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Garden at Post SkylawnOnce a concrete wasteland, the largest public rooftop garden in Texas offers unbeatable views of Houston’s skyline. The five-acre space, Post Skylawn, which is open to all, includes an organic garden, meditative walking paths, and plenty of room for picnics and yoga classes. It sits atop the former warehouse that was part of the Barbara Jordan Post Office, a sprawling sixteen-acre complex that reigned as the city’s U.S. mail hub from 1961 until nine years ago. (In 1984 it was renamed after the pioneering Black congresswoman.) The facility found new life in 2021 as Post Houston and also features an international food market, coworking spaces, the 713 Music Hall concert venue, and a retail village, which opened in February. But it still honors its past.…

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¡Tacos! Mi Gente owners Navin Chatlani (left) and Jaime Elizondo in front of their new taco trailer.Last year, night after night, Jaime Elizondo and Navin Chatlani stared at each other across the street. Elizondo was working at the second location of his Tejano barbecue joint, Smoke Crafters, a yellow trailer stationed in a McAllen food truck park. Chatlani was running his Mexican seafood restaurant, La Bahia. During the many slow nights, they’d wave to each other. “We would stand outside looking at each other’s businesses, wondering what the hell was going on,” Elizondo says. “It was a really slow year for a lot of businesses, you know, especially us.” Eventually they mustered the confidence to talk to each other. The two Rio Grande Valley natives brainstormed what was and wasn’t working. As the conversations continued, they agreed there was at least one…

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Stephen-Harrigan-Essay-Voice-in-the-Live-Oak-Corpus-Christi-feat“Do you know that guy?”The question came from above and behind me, as I walked down Center Drive in Corpus Christi on my way to the Lamar Park Pharmacy. I was an eleven-year-old boy in the middle of an idle summer in 1960, bored, hot, heading for the drugstore’s air-conditioning and its revolving paperback rack. I heard the question from a kid sitting high up in the gnarly branches of a live oak tree, but if his friend replied, I was already too far down the street to make out what he said. And I was too nervous to look back to see who was talking about me. The voice in the tree was unfamiliar, and his face probably would have been as well. But the…

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The Oil Business Keeps Getting YoungerPermian Basin oil grows older and older every day—300 million years and counting. But the Texans aiming to pull that liquid gold up out of the ground? Their ages are headed the other way.Earlier this week, Midland-based Diamondback Energy announced it would acquire rival Endeavor Energy Partners for $26 billion, creating a West Texas colossus. Autry Stephens, age 85, built Endeavor from a single well starting 45 years ago. He told the Wall Street Journal that a recent prostate cancer diagnosis was a “big factor” in his decision to sell.Diamondback is led by 62-year-old Travis Stice, but waiting in the wings is Kaes Van’t Hof, a 37-year-old former tennis phenom from Southern California. Van’t Hof has been elevated to president, a position that in the…

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When the law clashes with linguisticsMoris Esmelis Campos-Chaves sat in the plaintiff’s seat in the Supreme Court chamber on a cold, gloomy day in early January. It was a moment the dark-skinned, five-foot-ten gardener had been waiting for for nineteen years. Campos-Chaves entered the U.S. illegally in 2005 with his wife and two of his U.S.-born children by wading across the Rio Grande near Laredo. The family had fled violence in El Salvador, according to his lawyer, Raed Gonzalez, and Campos-Chaves had worked in the U.S. for nearly two decades since. A ruling, expected later this year, over the validity of the document ordering his deportation will not only affect the family’s future, but could have far-reaching effects for hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants—and it all comes down to…

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Curtis and Detective Scott Sayers arresting a quadruple-homicide suspect in an apartment parking lot.Sometimes his phone would ring smack in the middle of dinner, while the pasta and sausage were still steaming on his plate. Sometimes it would ring at ten p.m., midnight, two in the morning. On the other end of the phone was a detective, and the conversation would go something like this: “Richard, you’ll want to get here real quick because this one’s a mess. See you soon?” The answer was yes, always yes. He’d shoulder his camera bag, head out the door, and ready himself for the dark hours ahead. Coffee? He’d grab a cup near the murder scene. While embedding with the Dallas Police Department’s homicide unit for nearly a year, Richard Sharum photographed the aftermath of some sixty murders. That doesn’t count the…

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'Reality Bites' 30th AnniversaryThe most devastating scene in the 1994 Gen X classic Reality Bites comes when its protagonist, 23-year-old Lelaina Pierce (played by Winona Ryder) interviews for a job at the Houston Chronicle. She’s been fired from her job as an assistant at a local TV morning show, can’t make rent, and she is too proud to take a job at the Gap. The editor interviewing her is skeptical of her motives, noting her lack of relevant experience, but, over Lelaina’s insistence that newspapers are the watchdogs of society, gives her a one-question test to see if she’s got what it takes. “All right,” she asks Ryder’s character, “Define ‘irony.’ ” Lelaina, flustered and in an elevator whose doors are closing, stammers. “It’s a noun,” she asserts. “It’s when…

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Derek Spence, who is fifty, lives in Fredericksburg with his wife and four children. Besides performing, he makes chainsaw sculptures and owns a ghost-tour business.Derek Spence, who is fifty, lives in Fredericksburg with his wife and four children. Besides performing, he makes chainsaw sculptures and owns a ghost-tour business.I played my first gig at fifteen or sixteen, then I went to South Plains College to pursue a music degree. From there I got a job at Fiesta Texas, in San Antonio, before Six Flags bought the park. I played guitar there for a couple years and then moved to Nashville. I was there for five years, and then I moved back to Texas. I was kind of burned out on the music business at that point. This would have been 2000.I started working at the Rockbox Theater, in Fredericksburg, in 2010. If you recall, 2014 is when George was…

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How Brenham Schoolhouse Hotel Went from Schoolhouse to HotelThe walls of the Brenham Schoolhouse Hotel are so alive with layers and texture, they might actually talk. If so, it would be nice if they could answer some questions. Were the schoolchildren who studied Cicero and German here in 1883 actually attending the first public school in Texas, as some locals claim, or was this just one of the earliest? Did the Dominican nuns from Galveston, sent here in 1909 to start a convent, actually hold mass in the chalkboard-lined classrooms, as one neighbor reported? And who inscribed lines of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poetry on the wall in suite three? Walls, we want answers.When Jake and Meagen Gumm first bought the approximately seven-thousand-square foot Italianate schoolhouse in 2018 and began to pull away the…

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Behind Baylor's Title IX Religious Exemption RequestBee Matthey, a nineteen-year-old junior at Baylor University, feels lucky. As a nonbinary student at the largest Baptist university in the United States, they hear the stories of harassment on campus and know that making it to their junior year relatively unscathed is a blessing. “I’ve never been scared,” Matthey said, shrugging off what they call “random microaggressions.” For example, “I definitely have had people tell me ‘you’re going to go to hell.’ ”Matthey is not alone. Queer students at Christian colleges hear direct or implied condemnation all the time. Baylor alum Veronica Penales, in a high-profile lawsuit following a Title IX complaint filed against Baylor in 2021, reported receiving a Bible with all of the so-called “clobber verses”—Scriptures that appear to condemn homosexuality—highlighted.When leveled at…

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