JOHN, A NERVOUS CHATTERBOX WITH A child’s innocence, retches under a tree on the side of the road. “Dust in the lungs,” he says. His companion, the downhearted Mary, forces him to stand and leads him out of sight. “Cops’ll beat you dry for that shit,

WITH STUNNING PRECISION, SARA SAIDMAN, AN OIL FIELD engineer, can still recall the moment that “set the tone for the rest of my employment at Schlumberger,” a Texas-based oil field services company. Saidman took a job at Schlumberger in 2016 because

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CHANTÉ DAVIS, A 16-YEAR-OLD NEW ORLEANS NATIVE, knows that climate change is urgent and personal. In 2005, she and her family were evacuated right before Hurricane Katrina decimated their hometown. They settled in Houston, where, over the past decade

ISABELLE PAPADIMITRIOU WAS FINALLY A GRANDMA. The baby girl, Lua, was born in August 2019 in Brooklyn. Though Papadimitriou lived in Coppell and worked as a respiratory therapist in Dallas, she’d been able to visit her granddaughter in New York twice

BY THE TIME TEXAS LAWMAKERS MEET FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE THE PANDEMIC STARTED, MORE THAN 23,000 OF THEIR CONSTITUENTS WILL HAVE DIED OF COVID-19. MORE THAN 1.3 MILLION WILL HAVE BEEN INFECTED. ROUGHLY 4 MILLION WILL HAVE FILED UNEMPLOYMENT CLAIMS, A

On their last visit, Corken, who had tiny feet and hands, needed a new pair of slides, so they stopped at her favorite shoe store, the only one with a decent selection in size 5. Later, they caught a matinee at an upscale theater. “We always got a pe

ON A MILD, SHOWERY DAY IN august, Laverne Brackens sits in her bedroom with her daughters Lily Mays and Betsy Johnson. This is also her workroom, where she pins together cloth and sews while watching The Price Is Right on a TV mounted on a wall. Outs

THROUGH MY PORTRAIT SERIES “ESSENTIALS” I’VE BEEN photographing the women working in essential positions in Austin during the COVID-19 pandemic. The shelter-in-place order called for citizens to self-isolate—all citizens except those doing essential

THIS MARCH, AS PROTESTS OVER THE DEATH OF GEORGE Floyd spread across the globe and monuments to colonists and racists began to be pulled down, Texas A&M University faced its own reckoning. Since 1918, the school has had a statue of Lawrence Sullivan

SLATON // In an attempt to beat the lockdown blues, a woman in the West Texas town of Slaton has taken up a new hobby: piñata-making. KLBK reports that 78-year-old Hilda Rivera started with the usual, making unicorns and characters from the video gam

“PROGRESSIVE PROSECUTOR” CAN SOUND LIKE A CATCHall descriptor for any district attorney willing to pack fewer bodies into jails and prisons. But one race this year seems to have redefined the term. In a July primary runoff, José Garza, a former publi

THE ROOM WAS PACKED, the shutters drawn against the Austin heat. It was September 17 and Texas state leaders took to one of the smallest rooms in the Capitol building for a press conference on the coronavirus. They filed in that afternoon and took th