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Elephant VaccineWHO:  Paul Ling, a professor at Baylor College of Medicine, along with the veterinary and elephant care teams at the Houston Zoo.

WHAT: A new vaccine for elephant endotheliotropic herpes virus (EEHV), a devastating viral disease that can swiftly kill young elephants, often just one to five days after symptoms start showing.WHY IT’S SO GREAT: It’s been fifteen years since Baylor professor Paul Ling, a virologist who specializes in the human herpes virus, got involved in the project to treat and prevent EEHV. It all started with Mac, a two-year-old Asian elephant who died from the condition at the Houston Zoo in 2008. The disease, which can result in severe hemorrhaging and is fatal as often as 80 percent of the time, is the leading cause of…

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People gather to enjoy the beach at the Stewart Beach in Galveston.When my wife and I rented a beach house in Galveston’s affluent West End on a recent weekend, we weren’t sure what to expect. News emanating from the island bore a whiff of chaos. We’d been disconcerted to learn, for example, that nineteen-year-old Damiana Humphrey, visiting from Oklahoma, had fended off a shark in nearby waters with a punch to the face the previous week, but we decided to proceed—with caution.To reach our destination we had to fight apocalyptic traffic. Leaving on a Friday afternoon from Houston, we drove sixty miles in three hours—around triple the normal time. We finally crossed the causeway only to find the streets gridlocked with cars and the coast congested with beer-sozzled sun worshippers. Even the typically more sedate West…

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Ramiro-Gonzales-Governor-Greg-Abbott-pardonRamiro Gonzales was not a good person 23 years ago—even the lawyers fighting for his life acknowledge that. On January 15, 2001, Gonzales, who was 18, kidnapped, raped, and murdered Bridget Townsend in rural Medina County, outside San Antonio. He also kidnapped and raped another woman—a crime for which he pleaded guilty. Life had been unkind to him, though life is unkind to many who don’t commit heinous acts. His mother was a drug addict; he didn’t know his father; he had been sexually abused. He grew accustomed to a life of violence. At Gonzales’s 2006 trial, forensic psychiatrist Edward Gripon testified that the inmate was a future danger to society, and he was sentenced to death.By then, Gonzales had met an insistent “country boy…

The post Religious Leaders Are Pleading for the Life of a Death Row Inmate. In Texas, Mercy Is in Short Supply. appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders NetflixEvery reality show promises some reward. Often these are explicit—a million dollars, a proposal, a recurring role on hit teen drama Glee—but even those without a formal prize offer a steady paycheck, and attention, which can be even more valuable to the aspiring star. For sixteen seasons, the CMT show Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making the Team did both. Though it was canceled in 2022, a new Netflix docuseries, America’s Sweethearts, picks up the megaphone on June 20 and promises an even bigger audience for the women vying for pairs of blue and silver pom-poms.The show certainly checks two of the most important reality TV boxes: it’s got attractive people and cutthroat competition. “You need to look like a supermodel but perform like an athlete,” a woman says in a promo.But…

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Jeff Nichols/Bikeriders profileBelieve it or not, Jeff Nichols is tired of critics comparing his latest movie to Goodfellas. There are surface similarities between the Austin-based filmmaker’s sixth feature, The Bikeriders, and the Martin Scorsese Mafia epic that regularly places high on lists of the greatest films ever made. Both movies are sprawling character studies whose stories span years. The films both indicate the passage of time through era-specific music cues, use voice-over narration and freeze-frames, and ultimately accomplish the trick of glamorizing—then exposing the dark underside of—a subculture that’s long been romanticized in the popular consciousness. Nichols’s film spent the latter half of 2023 on the film-festival circuit, building buzz for its eventual wide release on June 21. At those festival screenings, critics largely took to the…

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We-Were-Illegal-Jessica-Goudeau-book-excerptAustin writer Jessica Goudeau’s second book, We Were Illegal: Uncovering a Texas Family’s Mythmaking and Migration, which was published this week by Viking, is a deeply researched examination of the lives—and lies—of Goudeau’s extended clan, who first came to Texas in the 1820s. When my classmates asked me, as a new fourth grader in Memphis, Tennessee, recently transplanted from San Antonio, if I knew any Texas Rangers, they were probably thinking of the baseball team. But the famed law enforcement agency that goes by the same name was the most Texas-y thing I had going for me. My great-uncle Frank Probst had been a Ranger, and I could tell them about the visits we’d made when I was growing up to his ranch, not far…

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Every Wednesday for the last eight years, Kerry Max Cook has gone to the website of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals at 9 a.m. to scan the list of rulings officially published that day. He was looking to see if the court—the highest criminal tribunal in the state—had issued a final judgment on his case, which was one of the longest and most harrowing in Texas history. The mild-mannered Cook had been tried for the murder of Linda Jo Edwards in Tyler three times since 1978: he was found guilty that year, appealed the verdict and had a mistrial in 1992, and was found guilty again in 1994. Constantly proclaiming his innocence, Cook spent almost two decades on death row, where he was stabbed…

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The main dining room at McAdoos.As a child, I looked forward to the regular trips with my mom to our local post office in the Hill Country town of Boerne. I can still smell the cardboard boxes and recall the excitement of buying stamps to send letters to my international pen pals and shipping Christmas presents to my uncle in faraway Nebraska.Starting in the early 1900s, U.S. post offices served as a community hub. Texans would catch up with neighbors, pay taxes at the teller window, pick up food stamps, and check out the “Most Wanted” posters (just in case). Post offices no longer play a role in most Americans’ routines. Although my hometown post office is still open, thousands have closed across the country. But these buildings, from the…

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Netflix is Opening a Big Box Retail Store at the Dallas Galleria. Here’s What We Want From It.Back in the early days of the pandemic, Netflix provided a certain comfort to a nation unable to safely leave home. We gasped at the real-life exploits of Joe Exotic in Tiger King, savored the pluck of Anya Taylor-Joy’s self-destructive chess prodigy in The Queen’s Gambit, and thrilled to the conflict between the Kooks and the Pogues on Outer Banks. We whiled away the hours with Warrior Nuns and Teenage Bounty Hunters, Sneakerheads and Baby-Sitters Clubs. We accompanied Emily to Paris, the Bridgertons to the social season, and—so bored were we—occupied ourselves with something called Floor is Lava. But all of that was years ago, and the outside world has resumed, with the specific dynamics of 2020 largely buried in whatever deep hole most of…

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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.

Netflix is Opening a Big Box Retail Store at the Dallas Galleria. Here’s What We Want From It.Back in the early days of the pandemic, Netflix provided a certain comfort to a nation unable to safely leave home. We gasped at the real-life exploits of Joe Exotic in Tiger King, savored the pluck of Anya Taylor-Joy’s self-destructive chess prodigy in The Queen’s Gambit, and thrilled to the conflict between the Kooks and the Pogues on Outer Banks. We whiled away the hours with Warrior Nuns and Teenage Bounty Hunters, Sneakerheads and Baby-Sitters Clubs. We accompanied Emily to Paris, the Bridgertons to the social season, and—so bored were we—occupied ourselves with something called Floor is Lava. But all of that was years ago, and the outside world has resumed, with the specific dynamics of 2020 largely buried in whatever deep hole most of…

The post Netflix House Is Coming to the Galleria Dallas. Here’s What We Want From It. appeared first on Texas Monthly.

Thank you for reading!