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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.

Only One Texan Won at the 2024 James Beard AwardsTexas walked away with just one medallion at the James Beard Foundation awards ceremony last night. The near wipeout disappointed many Texas viewers of the gala, which was streamed live on YouTube, especially because the state had initially done well in January, with 39 semifinalist nods. The festivities were held at the Chicago Lyric Opera.The winner of the lone Texas prize, for Best Chef: Texas, was a thrilled and emotional Ana Liz Pulido, owner of her own three-year-old restaurant, Ana Liz Taqueria, in Mission, a city of 87,000 people. In her acceptance speech, she said, “The first person I want to thank is my dad,” a taqueria owner. “I’m so grateful and honored to represent the Rio Grande Valley,” she continued. “We are a small…

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Mayor Eric Johnson at Dallas City Hall on May 23, 2024.When Eric Johnson made headlines last September for leaving the Democratic Party for the Republican Party, I sent him a text asking if he’d talk. Johnson, a Dallas native who served six terms in the Texas House before first getting elected mayor, in 2019, didn’t put me on his calendar then, and he later explained that he preferred to speak to national media rather than local and statewide outlets. But when I contacted him again this spring, he was eager to talk—and he didn’t hold back.Texas Monthly: What’s on your schedule today? Eric Johnson: I dropped my youngest, who’s two, at daycare and my eldest, who’s ten, off at school. My six-year-old didn’t have school today, so we’re hanging. I actually took him to the playground…

The post “The Real Heart of the Democratic Party Is With the Criminals” appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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CastrovilleSpirits are high in the class I’m crashing on an April night at a community center in Castroville, a small town 25 miles west of San Antonio. About fifty of us, including the mayor, sit in folding chairs while the language teacher, a man from Alsace, a region in northeast France that passed back and forth between that country and Germany over the centuries, leads us in a song praising a schnitzelbank. That’s the Alsatian word for “workbench,” a fitting muse for this crowd of industrious Texas Alsatians, most of whom trace their lineage back to Castroville’s founding, in 1844. We practice two more songs: “S’Elsass Unser Landel!” (“Alsace Our Land!”) and “Texas, Our Texas.” The class’s organizer, Mark Haby, tells us, “Remember, we will sing…

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Working Life Mike Holt, Prosthetics DesignerWorking Life is a monthly column in which Texans talk about their jobs. Mike Holt, who is 74, is an anaplastologist and owns ARTech Laboratory, a Midlothian workshop that creates custom silicone prostheses.I grew up in construction. My dad was a contractor, my grandfather was a contractor, I was a contractor. My brother was a contractor, until he went to work at the prosthetics company Life-Like Laboratories, in Dallas, and fell in love with anaplastology. He saw how meaningful it was to patients to have realistic limbs that helped them feel like themselves again. And there were not a lot of anaplastology labs, so we started our company in my garage in 1995, and we kept working together until my brother passed away in 2016. Now…

The post At This Anaplastology Lab, Each Lifelike Limb Is a Work of Art 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.

What’s Up With “Espresso,” a Mysterious New Song Shared by Maren Morris?Shortly after this article was published, “Espresso” was removed from Apple Music. However, the song remains on YouTube. Maren Morris has been something of a chameleon since emerging in 2016 with the R&B-tinged country of her major-label debut, Hero. The Arlington-born star veered into full-on dance-pop in 2018 with the single “The Middle,” a collaboration with producer Zedd and electronic music duo Grey, then brought that sound back with her to Nashville by inflecting her sophomore album, Girl, with a pop-country vibe in 2019. Later that year, she went rootsy, teaming up with Brandi Carlile, Natalie Hemby, and Amanda Shires for the Americana supergroup the Highwomen. As most of the world was emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, she filtered a strong country aesthetic through a nineties…

