappeared.In 2019, Tirmizi entered a doctoral program in geology at the University of Houston. He learned to measure changes in ground elevation by using data from orbiting satellites and started working with a professor who…

The post Thirsty New Subdivisions Have Made the Texas Groundwater Crisis Plain to See 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.

The Roberto Bustamante Wastewater Treatment Plant, in El Paso.As Texas’s population booms and the state grows hotter and drier, it’s more important than ever to understand: Who’s wasting our water? As climate change continues to shift eastward the dividing line between our nation’s arid plains and wetter climes, more of Texas will likely resemble the state’s desert regions in the coming decades. Cities will be forced to adapt to this new reality as they manage water resources. With only 9 inches of annual rainfall—compared with the statewide average of 27 inches—El Paso offers them a glimpse of the future.Until the late eighties, El Paso relied heavily on groundwater extracted from the Hueco Bolson aquifer. But after decades of overpumping caused water levels to plummet, municipal leaders changed course. Since the city implemented an aggressive…

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Who's-Wasting-Our-Water-Fracking-Fresh-water-EnergyAs Texas’s population booms and the state grows hotter and drier, it’s more important than ever to understand: Who’s wasting our water? Without water, there’s no fracking. Without fracking, there’s no twenty-first-century Texas oil boom. Water’s role is evident in the full name of the process—hydraulic fracturing.Drillers pump water, laced with sand and chemicals, deep into the ground to crack open the ancient rocks of the Permian Basin, releasing trapped fossil fuels from their primordial prison. About half of that water—three million barrels a day—is drawn from the region’s fast-dwindling aquifers. That’s enough to feed the faucets of more than 600,000 Texas households, enough for the city of Dallas.Water helped turn the Permian Basin into one of the world’s largest oil fields. Each day, more than…

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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.

Who's-Wasting-Our-Water-Charge-Usage-PricingAs Texas’s population booms and the state grows hotter and drier, it’s more important than ever to understand: Who’s wasting our water? To reduce waste, common sense suggests rescinding water’s current exception from the law of supply and demand. Typically in a market economy, if there’s not enough of a resource, its price goes up, encouraging conservation. Yet while water grows increasingly scarce, it remains relatively cheap.In Texas, unlike in most other states, we treat water both as a public good and as private property, depending on where it comes from and who’s pumping it. Landowners drawing water from their own wells pay almost nothing beyond the price of a permit and a pump. There’s little financial incentive to cut back on water use.The Legislature would…

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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.

Who's-Wasting-Our-Water-Save-Like-San-AntonioAs Texas’s population booms and the state grows hotter and drier, it’s more important than ever to understand: Who’s wasting our water? Thanks to a blind salamander, San Antonio became a national leader in water conservation. The eyeless, five-inch-long mass of virtually unpigmented flesh lives in the watery caverns of the Edwards Aquifer. It’s a pathetic-looking critter but no doubt a source of terror for the tiny snails and shrimp it feasts upon in its lightless subterranean home. The salamander and seven other species found nowhere else on earth depend on the health of the aquifer’s ecosystem.After the unregulated pumping of water threatened the salamander’s survival, federal authorities listed the amphibian as endangered in 1967. That act set in motion four decades of high-stakes lawsuits and…

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