Texas Monthly

Scoring ‘Where the River Took Us’

Texas Monthly — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 19:53:39 +0000

When approaching the scoring for Where the River Took Us, Brian Standefer recognized that the emotion “would be there if there was no music.” The podcast, based on Aaron Parsley’s reporting on the July 4th flooding, which debuted May 26, explores the aftermath of the flood and those who are still contending with its impact. Standefer describes his purposeful choices of instruments and tone, as well as the importance of minimalism, in this behind-the-scenes look at his scoring process.

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The Restaurant That Taught Austin About Mexican Food Is Closing

José R. Ralat — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 14:00:00 +0000

I don’t often frequent a particular taqueria or restaurant, as my work as taco editor keeps me on the move. But for the last fifteen years, there has been one place I’ve returned whenever my schedule would allow. Every time I was in Austin and wanted a quick, comfortable dinner, I visited El Naranjo, the contemporary Mexican restaurant owned by Iliana de la Vega, who also serves as executive chef, and her husband, Ernesto Torrealba. The fourteen-year-old restaurant has announced it is closing on July 18, and heartbreak doesn’t begin to describe my feelings over the news. I will lose a beloved space where I felt at home, where de la Vega was as likely to be seen sweeping or busing tables as working the…

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The Daily Crossword: June 10, 2026

Texas Monthly — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 10:00:00 +0000

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Word Wrangler: June 10, 2026

Texas Monthly — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 09:59:00 +0000

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First Look: Austin’s Iconic Driskill Hotel Unveils Multimillion-Dollar Renovation

David Courtney — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 18:17:21 +0000

The Driskill, Austin’s most historic hotel, has seen some stuff over its 140 years of existence—including numerous occasions when the grande dame of capital-city accommodations came close to existing in a state of, well, nonexistence. But it’s currently the good times for the Driskill, which over the last year underwent a comprehensive renovation.This new era was ushered in after Hyatt Hotels and Resorts took over the property in 2013 and folded it into its Unbound Collection. Austin’s Pixiu Investments and Dallas’s Woodbine Development Corporation bought the Driskill in 2022, though Hyatt still manages it. The first phase of the renovation, unveiled in the fall of 2025, included a refresh of the 110 Tower rooms built in 1929, as well as the addition of a 2,800-square-foot…

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How a Twinkie Made of Corn Became Austin’s Most Popular Pastry

José R. Ralat — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 11:00:00 +0000

Julian Maltby is standing in Mercado Sin Nombre’s kitchen when an exciting delivery arrives. His Austin cafe has just received a large molino that can grind forty pounds of nixtamalized-corn masa in forty minutes. It’s a must for the much-lauded walk-up spot that’s drawing in a huge number of customers for its masa twinkies, masa pancakes, and masa biscuits. For the past two years, his kitchen had been using a tabletop molino that takes about four times as long to process the same amount of kernels. “We’ll see if it shorts out the electricity when we turn it on,” Maltby jokes.Masa has been the foundation of Mercado Sin Nombre from the start, in 2020, when Maltby started selling homemade tortillas. In some ways, it was…

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The Death Penalties

Nicholas Gutteridge — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 11:00:00 +0000

Sarah Sanders had spent the day in her small, windowless office drafting letters to funeral directors when her boss came in with a new request. It was a late Monday afternoon in March 2025, and Scott Bingaman, the executive director of the Texas Funeral Service Commission, wanted her to put aside her other work and look into a year-old case. It concerned the East Plano Islamic Center, a mosque and Muslim community in North Texas known as EPIC. The soft-spoken 33-year-old Texas Tech University law school graduate had joined the commission, which regulates the funeral industry, only a few months earlier, after bouncing around law firms in Beaumont and briefly serving in another state agency. Most of her time in her new role in Austin had…

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‘Where the River Took Us’ Episode 4: “Stuck at Camp Forever”

Aaron Parsley — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 11:00:00 +0000

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Read the transcript below. “Forgiveness doesn’t exclude accountability. It doesn’t give a pardon. . . . We handed our children over to someone else’s care and were assured that they would be safe. And they weren’t safe.” —Michael McCown Subscribe Apple — Spotify When I wrote about what happened along the Guadalupe last July 4, I wanted to honor my family, my nephew Clay, and my sister’s heroism. After my story was published, it went viral almost immediately, and I started receiving messages from people who had read it. Many of them knew me and my family. One of these messages came from an old friend, Michael McCown, of Austin. He told me that his daughter, Linnie, had been…

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The Daily Crossword: June 9, 2026

Texas Monthly — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 10:00:00 +0000

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Word Wrangler: June 9, 2026

Texas Monthly — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 09:59:00 +0000

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Corpus Christi’s Water Crisis Sparks a Fight With Its Neighbors

Joe Pappalardo — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 11:00:00 +0000

Chris Cuellar’s eyes scan the eight-inch pipe that’s spewing water on the other side of the chain-link fence. Drawn from hundreds of feet below the surface, the water tumbles down a short spillway that leads straight into the Nueces River. It will flow roughly five miles downstream, to the intake pipes of the City of Corpus Christi’s O. N. Stevens Water Treatment Plant. From there, a vast network of pipes will carry it to homes and businesses.We’re a dozen miles outside the city limits, in unincorporated Nueces County, just a couple minutes’ drive from Cuellar’s house. In one hand, the 65-year-old holds a water probe that’s attached to a spool of cord, and in the other, he holds a portable digital readout. With this gear, he’s…

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The Daily Crossword: June 8, 2026

Texas Monthly — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 10:00:00 +0000

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Word Wrangler: June 8 , 2026

Texas Monthly — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 09:59:00 +0000

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The Daily Crossword: June 7, 2026

Texas Monthly — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 10:00:00 +0000

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Word Wrangler: June 7, 2026

Texas Monthly — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 09:59:00 +0000

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The Daily Crossword: June 6, 2026

Texas Monthly — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 10:00:00 +0000

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Word Wrangler: June 6, 2026

Texas Monthly — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 09:59:00 +0000

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Texas BBQ Joints Are Struggling With Sky-High Beef Prices. But There’s Another Way.

