The Texas Observer

EDITOR IN CHIEF Tristan Ahtone INTERIM EDITOR IN CHIEF Gabriel Arana EXECUTIVE EDITOR Megan Kimble ASSOCIATE EDITORS Christopher Collins, Sophie Novack DIGITAL EDITOR Danielle Lopez SENIOR REPORTER Lise Olsen STAFF WRITERS Amal Ahmed, Michael Barajas

More than 1,000 people have died in county jails across Texas in the past decade. How these deaths are investigated is at the heart of our investigation “Locked Up and Left to Die”—a serious undertaking by reporters Michael Barajas and Sophie Novack

Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick is heartsick and afraid. He’s scared for his six grandchildren, who may grow up in a country that rejects its greatness in exchange for wokeness and anti-whiteness. Critical race theory and the New York Times’ 1619 Pro

TWO new congressional seats were awarded to Texas after the 2020 Census, for a total of 38 districts. Ninety-five percent of the past decade’s population growth has come from Hispanic, Black, and Asian people. Yet the GOP’s map increased the number o

This election cycle, the first high-profile Democrat to announce a statewide run in Texas is also one of the nation’s leading civil rights lawyers. Lee Merritt, who this summer announced he would challenge indicted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton i

215 JAILS have failed at least one TCJS inspection from 2010–2020. An average of 45 JAILS failed at least one TCJS inspection each year. ■

Veronica Ceci held two jobs after earning her master’s degree in printmaking in 2014. The first was as a master printer at Austin’s Flatbed Press, a role that involves the skilled use of printing presses, tools, materials, and processes to help other

HOUSTON AND GALVESTON, TEXAS, MARCH 2007 Cathy McBroom felt herself unraveling as she drove back to the brick house she shared with her husband, Rex, and youngest son, Caleb, in the quiet Houston suburb of Clear Lake. It was still early on Friday, Ma

It’s a gloomy, overcast Sunday evening in August, and Albert Old Crow pulls a collapsible crate on wheels that held two giant CD binders from his maroon truck. Old Crow, 66, is host of the Beyond Bows and Arrows radio program in Dallas. He’s tall wit

In 2008, just after college, I spent the summer traveling across Texas in a midnight-blue Corolla with a crooked “Yes We Can!” Obama bumper sticker. I’d been hired by a new organization called the Texas After Violence Project, founded by Walter Long,

We would not be here today after 67 years without each and every one of you. Whether it’s helping with your membership dollars or extra donations, sharing on social media, passing your issue along to a library, or just telling your friends and family

On a hot September afternoon, 16-year-old Jackson Biffar drove west to the town of Pottsboro, a rural community of 2,500 people north of Dallas. He started his journey from Ivanhoe, another tiny town an hour away, just south of where the Red River de

Carlton Carl remembers distinctly how he first ran across the Texas Observer. “It was probably 1956 or ’57 when the Observer was still young,” he says. “My father handed me a copy of the Observer which was still then a broadsheet, and the (Wisconsin)

Recently, I have been to the middle of the earth,And it was very hot.But there was no one thereTo tell about it. * Through some divine repugnance of your own,You would not scatter easy, caught the wind,And blew back in my face. And was it love,Or ins

PRESENTED BY Any consideration of the Texas Observer would be incomplete without an appreciation for the political cartoons and original artwork found in its archive. Over the years, the Observer’s pages have featured pointed illustrations that skewe