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Jamie Diaz and Gabriel Joffe share an issue of W magazine.A day after her release from prison after serving nearly thirty years of a life sentence for aggravated robbery, Jamie Diaz headed to a Dallas salon to have her makeup done. She sat in a chair, her cane within reach, waiting for her appointment. She wore a pink long-sleeved sweater and thin black sweatpants. Her large hands were folded in her lap, left over right, the latter swollen and clenched in a fist since her stroke earlier this year. With gray hair that fell to her shoulders, a furrowed brow, and thin lips that formed a slight smile, Diaz wore an expression both warm and quizzical. She attempted to say something, but her speech was severely impeded.It was the first time I’d seen Diaz. She…

The post A Houston Artist’s Career Took Off While She Was Imprisoned. Now Free, She’s Learning to Paint Again. appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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Book review: MalasLeo Tolstoy’s famous line about all happy families being alike has a fatal flaw: there are no happy families. Happy moments, happy days, maybe even happy years—sure. But look closely enough, and you’ll find the trauma.One way that ambitious authors explore these ordeals is by writing multigenerational epics that draw on historical events to illuminate the past and the present. Given how much Texans love a big story, it’s a little surprising that so few novelists have written books that stretch across the centuries to take advantage of our violent and event-filled history. Philipp Meyer’s The Son is a rare exception, though James Carlos Blake, Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, and Larry McMurtry have all told era-spanning stories over the course of series of novels. (Oddly, two of…

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Texans You Should Know is a series highlighting overlooked figures and events from Texas history. Clad in a sharp Western jacket, necktie, and skirt, the 26-year-old rising country star is magnetic as she takes the stage for a December 1955 broadcast of a TV variety show called Ozark Jubilee. As soon as the camera is on her, she sways, steeling herself for the opening notes of “Burn That Candle,” in which she makes a plea to her mother to keep a candle burning and the door open wide until she strolls back home with her “sugar pie” by her side. Her brassy vocals seem better suited for a neon-lit Texas honky-tonk than the Jubilee set, whose backdrop was a quaint suburban home. But as audiences across…

The post How Rockabilly Trailblazer Charline Arthur Shocked Nashville and Almost Became a Superstar appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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Livestrong-wristband-twentieth-anniversary-Lance-Armstrong-Texas-cancer-featWhen the movie Saltburn was released, in 2023, viewers of a certain age quickly clocked a familiar yellow bracelet on the main character. The particular shade of yellow—let’s call it Homer Simpson meets caution tape—and the half-inch width were all anybody needed to identify the Livestrong wristband, a $1 piece of silicone that first debuted in 2004. The costuming choice was logical. The movie was, after all, set in 2006, and the accessory had been as ubiquitous in that decade’s fashion as the Von Dutch trucker hat and dresses over jeans. The film’s director, Emerald Fennell, called the Livestrong band a “crucial period detail,” as if the character, a well-meaning if malleable young man, could not be fully conveyed without it. As anyone who remembers the…

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An aerial view of the Devils River, on May 30, 2024.On a scorching May afternoon, Dell Dickinson was wearing creased jeans, a faded button-down, and a cowboy hat and boots. He kept a nine-millimeter Beretta in a holster on his hip. “I’m not trying to impress anyone with that,” he said, adding that he hasn’t hunted in nearly sixty years. “I don’t get any thrill out of killing something.” But sheep ranchers such as Dickinson sometimes have to deal with predators—black bears, bobcats, and coyotes. Right now he’s more concerned about another kind of interloper: river enthusiasts.Dickinson’s property, Skyline Ranch, sits on the Devils River, a turquoise ribbon of water that begins with a trickle from a spring dozens of miles north, in Sutton County, about 200 miles west of Austin, and flows 94 miles…

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Filmmaker Yen Tan Couldn’t Find a Movie About Pet Grief. So He Made One.The first sound you hear at the beginning of All That We Love, the new film directed by Austin-based filmmaker Yen Tan, is wind chimes tinkling in the breeze. The gentle stillness of this opening scene immediately reminded me of the hush that envelops the world when someone you love dies. In this case, that someone isn’t a parent, sibling, or a spouse. It’s a pet.“My dog Tanner died ten years ago, and I was looking for films to see if there was something I could watch to help me go through what I was going through,” Tan says. “But I wasn’t able to find anything.”When he lost his Chinese Shar-Pei, Tan watched the classic tearjerker Marley and Me, which ends (spoiler alert!) with a…

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David Beebe at his home, in Marfa, on May 19, 2024.The stack of letters is about an inch high. Most are handwritten in black ink on lined, three-holed notebook paper, with A-plus penmanship. Curlicues, stars, and graffiti-style lettering are reserved for signatures, although the writers typically sign off with something other than their given name: Boo, Mr. 18, Yishai, Mr. Palmer, Your Boy L.A., Dan D Man.For the past decade or so, inmates at the James Lynaugh Unit, a state prison outside Fort Stockton and some eighty miles from Marfa, have written letters to David Beebe, a man they’ve neither met nor seen. They know his raspy voice and his drawl, y’all, as the deejay on the Night Train Express, a radio show that airs Tuesday nights, from nine until midnight, on Marfa Public Radio.…

The post This Late-Night “Grown-Folks” Soul Music Broadcast Serves as a Lifeline for Inmates at a Fort Stockton Prison appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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This caviar-topped taco is one of the special menu items Zavala's Barbecue is offering at the American Airlines Center this week.After suffering through chicken tenders by the bucket and mac and cheese topped with coleslaw at TD Garden, the Mavericks faithful who traveled to Boston are in for a treat when they return to Dallas. The American Airlines Center will host the first Mavericks home game of the NBA Finals on Wednesday evening, and Zavala’s Barbecue will be ready with smoked meat and caviar at the booth they’ve run all season in section 121.When I sat down with pitmaster and caviar connoisseur Joe Zavala at the barbecue joint he co-owns with his wife, Christan, in Grand Prairie, he asked, “What goes better with barbecue than caviar?” He popped open a tin of Petrossian Royal Ossetra caviar as a tray of barbecue arrived from the kitchen.…

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Pre-Olympic profile of UT Swimmer Lydia JacobyBy the time Lydia Jacoby dove into a pool at the Tokyo Aquatics Centre in the summer of 2021, the first-time Olympian had long known who had her back. In Seward, Alaska, where the seventeen-year-old had lived her whole life, everybody knows everybody. And everybody supported Jacoby’s dreams.So the fact that hundreds of her friends and supporters gathered at a railroad terminal in Seward (population: roughly 2,700) to watch the hundred-meter breaststroke final wasn’t out of the ordinary. What was unusual was her surprise win in a shade under 1 minute and 5 seconds (1:04.95, to be exact), which sent the crowd jumping up and down and up and down, higher and faster once she tapped the wall. Some of those following from the forty-ninth…

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Who Will Buy Infowars?After years of lawsuits from several of the families of the children murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School, two high-profile defamation trials, and a bankruptcy process that’s stretched for nearly two years, something of a resolution has finally emerged in the saga of Alex Jones and Infowars. As a reminder, Jones was found liable in court for defamation in 2022 because of his repeated, absurd on-air claims that the Sandy Hook parents were actually actors hired by someone—the New World Order or the deep state—as part of a plot to seize Americans’ guns. The result was that two juries, one in Austin and one in Waterbury, Connecticut (about twenty miles northeast of Newtown, where the Sandy Hook shooting occurred), ordered him to pay damages totaling…

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