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How to Win Friends and Not Poison Them With BarbecueIt was a drizzly Saturday two Januarys ago when, just after noon, I felt a cramp in my lower abdomen. I was standing in line outside a popular food truck and tried to ignore it the best I could. I made my way up to the widow and ordered a bountiful tray of barbecue for a friend and me to share. It was our second stop of the day. After a few bites, I had lost my appetite. Something from our earlier meal was disagreeing with me, and it had caught up to me fast. The porta-potties outside the food truck weren’t going to cut it. We packed up the food, and a wave of intense pain persuaded me to let my friend drive. We…

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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.

More than 100 RV sites give visitors lots of options for nearby amenities: picnic tables, tables and chairs, barbecue pits, proximity to the pool, or seclusion near the creek.When introducing Pantone’s 2024 color of the year, executive director of the institute Leatrice Eiseman said that Peach Fuzz is a shade that “resonates with compassion, offers a tactile embrace, and effortlessly bridges the youthful with the timeless.” The pale hue was plucked in searching for one that “echoes our innate yearning for closeness and connection.” It’s fitting, then, that the color—and various complementary pigments—can be seen dotting the landscape at the newly opened Camp Landa, a retro, luxuryish RV resort in New Braunfels, about thirty minutes north of San Antonio. That yearning for closeness, in part, is what prompted me to shove my family of five into a borrowed RV for a night in the creeping-close-to-summer Texas temperatures on a recent weekend in May.The…

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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 infielder Alyssa Washington high-fiving head coach Mike White after a home run during a game in March.University of Texas softball coach Mike White is fairly certain his New Zealand accent has softened after six years in Central Texas. Not that he’ll ever be mistaken for anyone from Hallettsville, which he most definitely isn’t.“That’s true,” White told me. “But I’ve lost a little bit of it, you know.”That faraway accent was the most distinctive thing about White when University of Texas at Austin athletics director Chris Del Conte lured him away from Oregon in 2018, after White had taken the Ducks to the Women’s College World Series (WCWS) five times in a nine-season stretch.The coach’s mandate from Del Conte was to put Texas softball on the national stage alongside Oklahoma, UCLA, and other traditional powerhouses. That he did, and fairly quickly, leading…

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Mark Myers investigative featureWhen Anna Albright entered a basketball gym in suburban Austin with her ten-year-old son during a tournament in early 2023, she walked past the man who, decades earlier, had been her coach. The encounter nearly stopped Albright in her tracks. “It was shocking,” she said. “I never thought I’d see him again. My body went into fight-or-flight mode. I looked at him and he was with a team of girls, laughing and joking, and I immediately recognized his demeanor.” Albright kept moving toward the bleachers, and when she sat down, she did a quick internet search on her phone to confirm that the coach was the man she remembered. The first link she found, a February 2023 story from the Killeen Daily Herald, confirmed it. The…

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mosquito-apocalypse-houston-texasThink you have a crummy job? Consider the 47 employees of Harris County Public Health’s Mosquito and Vector Control Division. After each major Houston-area weather event, these hardy public health workers fan out to 21 spots around Harris County. They work in teams of two. One staffer stands in place, bare-limbed, without bug spray, while the other counts how many mosquitoes land on them in a minute. If the number is greater than thirty, the county dispatches a pesticide truck. “That is how far our staff is willing to go to protect the county from the risk of mosquito-borne viruses,” said Max Vigilant, the division’s appropriately named director. “They definitely take some bites.” In the wake of the deadly windstorm that swept through southeast Texas last…

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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 Most Unhinged Amenities at Drake’s New Texas Estate, RankedImagine you’re a famous child actor turned hip-hop artist who spent the first part of the month getting annihilated in a battle with the only rapper to ever win the Pulitzer Prize, and you need somewhere to disappear and lick your wounds. You could do worse, in a place to hunker down, than a $15 million resort turned private estate out by Brenham. Who would think to look for one of the defining pop stars of the twenty-first century there? That might not have been something Drake factored in when he finalized the purchase of the former Inn at Dos Brisas, in Washington County, last fall, but now that he’s been publicly revealed as the owner, we can assume it’s a handy side benefit. Situated roughly…

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Playing Texan: Blood SimpleFilmmakers have long been drawn to “the Texan” as a character type. Our series Playing Texan revisits some of the most notable of these portrayals, from the legendary to the ludicrous, to determine what they say about how the world sees Texas—and how we see ourselves. The state motto of Texas is “Friendship,” so never let it be said that Texans don’t appreciate irony. It was derived from “tejas,” which is how Spanish settlers pronounced the Caddo Indian word for “friend”—right before the early Texans wiped most of them out. Our credo is thus a mordant joke that’s rivaled by those “Drive Friendly – the Texas Way” signs along the highway. Maybe you’ve noticed one after being forced onto the shoulder by a speeding F-150 that…

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A tray from Owens & Hull at Grand Champion.Owens & Hull at Grand Champion combines the best of Atlanta’s barbecue tradition with Texas attitude. Robert Owens and Bryan Hull came up through two different schools of barbecue. Owens cut his teeth in the kitchen of foundational joint Sam & Dave’s BBQ, in Marietta, Georgia, starting in 2007. He left the restaurant in 2011 to open Grand Champion BBQ. Hull debuted his pop-up, Secret Pint, in Atlanta in 2021 after taking a couple courses at Goldee’s Barbecue, in Fort Worth. “I wouldn’t be where I am without those guys,” Hull said. He’d watch instructional videos while working as an audio engineer recording audiobooks. Hull decided last year that he was ready to dedicate his life to barbecue, and Owens wanted an infusion of energy,…

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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.

Colin Allred speaks to media with members of the Congressional Black Caucus during a press conference on voting rights legislation and reforming the filibuster at the U.S. Capitol, in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, January 12, 2022.Colin Allred announced that he planned on seeking the Democratic nomination for Senate last May, joining a long list of Texas Democratic hopefuls who shared the goal of flipping a statewide seat for the first time in three decades. The comparisons to Beto O’Rourke, who ran against Ted Cruz in 2018 and set a new high-water mark in this century for Democrats in Texas, soon followed: both were relatively green U.S. congressmen when they announced bids, both defeated entrenched incumbents to get to Washington, D.C., and they were running against the same man for Senate. But Allred isn’t here for the comparisons. In his mind, he’s a different candidate running in a more dire time for Texas’s 30 million residents. Mainly, he thinks he’s distinct…

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That’s Not Baby’s Breath: The Cute and Highly Invasive Weeds Taking Over Texas YardsAt first I was charmed by the friendly white microflowers popping up in my backyard. And front yard. And sprouting along the sides of my house. If spotted only in passing, the delicate blooms could easily be mistaken for baby’s breath or maybe Queen Anne’s lace. But I’ve bought enough grocery store bouquets to know only that it was neither of those. Through my free plant identification app I learned the news: I was being infiltrated. Torilis arvensis, known as hedge parsley, sometimes helpfully “spreading hedge parsley,” and other times jokingly “burn it,” has reedy stalks with tops that explode in tiny white flowers come springtime. It grows quickly and can be found in most regions of Texas, but it’s not native to the state or…

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