Mimi Swartz

Houston has lost scores of trees, courtesy of Beryl and a surprise derecho. Walking around my newly bare neighborhood, I feel so much grief.

Sometimes, when I was watching various artificial heart experiments in the basement of the Texas Heart Institute, I wondered if I was experiencing something akin to Thomas Edison’s housekeeper. That is, someone with only a tenuous reason to be in a place where history was being made—or was made today, when it was announced by the Texas Heart Institute that a new total artificial heart, the BiVacor TAH, had kept a Houston man alive for several days. It is, as one of its developers likes to say, t…

Sometimes, even big-time lawyers have trouble getting paid. Consider Jonathan Mitchell, who says his regular hourly rate is $1,200. The baby-faced, Austin-based savant graduated from the University of Chicago Law School with high honors in 2001 and clerked for right-wing U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Mitchell has since earned a reputation as the canniest champion of the movement against abortion rights. He’s the architect of Texas Senate Bill 8, the law that allows anyone to sue, an…

As Yogi Berra liked to say, it was déjà vu all over again Tuesday, in the ongoing prosecutions against Texas attorney general Ken Paxton. Much as he did in September, when the Texas Senate acquitted him of bribery and corruption charges, the attorney general walked blithely out of a courtroom Tuesday morning largely unscathed. This time, however, it wasn’t his Republican cronies in the state Senate who let him off, but the lawyers who had been prosecuting him for nearly a decade. With Paxton’…

Before Beth Dutton and Beyoncé, “rodeo wear” was just a style I had been taught all my life to avoid.

My father always pampered his pets. So when he fell ill and moved in with us, it was no surprise that his corgi came to rule our home. What I didn’t expect was for Trilby to care for me after Dad was gone.

Until I visited the new incarnation of La Griglia, the popular Italian restaurant that has been around since 1991, I had completely forgotten about something that used to be intrinsic to understanding Houston. Once upon a time (starting when I moved here in the metazoic year of 1976) the past was a country no respectable Houstonian would bother to visit. Nostalgia was for chumps; sentimentality for suckers. Back then and in many ensuing decades, the future was all: from NASA, to Philip Johnson’s…

The free-floating anxiety in the Senate chamber at the Texas Capitol was so thick on September 16 that, from the floor to the gallery, you could almost feel the emotional electrons pinging through the air. That Saturday morning was, of course, the day on which, after hearing nine days of arguments and testimony, thirty senators filed into the sun-streaked room to vote to keep or expel Ken Paxton as attorney general of Texas, the first-ever such trial of the state’s chief law enforcement officer.…

Forgotten places leave behind sensory keys that, when reencountered, unlock entire mental, sensual, and emotional worlds. Whenever I drive past the former location of the Bun ’n’ Barrel Terrace on Austin Highway in San Antonio, for instance, my mind takes me back to the fried chicken legs, as crispy as they were juicy, that came shod in the early 1960s in frilly, pastel-colored paper shoes, which proved irresistible to my girly six-year-old self. Soon enough, I see my impossibly young and alread…

Thursday, day eight of the Ken Paxton impeachment trial, was a day that left many longing for the fireworks of Wednesday’s events in the Texas Senate chamber. The public gallery was virtually empty except for the seasonal invasion of crickets (find your own metaphor) and some mildly curious visitors that included the wife of Republican state representative Briscoe Cain of Deer Park and their five well-scrubbed children who seemed deep into their homeschooling homework, perhaps because it was mor…