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

From afar, the new exhibition at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth looks like a collection of colorful leaves piled on the museum’s ground floor. But once viewers step into the concrete ellipse at its center, they are quickly immersed in a barbecue universe. Rebecca Manson, whose Barbecue installation opened last week, estimates she crafted and composed 50,000 individual ceramic pieces (though the official description credits a mere 45,000).Manson grew up in New York, where she still lives and works. Her father has always been the cook of the household in the summer. “The Weber grill is his stove,” Manson told me when we met at the museum. Lamb chops and beef steaks have always been his specialties. “As he gets older, the meat…

The post 50,000 Reasons to Go See ‘Barbecue,’ a New Artwork at Fort Worth’s Modern 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.

In Talking Texan, we explore the diverse dialects, interesting idioms, and unique linguistics of the Lone Star State. Texans like to think of themselves as being somewhat apart from the rest of the country—or even the world. We dress differently, we cook differently, we politick differently, we live differently. And we most definitely talk differently. A big part of what makes the Texas tongue stand out, on top of our sharp West Texas twangs and molasseslike East Texas drawls, is the fact that our speech is accentuated with numerous—a buttload of, one might even say—colorful adages, axioms, idioms, and sayings. If it’s excessively hot out, for instance, a Texan might declare it “hotter than Hades.” If, on the other hand, it’s excessively cold, you might describe…

The post Ten Folksy Ways to Insult Your Fellow Texan (or Any Other Deserving Soul) 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.

Down near the bottom of the track list of Willie Nelson’s latest album, his 152nd, is a new song that should join what I think of as his personal canon. These songs are not necessarily his biggest hits nor his best-sellers, though entries like “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground,” which he wrote, and “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” which he did not, certainly qualify as such. Rather, these are the songs that have come to matter most to his fans. They’re the ones that get played widely at weddings and funerals, in the quiet moments when life becomes too much to bear, when a body needs to hear just the right song—one that will express something they can’t find words for or will…

The post On His 152nd Album, Willie’s Still Dropping Once-in-a-Generation Songs 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.

One of the peculiar and unfortunate artifacts of the Texas election calendar is the primary runoffs. Few states use this system to pick Democratic and Republican nominees who don’t win an outright majority of votes during the primary, and for good reason. Runoffs are a relic of efforts to protect white political power in the South. Few voters bother to participate in them—even fewer than the primaries, which are themselves low-turnout elections. As a result, a small partisan cohort has outsized influence on who governs Texas. If the primaries are a rock concert in an arena where only a fifth of the seats are filled, runoffs are a house show where only the most hardcore fans bother to show up. Or, to keep with the…

The post Dade Phelan Won His Runoff, But the Texas GOP Establishment Is Losing the War to the Far Right 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.

The Tex-Mexplainer series explores the ingredients, techniques, history, and culture of Mexican food in Texas. On May 13, an Indiana judge ruled that a taco is a “Mexican-style sandwich.” The contentious statement created a kerfuffle, with media outlets chiming in with their own opinions. Allen County Superior Court Judge Craig J. Bobay probably didn’t expect the national blowback when he sided with the Famous Taco owner Martin Quintana, who argued that tacos are sandwiches and therefore didn’t breach the agreement he signed with the Allen County Plan Commission restricting Quintana to open only a sandwich shop on the Fort Wayne property. If Bobay had looked for precedent, he would’ve learned that the matter had been decided eighteen years ago in Worcester, Massachusetts. In 2006, in a similar…

The post A Taco Is Not a Sandwich. A Torta, on the Other Hand, Is. appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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