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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.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott speaks during the NRA ILA Leadership Forum at the National Rifle Association (NRA) Annual Meeting & Exhibits at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center on May 18, 2024 in Dallas, Texas. The National Rifle Association's annual meeting and exhibit runs through Sunday.The first time she met the woman who would become her state representative, they were both serving as greeters at a polling location in Round Rock. Throughout early and Election Day voting, Jennie Birkholz, a Democrat and public health care consultant, answered voters’ queries about a school board election in the Austin suburbs in November 2022. She recalls Caroline Harris Davila, a Republican running for a seat in the state House of Representatives, shaking hands with would-be constituents and bringing her adorable golden retriever for voters to pet. In between conversations with those about to cast ballots, Birkholz, who has two school-aged children, asked Harris Davila what Birkholz considered to be softball questions related to public schools and how they are funded. Birkholz says the…

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Mark Melton in his home office, in Dallas, on April 22, 2024.Here was Mark Melton, one of Dallas’s most decorated lawyers, stepping out of his milky white Cadillac Escalade as two dozen code-compliance officers swarmed one of the most crime-plagued spots in the city. Melton, who’s in his mid-forties, didn’t look the part of someone who steers billions of dollars’ worth of private equity deals each year. A sweat-stained purple Patagonia cap shaded his scruffy salt-and-pepper beard; an untucked T-shirt dangled loosely over his jeans. Melton has the throaty rasp of a chain smoker, and as he surveyed the spectacle, he deadpanned, “This is pretty normal.”The Rosemont at Meadow Lane apartments, just a few miles southeast of downtown, could easily pass for typical middle-class dwellings. Many of the roughly two hundred units are two-story townhomes, their…

The post A Hotshot Corporate Lawyer Got Angry About Illegal Evictions—And Then Did Something About It 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.

Mark Melton in his home office, in Dallas, on April 22, 2024.Here was Mark Melton, one of Dallas’s most decorated lawyers, stepping out of his milky white Cadillac Escalade as two dozen code-compliance officers swarmed one of the most crime-plagued spots in the city. Melton, who’s in his mid-forties, didn’t look the part of someone who steers billions of dollars’ worth of private equity deals each year. A sweat-stained purple Patagonia cap shaded his scruffy salt-and-pepper beard; an untucked T-shirt dangled loosely over his jeans. Melton has the throaty rasp of a chain smoker, and as he surveyed the spectacle, he deadpanned, “This is pretty normal.”The Rosemont at Meadow Lane apartments, just a few miles southeast of downtown, could easily pass for typical middle-class dwellings. Many of the roughly two hundred units are two-story townhomes, their…

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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.

Jesse Daniel ProfileOn the way to rehearsal at South Austin’s Space ATX, Jesse Daniel stops to check out a billboard advertising his new album, Countin’ the Miles. His look, both in the larger-than-life photo looming above and now, on the street below, is vintage seventies country—Levi’s, serious sideburns, and a pearl-snap shirt. Later, while he and his band practice playing in preparation for his album-release show at the long-standing downtown venue Antone’s the next night, Daniel channels that old-school vibe into his music. It’s stripped down and propulsive and feels authentic. In that small rehearsal room, guitar slung over his shoulder, he gets ready to face the crowd at a pivotal performance in his career.Before Daniel and Jodi Lyford, his fiancée and bandmate, moved to San Marcos, in 2019, they…

The post Jesse Daniel Found Salvation in Country Music and a Home in Texas appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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Madelyn Manlove climbs the shelves of the artist studio in Open Dance Project’s Red Landscape: Georgia O’Keeffe in Texas 1912-1918.Five days before the first performance of Open Dance Project’s Red Landscape: Georgia O’Keeffe in Texas 1912-1918, the theater at Rice University’s Moody Center for the Arts is being transformed into a movable dreamscape of rooms.Designer Ryan McGettigan is building the biggest parts of his set in place. A foray into one of O’Keeffe’s meditative pastel flowers this is not: doorframes and windows on casters help to define multiple rooms and enable the spaces to morph like memories. Huge canvases based on the artist’s early paintings and a monumental photograph of Palo Duro Canyon consume the walls, creating a sense of slightly claustrophobic interiority. A bare tree stands in one corner. A bookcase full of small objects consumes another, and there’s a large dollhouse with…

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