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

WHO: University of Texas at El Paso scientists Eli Greenbaum, Michael Harvey, and Matthew L. Brady, along with Congolese researchers Chifundera Kusamba, Robert Kizungu Byamana, Chance Bahati Muhigirwa, Mwenebatu Aristote, and Wandege Muninga.WHAT: A six-week expedition to the Itombwe Mountains in the Democratic Republic of Congo, during which the joint Texan-Congolese team discovered two rare species—a frog and a bird—that had not been spotted in the wild in decades. WHY IT’S SO GREAT: Both species were feared to be extinct. The red-bellied squeaker frog, Arthroleptis hematogaster, had not been seen since the 1950s, and the last-recorded sighting of the yellow-crested helmetshrike, Prionops alberti, was almost two decades ago. During their six-week expedition through the cloud forests on the mountain slopes, researchers were able not only to…

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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.

A few days after the largest wildfire in Texas history had torn through Hemphill County, the locals in Canadian—the charming Panhandle town a hundred miles northeast of Amarillo—all seemed to understand something that outsiders like myself could not: no matter how many journalistic overtures were made, no matter how many pleasantries included, area ranchers, among the hardest hit by the fires, were not going to talk about their ordeal—at least not yet, anyway.Initially, this recurring message seemed hard to believe. During most instances of calamity, be it violent crime or natural disaster, some victims are almost always willing to share their experiences. In Sutherland Springs, I spoke to a woman in her home 24 hours after a gunman’s bullet had left a golf ball–size hole…

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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.

Over the course of a single week around 1960, Willie Nelson wrote “Crazy,” “Funny How Time Slips Away,” and “Night Life.” It was, perhaps, the greatest finite stretch of time in the history of Texas music. The spring of 2024 might not quite match Willie’s exalted week of composing, but it’s not too far off, either. Over the course of the next eight weeks, eleven of Texas’s most compelling artists—from bona fide megastars to venerable legacy acts to up-and-comers—are releasing new albums. The list is headlined by Beyoncé’s Act II, of course, but it includes a lot of names that fans are either already familiar with or that they’ll likely learn about in the next few months. In fact, it seems as though most of 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.

This story was originally published in November 2021 and has been updated.The Houston metro area has more praiseworthy barbecue joints than most entire states. We have our favorites, of course. Last year Texas Monthly released a list of the best new barbecue joints in Texas. In 2021 we published our top fifty barbecue joints list, along with fifty more worthy of honorable mentions, but our barbecue recommendations don’t stop there. You can get a great meal of smoked meats at any one of these Houston barbecue joints.In the city of HoustonBlood Bros. BBQ (Top 50)Barbecue doesn’t get much more creative than at this joint, which is known more for having a rotating menu of myriad specials—think Thai green curry boudin and thit nuong pork belly…

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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.

On an unseasonably warm Thursday night in February, Sarah Palin’s helicopter landed in the multi-acre field behind the One Shot Distillery and Brewery in the Hill Country town of Dripping Springs. The small aircraft was dwarfed by most of the trucks in the venue’s impromptu overflow parking lot, where several hundred far-right pilgrims had joined a convoy on its way to the Texas-Mexico border. As the one-time Alaska governor and former vice presidential candidate stood in front of the hundreds of flag-waving Texans, she expressed love for the Lone Star State and the various strains of Christian-nationalist rebellion evident among members of the crowd.Referencing the state’s southern border—where tensions were mounting between the Texas National Guard and federal law enforcement over Governor Greg Abbott’s multibillion-dollar…

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