Lea Konczal

Todd Dodge slid back into the saddle at 6:30 Monday morning as the new head football coach at Lovejoy High School, in the Dallas suburb of Lucas, about thirty miles north of the city. Seldom has one man oozed so much joy about a first day on the job. “Gosh, am I fired up to be back in it,” he told me this week. “I guess I didn’t know how much I missed it.” Dodge is among the greatest Texas high school football coaches ever, with a 234–72 overall record, including a 79–1 run during one five-ye…

Kathleen Hoffmann could have been a ghost. As the 87-year-old toed the foul line of her team’s lane at Solms Bowling Club, there wasn’t much around her to separate this moment, in 2023,­ from 1983, when Hoffmann was a fairly new member at Solms; or from 1933, shortly after the club moved to this spot from its original location across the street; or even from 1903, when the club was only five years old. Bowlers still scrawled their scores on chalkboards, teens still scrambled to set up pins at…

Quick: imagine a Texan. If you thought of a rugged white guy in a cowboy hat, artificial intelligence agrees with you—almost. Inspired by a Rest of World story that examined cultural stereotypes in the popular AI image generator Midjourney, we asked the program to create one hundred images in response to various Texas-related prompts, such as “a Texan,” “a house in Texas,” and “a plate of Texan food.” Of the 100 individuals Midjourney spat out in response to “a Texan,” 92 wore cowboy hats. Fi…

Every year, residents of the Texas border city compete to see who can give the best scream.

He’s a fourth-generation watermelon farmer, he married the Texas Watermelon Queen, and he puts his face on every melon he sells.

Ila Loetscher took costumed turtles on late-night TV and founded a nonprofit that has rescued thousands of the creatures.

San Antonio’s Pig Stand is facing an uncertain future. But one day in October, the restaurant’s makeshift family of regulars took time to honor the past.