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For an American sports fan, following a rugby match can be disorienting. The constant action is a remedy against boredom, but the experience is like watching every other sport you might be familiar with happening all at once. “It has a combination of basketball, football, hockey, soccer, and even some elements of track,” said Rodd Newhouse, COO and part owner of the Dallas Jackals. The pace of play drew him to the game, and he’s hoping it will draw new fans to a professional league that most Texans have never heard of, Major League Rugby.MLR was founded seven years ago in Dallas, though North Texas has only had a team since the Jackals debuted in 2022. The Houston SaberCats have played since the inaugural 2018…

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Parker McCollum performing in Nashville during the 2022 CMA Fest.Country singer Parker McCollum epitomizes cowboy swagger. His usual white tee, gold chain, and heavily starched jeans are as much of a uniform as Orville Peck’s mask of fringe. Heck, he even has a whole album, Gold Chain Cowboy, dedicated to the classic look. It’s the cowboy version of effortless chic. McCollum says his fashion sense is a tribute to MTV Cribs and Pure Country, the shows he spent his youth watching in Conroe, north of Houston. “I grew up cowboying a lot from my granddad but also, I wanted to be a country singer and have a big ranch, have a bunch of cars, and maybe some jewelry and some fly stuff like that,” McCollum says. The “weird hybrid mix of the two” has worked…

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Dan Rather DocumentaryDan Rather was perhaps the most famous journalist in America back when being a news anchor at one of the big three network television channels—ABC, CBS, and NBC—mattered.  The Texas native’s long career, including 24 years as the face of CBS’s Evening News, is one of the most storied in the history of American journalism—even when considering his sudden, ignominious fall from his CBS perch—and is the subject of Rather, a new documentary streaming on Netflix. The film, directed by longtime Hollywood producer Frank Marshall and featuring Rather, who is a sprightly 92, is snappy and well-crafted, but it’s mostly interested in defending and celebrating the newsman. In its more transcendent moments, it touches on larger questions about journalism, how it should be done, and…

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Last week, it was announced that Texas Monthly was recognized by two prestigious entities: the Religion News Association and the Webby Awards. The RNA awards ceremony took place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on April 20. According to the organization’s website, “The Religion News Association has been the premier professional association for people who report on religion in the news media. Our mission is to equip journalists throughout the world with the tools and resources they need to cover religion with balance, accuracy and insight.” At the awards, Texas Monthly‘s deputy editor of digital, Sandi Villarreal, won first place in the RNA’s Multimedia: Analysis category, for “The Biblical Womanhood of Angela Paxton,” which was published online in September 2023.On April 23, Texas Monthly Studio‘s The Official Love…

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Mauro “Max” Chiefari.Mauro “Max” Chiefari was in the Nile Delta, about a hundred miles north of New Cairo, when he felt his stomach rumble. He had just eaten some raw-milk cheese shared with him while on a search for hardwood to fill the smokers at Longhorn Texas BBQ. It was late 2020, and the restaurant was to open soon. Wood is scarce in Egypt, so Chiefari had answered a Facebook ad promising something better than the old furniture scraps he was sometimes offered. “The drive took six hours,” he recalled, and was mostly off-road, but the person who put out the ad had good acacia and oak. As he loaded the wood, he saw a motorcycle carrying four people being pulled by a donkey. “It was just…

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RobotruckersOn a sunny Wednesday morning, a cyclist pedals furiously down the shoulder of Interstate 20, just south of Dallas. He’s no more than ten feet from dozens of cars zooming by at seventy miles per hour. One tiny mishap—say, a passing driver distracted by changing the radio station and swerving at the worst possible moment—could kill the cyclist. And he has no idea that approaching rapidly behind him is an eighteen-wheeler without a driver in control.Fortunately for the cyclist, pods mounted on the truck’s sides are equipped with cameras, lasers, and radar that give the vehicle a 360-degree picture of its surroundings and help it gauge distances. The sensors identify the cyclist as a moving object that needs to be avoided and send data about…

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Closeups of Joel Osteen, Kendrick Lamar, and Haley Joel OsmentKendrick Lamar surprise-released a new single on Monday, and Drake had a bad day. The track, a six-and-a-half minute instant classic, was a howl of rage and mockery at the Canadian megastar, escalating a war of words that had recently tipped from cold to hot in a way that effectively salts the earth beneath poor Drake’s feet. Neither of those fellas are Texans, though, so why are we writing about it? You won’t believe this, but it’s because of Houston megachurch pastor Joel Osteen.Nearly five-and-a-half minutes into the track, Lamar drops yet another brutal simile in a song full of devastating insults. “Am I battling ghost or AI?” he asks, referencing both a song Drake released in April that featured an AI-generated verse mimicking Tupac…

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Onlookers stop to take photos of the Sam Houston statue wearing a Houston Texans jersey in Huntsville.The statue of Sam Houston in Huntsville, Texas, stands a mighty 67 feet tall. It’s one of the tallest in the United States, just six inches shorter than the giraffe sculpture at the Dallas Zoo and a foot shorter than the Iwo Jima Memorial in Washington, D.C. (Ol’ Sam is, alas, less than half the height of the Statue of Liberty.) The Huntsville monument is named “A Tribute To Courage,” and it has towered over motorists heading north on Interstate 45 for the past thirty years. Normally, the graven image of the first president of the Republic of Texas is dressed formally, in a cravat, waistcoat, and jacket, gazing over the state whose independence he helped secure while resting his right hand on a cane. In…

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Even if you’re not BOI and you have no idea what a feeder road is, the Texanist is here to help.Q: I’m about to move from California to Galveston. In lieu of “shaka, bruh,” “surf’s up,” or “hella cool,” what are some words and phrases I should learn to use in conversation?Dianne White, Santa BarbaraA: Howdy, and welcome to Texas! Moving to a new state can be an exhausting and life-altering experience. And pulling up stakes on the West Coast—pretty Santa Barbara, no less—and putting down new ones on Galveston Island, off the Third Coast, presents an extra layer of cultural disruption on top of the logistical challenges that come with transplanting oneself. That’s because we Texans take our state culture and identity more seriously than…

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The Last Sugar Mill in Texas Just Closed. Is Mexico To Blame?Historians believe that Spanish missionaries built the first sugar mill in Texas in the 1780s at Mission San José y San Miguel de Aguayo, in present-day San Antonio. Four decades later, Stephen F. Austin’s colonists planted cane in southeast Texas, and over the course of the nineteenth century, sugar grew into one of the state’s most lucrative exports. The sprawling cane plantations along the Brazos River—worked by thousands of slaves toiling in pestilential conditions—became known as the Sugar Bowl of Texas. After mosaic disease decimated the state’s sugar crop in the 1920s, cane production was largely abandoned for nearly half a century. But the 1962 U.S. economic embargo against Cuba, which restricted sugar imports, helped resurrect the industry. In 1970, a cooperative of one hundred South…

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