Skip Hollandsworth

One should never attempt to guess what kind of film Richard Linklater is going to make next. Since 1985, the indie maverick has written and directed movies about everyone from eccentric Austin misfits (Slacker) to Texas high schoolers on the last day of classes (Dazed and Confused) to a young couple who meet on a train in Europe (Before Sunrise). He has tackled genres as varied as the western (The Newton Boys), political satire (Fast Food Nation), and science fiction (A Scanner Darkly). He relea…

“Can we talk UFOs?” I asked Nicholas Suntzeff, the regents professor of physics and astronomy at Texas A&M University. “I’d be happy to,” he replied, letting out a chuckle. “But just so you know, the government now wants us to call them unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP.” The wiry, good-natured Suntzeff, who’s 71, is one of the most respected astronomers in the world, a specialist in cosmology and supernovas. He majored in mathematics at Stanford University, earned his doctorate in ast…

When you’re underpaid, inexperienced, and overloaded with files detailing allegations of child abuse, there is a limit to how well you can do your job. Eight months in the life of an investigative team in the Travis County office of Child Protective Services.

Before they clubbed two deer to death in their tiny West Texas town, the four high school football stars were treated like royalty. Afterward, when news of their exploits hit the Internet, they were celebrities of a very different sort.

On May 6, 2021, Jena Ehlinger was at a friend’s wedding in Mexico when she received a phone call from an Austin police officer. He told her that her twenty-year-old son, Jake, a student at the University of Texas, had been found “unresponsive” in a house in West Austin that he was renting with three friends. Jena quickly flew home to be with her two other children: her daughter, Morgen, who was a senior in high school, and her eldest, Sam, who had spent the past four years as the Longhorns’…

In the early nineties Mickey Guyton was a young girl living in the small town of Crawford, a short walk from George W. and Laura Bush’s ranch. One summer evening, she attended a Texas Rangers game, where LeAnn Rimes, who was about the same age, performed the National Anthem. Guyton was so inspired that she declared that she, too, wanted to sing country music. Today the forty-year-old Guyton is a genuine country star. Over the past five years, she has released a Top 50 album, received four Gra…

They began arriving at the Mission Park Funeral Home in San Antonio early on a Friday afternoon. They came in packs, riding two, sometimes three abreast, their motorcycles roaring loudly enough to rattle all the funeral home’s windows. People who worked in the nearby stores and businesses rushed outside to get a better look. One man, standing in the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant, called a friend on his cell phone and shouted, “There must be a hundred of them!” A woman driving a Ford Tau…

In the early eighties Margaret Spellings, an ambitious University of Houston grad, arrived in Austin to get involved in politics and quickly ended up working on education issues. (“It doesn’t take you too long to figure out that in state government the action is in education,” she once said.) She got a job as a staffer with the House Committee on Public Education and later as a lobbyist for the Texas Association of School Boards. In 1995 she became Governor George W. Bush’s chief education advis…

Sonny Lamb, the hero of Lawrence Wright’s new novel, Mr. Texas (Knopf, September 19), is a good-natured young rancher from the Big Bend region of West Texas. Sonny played football at Sul Ross State University in Alpine, fought in the Iraq War, and then had a brief career as a country singer. He was good enough, almost, to get a recording contract. Sonny is not exactly the smartest rancher in Texas. As the novel opens, he puts a bull up for sale at a livestock auction, suddenly changes his min…

Susan Wright, the blue-eyed butcher of the Houston suburbs, is still a lovely young woman, still as polite and well-mannered as she was seven years ago, when she grabbed a knife, stabbed her husband at least 193 times, and buried him facedown in their backyard. “Hi,” she said softly as she walked into the visiting room of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s Hobby Unit, in Marlin, shaking my hand and ducking her head shyly. She was wearing dark-red Covergirl lipstick, which she keeps in…

It started off as a Texas version of the Sharks versus the Jets. In 2013, the Bandidos, the oldest, biggest, and most-feared outlaw motorcycle club in the state, learned that members of the Cossacks, a rapidly growing rival club, had begun wearing patches on the backs of their vests that read “Texas” in capital letters. For decades, the Bandidos had decreed that the Texas “bottom rocker” patch belonged only to them. If another club wanted to wear the patch, it would have to receive permission fr…

A light drizzle was falling in the early morning hours of May 9, 2010, when detective Dwayne Thompson pulled up in front of a modest home on Spring Grove Avenue, in a tree-lined neighborhood in North Dallas. A uniformed officer walked over and told Thompson that the house belonged to a man named Michael Burnside, age thirty. At around twelve-thirty, the officer continued, a woman had called 911 from the house. She identified herself as Olivia Lord, Burnside’s girlfriend, and said she had just fo…

The “show” was scheduled to take place on Friday night in a field behind a rundown gas plant about forty miles west of Houston. Chris, a young dogman from the coastal town of Matagorda, was driving up to take on Rob Rogers—or, as he was known in the dogfighting world, White Boy Rob. Chris was a cocky, fast-talking black guy, maybe 25 years old. He had a beauty of a pit bull named BJ, a newcomer to the game but one that had already developed a reputation as a “leg dog.” At his last show, BJ had l…

It was a modern-day horror story: a little girl hidden away in rat-infested squalor for most of her life. When the authorities took her away from her mother and grandmother, the nine-year-old had never been to school or played outside.

The tragic culture clash that led to the murder of a governor’s son.

Friends and family knew Deborah Murphey as a mild-mannered nurse and a loving wife and mother. Then a U.S. marshal knocked on her door.

Kimberly Mata-Rubio says after the tragedy, Uvalde remains a divided community—and she wants to change that.

You would not have been able to turn away if you had seen her. Her name was Eula Phillips—Luly, her best friends called her—and in 1885 she was one of the loveliest young women in Austin. Her skin was pale, her eyes soft and contemplative, her dark, curling hair swept back from her temples. She wore billowy white dresses. One enchanted newspaper reporter described her as “beautiful, frail.” Although she was descended from two of Texas’ most prominent pioneer families—one of her grandfathers w…

Kimberly Mata-Rubio pulls her thick black hair into a ponytail, laces up her purple-and-black Brooks running shoes, and sets off on a three-mile loop through her hometown of Uvalde, at the edge of the Texas Hill Country, eighty miles west of San Antonio. From her house, she heads west, then she makes a left and runs alongside the magnificent oak trees lining North Getty, one of Uvalde’s main streets. She runs past the softball fields where her ten-year-old daughter Alexandria “Lexi” Aniyah Ru…

On the morning of March 1, Todd Lindley, a forty-year-old science and operations officer with the National Weather Service, walked into his office in Norman, Oklahoma, and sat down in front of his four computer screens. Lindley specializes in weather on the southern Great Plains, a mostly flat five-hundred-mile expanse that runs from Kansas to just below the Panhandle of Texas. That morning, on one of the screens, he noticed a storm system that meteorologists call a “midlatitude cyclone,” a pinw…