Forrest Wilder

Greg Abbott hired a coterie of high-priced attorneys to stop Corpus Christi federal Judge Janis Jack. It’s working.

The procedure is already illegal here. Now extremists entering the Legislature want to make it a felony for patients, punishable by death.

Thanks to his border-security operations, DPS director Steve McCraw has never paid a price for his many failings, Uvalde foremost among them.

Hotelier Monty Bennett wants a Collin County school board to adopt a scheme that would let Texas students attend private academies on taxpayer dollars.

Federal intervention empowered the Edwards Aquifer Authority to restrict water waste like no other area of the state.

Decades of overpumping, spurred in part by agricultural subsidies, have left too much of the region with too little groundwater.

The scenes in and around Houston of angry, sweaty citizens threatening and attacking the very utilities workers sent to restore their electrical power have looked like something out of a Monty Python skit. In Sugar Land, twenty miles southwest of the Bayou City’s business district, a group of men reportedly wielding assault rifles menaced linemen as they worked to restore power. On Southwest Freeway, a man casually walked up to a utility truck and beat it with what appears to be a stick. Elsewhe…

An ascendant faction of the GOP wants to make the party smaller and purer while keeping Democrats from power by any means necessary.

A few weeks ago, I was working outside my Austin home on a rainwater-catchment system—I’m one of those incorrigible weekend warrior DIYers who keeps Home Depot in business—when I noticed I was completely drenched in sweat. It was midmorning in May, in the shade, still hours away from the peak heat of the day. I was just tinkering with little irrigation parts, not doing anything as laborious as the ditchdigging and stonemasonry that had occupied my winter and spring. Yet the air felt as if it cou…

One of the peculiar and unfortunate artifacts of the Texas election calendar is the primary runoffs. Few states use this system to pick Democratic and Republican nominees who don’t win an outright majority of votes during the primary, and for good reason. Runoffs are a relic of efforts to protect white political power in the South. Few voters bother to participate in them—even fewer than the primaries, which are themselves low-turnout elections. As a result, a small partisan cohort has outsized…

Life slows down for both students and visitors, who can watch red-eared sliders and snapping turtles in the heart of the Austin campus.

If you’re a native Texan, or if you’ve lived here awhile, you’ve probably had it drilled into your head: don’t waste water. And you’ve likely noticed how our ever-hotter, ever-drier summers are wreaking havoc on our aquifers, reservoirs, rivers, trees, and landscapes. Thanks to our old pal climate change, we are now even contending with a new type of drought! For those who didn’t get the message, however, water utilities across much of the state have been increasing rates for heavy users, cracki…

Brigette vonHoldt was grabbing lunch at Viet Cajun, a restaurant on the Galveston Island Seawall, when a chatty local approached her. The man had pegged her and her group, correctly, as out-of-towners. Birders, he figured, if the binoculars they carried were any clue. “You know what you should do,” he told vonHoldt, “is go look at these wolves.” VonHoldt was thrilled at the suggestion—not because it was the kind of locally-sourced hot tip that travelers crave, but because she is one of the p…

Up against the wall, Charles Butt! The Jacobins in the GOP have a new enemy, and it’s the 86-year-old chairman of Texas’s beloved grocery chain, H-E-B. This weekend, party officials in four counties in East and Southeast Texas voted to condemn the “Democrat billionaire” for involving himself in “advocating for policies contrary to the Republican Party of Texas platform.” Among Butt’s alleged offenses against the party: —Advocating against “election integrity.” (Ahead of the 2020 election, Bu…

Dade Phelan may soon have the distinction of becoming the first Texas House Speaker to lose his seat since 1972, when Democrat Fred Head, one of those rare do-gooder types in state government, knocked off Rayford Price. Phelan’s opponent, oil and gas consultant David Covey, is no Fred Head, and little about this matchup has to do with good government. Still, Phelan’s inability to avoid a runoff against his Republican primary challenger is a political earthquake. Even if he does win his runoff on…

Mere months ago, Governor Greg Abbott suffered one of the biggest face-plants of his long career. Even after commanding the Texas Legislature to meet in two special sessions, vetoing the bills of unyielding lawmakers, and threatening to campaign against any legislator who crossed him, Abbott failed to convince the Republican-controlled House to pass a voucher plan that would use taxpayer funds to subsidize private school tuition. Rarely, if ever, had the governor risked so much political capital…

The late Texan writer Molly Ivins famously quipped, “Good thing we’ve still got politics in Texas—finest form of free entertainment ever invented.” In these grim and angry days, “entertainment” is perhaps not the first word to come to mind. Insurrection, violence, Ted Cruz’s podcast—none of these brings the warm fuzzies. Current events have assumed a surreal, almost hallucinatory nature: Did Greg Abbott really seem to lament that shooting unarmed immigrants was off-limits? Did a state representa…

After sitting dry for 222 days, Jacob’s Well, the iconic artesian spring near Wimberley, has started to flow again. From mid-June through mid-January, the popular swimming hole was a miserable sight: the water level had receded below the lip of the well’s mouth, leaving behind bleached limestone and a dead-looking Cypress Creek, usually the very picture of a healthy Hill Country stream. Hays County, which manages the spring as a park, banned swimming. Today, thanks to beneficial rainfall, the sp…

With the proliferation of state-of-the-art indoor climbing gyms, the sport has taken off across the state. Ready to go climbing on real rock? Here are some of our favorite crags, on public and private land, from West Texas to North Texas. If you’re new to climbing outdoors, consider hiring a professional guide for your first outing. Continental Ranch offers prime limestone climbs. Continental Ranch Comstock If you’re looking for pristine rock in a rugged wilderness setting, then…

The November day had dawned chilly and damp, the sun bundled in gray cloud banks. Now, in the early afternoon, the air has warmed only a few degrees, and a persistent mist slicks the limestone—horrid conditions for rock climbing. But I must try. I’ve spent three months training hard in the gym, torturing myself on a finger-strengthening device called a hangboard and doing weighted pull-ups like a maniac. I’ve gathered two friends to assist, and a drone will soon be sent aloft to capture what I h…