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

State representative Glenn Rogers wants to confiscate your firearms and create a registry of firearm owners. So said the large, red-type message on a glossy mailer sent to voters’ homes in his rural North Texas district in late February. On the leaflets, Rogers’s head is clumsily pasted, via a photo editing tool, onto the body of a man in a suit carrying a leather bag full of assault rifles. The man is shaking President Biden’s hand, and a text bubble reads, “Their guns are yours.”Rogers was flipping through this mailer and others on a recent Friday in his study at his ranch office outside Graford, an hour west of Fort Worth. As usual, he was wearing boots, jeans, and an ironed, button-down ranch shirt. Behind…

The post A Deposed Texas Republican’s Lament About Slander and Corruption appeared first on Texas Monthly.

Thank you for reading!

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

Stuart Rowe has found himself revisiting a name tag pasted to a page in his old journal: “Hello my name is: Aaron,” it says. It had belonged to Aaron Bushnell, the young Air Force service member who died last month after setting himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., in an extreme act of protest against Israel’s actions in Gaza, which he called a “genocide” on social media prior to his death. In the journal, Rowe had written beneath the name tag: “Prayer: Figuring things out.”The writing is a memento from the pair’s first meeting, in August 2021 at an Anglican church in San Antonio called the Gathering, where members were encouraged to swap name tags with someone they would…

The post In San Antonio, Friends of Aaron Bushnell Remember a Devoted Helper appeared first on Texas Monthly.

Thank you for reading!

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

Robie Flores couldn’t get out of Eagle Pass fast enough. Growing up in the border town as the only girl in between her older brother, Paco, and her younger twin brothers, Marcelo and Alejandro, she felt frustrated by the boredom and wanted to escape the confusion of a place that made her feel like she wasn’t American or Mexican enough. “I actually always told people when I went to college, [that] I’m from San Antonio, because it’s the closest notable city,” Robie recalls.When she graduated from high school, Robie left Eagle Pass for wider pastures and a chance to reinvent herself. She earned a master’s degree in news and documentary journalism from New York University and worked for CNN and Bloomberg. Then, in July 2015,…

The post Border Pundits Need to Watch ‘The In Between’ appeared first on Texas Monthly.

Thank you for reading!

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

Terry Allen likes to call himself an artist, full stop. The rest of us tend to complicate things. We like to call him a conceptual artist or a multimedia artist—or a singer-songwriter-playwright-sculptor-painter-pianist. We feel we have to, because he has played so many different roles in his life. Considered both a grandfather of alternative country music and a grand master of modern conceptual art, he’s written hundreds of songs and radio plays. His physical work sits in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts, and a dozen other museums, as well as Dallas Fort Worth International Airport and Bush Intercontinental. Allen, who is eighty, grew up in Lubbock and lives in Santa Fe, and no living artist captures the darkness and light…

The post Terry Allen Doesn’t Care What the Smithsonian Wants appeared first on Texas Monthly.

Thank you for reading!

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

Among the many enduring images of Hurricane Harvey’s 2017 devastation in Houston was the reminder that when faced with floodwaters, fire ants will assemble in groups of up to 100,000 and link their legs together to create nearly watertight rafts that can span several square feet. The venomous red hexapods then collectively float to safety before releasing and continuing their important work as backyard terrorists.Now researchers at Texas A&M have drawn inspiration from the phenomenon and mimicked it to develop synthetic materials that can autonomously assemble, disassemble, and reconfigure in response to different conditions, such as changes in light or heat. Professor Taylor Ware of A&M’s biomedical and materials science engineering programs, one of the authors of the study published in Nature Materials, says he…

The post How Some of Texas’s Most Terrifying Species Are Inspiring Engineers appeared first on Texas Monthly.

Thank you for reading!