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Like so many of Dr. Irene Stafford’s impoverished and unhoused patients, the twentysomething woman showed up, in labor, at the Houston hospital having received no formal prenatal care. Stafford, a maternal and fetal medicine specialist, leaped into action and safely delivered the baby.As required by Texas law, the young woman was tested for syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease that can prove deadly to the mother and can spread to the fetus in the womb if untreated. The test results were positive, but by the time the doctors received them—many hours later—the new mother and her infant had been discharged.Stafford called the phone number provided by the patient, whom she refers to as Miss Jones to maintain her privacy. The woman who answered introduced herself as…

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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.

Bridgett vonHoldt was grabbing lunch at Viet Cajun, a restaurant on the Galveston Island Seawall, when a chatty local approached her. The man had pegged her and her group, correctly, as out-of-towners. Birders, he figured, if the binoculars they carried were any clue. “You know what you should do,” he told vonHoldt, “is go look at these wolves.” VonHoldt was thrilled at the suggestion—not because it was the kind of locally sourced hot tip that travelers crave, but because she is one of the preeminent experts on the “ghost wolves” of Galveston, coyotes that carry unusually high levels of DNA from red wolves, the world’s most endangered wolf. VonHoldt, an associate professor of evolutionary genomics at Princeton University, and Kristin Brzeski, a conservation geneticist now at…

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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.

Earlier this month, the Texas Monthly art department was named a finalist in seven categories by the Society of Publication Designers—one of them being brand of the year. TM is in prestigious company in that category, nominated alongside Garden & Gun, The Guardian, National Geographic, and The New York Times Magazine. Texas Monthly was recognized as a finalist in the below categories:Brand of the YearTexas MonthlyDesign: Cover, News/Documentary/EssayMarch 2023, “The Campaign to Sabotage Public Schools“Design: Feature, Lifestyle/Travel/Food/Shelter; StoryNovember 2023, “The Good Place“Photography: Feature, Lifestyle/Travel/Food/Shelter; Single/SpreadMarch 2023, “Where to Eat Now“Photography: Feature, Lifestyle/Travel/Food/Shelter; StoryNovember 2023, “The Good Place“Illustration: StorySeptember 2023, “We’re #1“Social: Entire Channel@TexasMonthly Instagram The winners will be announced during the 59th Annual SPD Awards Presentation in June. For a full list of finalists, click here. Congratulations to Emily Kimbro, Victoria…

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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.

How do you make an American classic like meat loaf a bit more . . . Texan? You treat it like a giant enchilada. Specifically, a truck stop enchilada, by drowning it in a chili gravy and melting a heavy blanket of orange cheese over the top.Truck stop enchiladas likely need no introduction, but in case you’re new here, let’s give a brief primer on this quintessential Tex-Mex dish, named for its ubiquity at roadside oases. Lightly spiced ground beef is rolled in corn tortillas; doused in a mild roux-based chili sauce; and topped with cheese, onions, and, perhaps, pickled jalapeños. It’s comfort food at its best, as familiar on Texas menus as chicken-fried steak or fajitas. It’s not a huge leap to transpose that…

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Nobody came to Navarro cheer to be famous,” Monica Aldama said in her soft twang. She was sitting in her office, a long, narrow treehouse of a space tucked away on the second floor of the gym at Navarro College, in Corsicana, about an hour southeast of Dallas. The wall behind her desk was red and lined with trophies, and I recognized it as the spot from which she’d given many interviews on Cheer, the Netflix docuseries that rocketed her to fame. A large piece of what looked like butcher paper was taped across a fluorescent fixture in the ceiling—a diffusion filter placed by the camera crew to create a more flattering light—and I couldn’t tell if it was still there because she hadn’t noticed it…

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