Daniel Vaughn — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 11:00:00 +0000

A gaggle of press armed with cameras and microphones formed outside Smokey Joe’s Bar-B-Que, in South Dallas, this week. Senate candidate James Talarico had invited us there to announce his plans for lowering beef prices to provide relief to Texas barbecue joints. Ending the war in Iran, suspending the federal diesel tax, and fully staffing the USDA were on his list of priorities, but his real reason for being there was the photo op inside.Countering accusations of being vegan from his opponent Ken Paxton, who nicknamed him “Talafreako,” Talarico sat beneath a BBQ Freak sign with Smokey Joe’s owner, Kris Manning, to share an overflowing tray of smoked meat. He cleaned the meat off a spare rib with his teeth and ate brisket slices with…

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Old Austin’s Legendary Taxi Tycoon Was Immortalized in Richard Linklater’s ‘Slacker’

Clay Coppedge — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 11:00:00 +0000

Texans You Should Know is a series highlighting overlooked figures and events from Texas history. The first time I met him, he was yelling. It was the spring of 1977, and I was looking for a better job than the one I didn’t have. I’d just walked through the side door of a two-story, white-frame house at 90 East Avenue, in Austin. Outside, half a dozen cars—painted sea-foam green with red roofs, the words “Roy’s Taxi” on their sides—awaited duty in a small dirt lot. Inside, I found a waiting room furnished with a few chairs and a card table. In the corner stood an elderly man in a white guayabera shirt, tan slacks, and house shoes, who was jabbing the stubs of his fingers into a…

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Every Spurs Fan Has a Story. Here Are Ours.

Texas Monthly — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 11:00:00 +0000

It’s not a requirement to be a Spurs fan if you’re from (or now live in) Central Texas, just as it’s not a requirement to support the team if you’re a Texas Monthly staffer. Even so, lately, you’d think it was: As the team has made its way to the NBA Finals—where it’s facing the New York Knicks—it seems that everywhere we turn, another diehard reveals themselves. Spurs supporters arrive at their fandom by different routes, whether they’re born-and-raised San Antonians, fans by proxy (inherited from parents, adopted from friends), or “bandwagoners.” We’ve also found that cheering for the team tends to mean something more to them than raising trophies. In other words, if you love the Spurs, we’re sure there’s a story behind why. Here…

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Ken Paxton’s Impeachment Was the Best Thing to Ever Happen to Him

Christopher Hooks — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 11:00:00 +0000

The occupational hazard of writing about “politricks” is that inevitably, you will make a lot of assertions and predictions that will make you look like God’s perfect idiot as soon as the period is affixed to the end of the sentence, like so. When Ken Paxton put John Cornyn out of business for good, I went back with some trepidation to the first stories I wrote about what seems now to be far and away the most important Texas political story of the decade—Paxton’s impeachment by the Texas House in 2023. That May, after the Republican-led House voted to impeach Paxton 121–23, I tried to explain the bigger context around the impeachment and why it was so shocking. It was a violation of the unspoken code…

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The Daily Crossword: June 5, 2026

Texas Monthly — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 10:00:00 +0000

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Word Wrangler: June 5, 2026

Texas Monthly — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 09:59:00 +0000

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I Had Spoiled Meat at a BBQ Joint. Here’s What Happened Next.

Daniel Vaughn — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 11:00:00 +0000

During a recent meal at a Texas barbecue joint, I ordered a beef short rib. It was so tender that I couldn’t pick up the bone without the meat falling off, so I decided to eat it with a fork instead. I was excited to dig in. As soon as I started chewing, it hit me: the unmistakable flavor of meat that had gone bad. The muskiness filled my nostrils, and the sour, metallic taste was so strong I reflexively grabbed a napkin to spit into. The rejection felt involuntary, like my brain was protecting my digestive system.An attendant came by the table to ask about my meal. I told him the beef rib was off and that it tasted like an extended wet-aging experiment…

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A Guide to Dallas* for Confused World Cup Visitors

Eric Benson — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 11:00:00 +0000

The first thing you need to know about the nine World Cup matches scheduled to take place in Dallas—starting with a sneaky-good June 14 group-stage face-off between the Netherlands and Japan and concluding with one of two semifinals on July 14—is that, in a meaningful way, they do not take place in Dallas. AT&T Stadium, the “Dallas” World Cup host venue, is part of a sprawling sports and entertainment complex in the city of Arlington, about halfway between downtown Dallas and downtown Fort Worth. The vast Metroplex, with its dozens of independent cities and confusing-even-to-locals network of freeways and tollways and express lanes, can be a fiendishly difficult place in which to orient yourself. Drive around looking for something interesting, and you might well end…

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