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

This month’s cover story, an oral history, explores the enduring impact of the Livestrong movement, once promoted by professional cyclist and cancer survivor Lance Armstrong to lend encouragement and support to others suffering from the dread disease. For the writer of our story, the topic hit close to home. Senior editor Emily McCullar was ten years old when she lost her mother to breast cancer, in 1996, eight years before Livestrong was born. Emily says, “My mother’s illness has very much informed my work on this story.”That work began late last year, when Emily noticed that 2024 would mark the twentieth anniversary of the Livestrong bracelet. She began talking with contributing editor Leah Prinzivalli about a possible pop culture–focused story, perhaps illustrated by photos 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.

No BuenoWhile I enjoyed the article on Velvet Taco and Torchy’s and their respective aspirations for craft-taco dominance [“Big Taco,” May 2024], I was disappointed by the passing mention of Abilene-born-and-bred Taco Bueno. While its offerings may not be as elevated or quirky as those chains, I dare you to find anyone who grew up in the Big Country, like me, or in suburban Dallas–Fort Worth who doesn’t prefer a Bueno Chilada platter or a Beef Muchaco to anything offered at comparable taco joints.  Mark Doty, Inglewood, California Dug It I was thrilled to see an article about Mason County topaz in the May 2024 issue [“The Last Blue Topaz Hunters?”]. I remember going with my parents and a gem and mineral group from Bexar County on a…

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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.

On a sunny day in Corpus Christi, dozens of volunteers stand knee-deep in the Gulf, forming an assembly line. It’s all part a coastal restoration effort from Harte Research Institute at Texas A&M–Corpus Christi that involves recycling oyster shells from local restaurants. Texas Country Reporter visited with Danielle Downey, a research specialist at the Harte Research Institute, to learn more about how Sink Your Shucks became the first initiative in Texas to reclaim oyster shells and return them to our local waters.

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Alia Gunnell used to get away with sleeping in until 8 a.m. before heading to properties across Marfa, where she runs a landscaping company. But last June, when average daily temperatures were some of the hottest on record across Texas, Gunnell started to feel especially irritable after days of spent fertilizing and watering plants in the heat. Now she starts her workday at 6 a.m. so she and her employees can get indoors by mid-afternoon when temperatures spike. She says she and her husband, Jason, come home and lie together, in silence, on their home’s cool concrete floor. “Otherwise it just feels like your brain is cooking all day,” Gunnell told me recently. This year, the heat dome—a high-pressure system that traps warmth in the atmosphere—arrived…

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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.

FilmTwistersIn theaters July 19In a whirlwind two years, Glen Powell—who was born and raised in Austin—has appeared in Top Gun: Maverick, the rom-com Anyone But You, and Hit Man, a Netflix film directed by fellow Texan Richard Linklater that’s loosely based on a Texas Monthly story. Now he’s at the swirling center of what may be this summer’s biggest blockbuster, a stand-alone sequel to the 1996 megahit Twister, which starred Helen Hunt and the late, great Fort Worthian Bill Paxton. In Twisters, Powell plays Tyler Owens, a blowhard social media personality who chases storms (and clout) while sporting a cowboy hat as the self-described “Tornado Wrangler.” While filming his atmospheric adventures, Owens crosses paths with Big Apple–based meteorologist Kate Cooper, played by Daisy Edgar-Jones, who…

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