It’s been a wonderful year covering our state. Since the last iteration of this list, the Texas Monthly team has profiled rising stars, joined secret societies, and covered the final flight of a war hero and the newest frontier of the space race. We’ve revisited half-century-old crimes and newer ones still shaking their communities. We’ve reported on the billionaire outsiders and Californians trying to change Texas and how they have discovered it is a harder business than they initially expected.
And we’ve been on the ground covering both the tragedies that have befallen our state—from the deadly flooding in Central Texas to the deadly fires in the Panhandle to the deadliest immigration-related disaster in the country’s history—and the resiliency and heroism of our fellow Texans in the wake of them.
Of course, we couldn’t get to all the news and happenings in Texas this year. We were pleased to see other publications paying close attention to our state—and maybe a little bit jealous of some of the work they did. Here are the stories we admired the most.
“Where Train Dreams Meet Reality in Texas”Benton Graham, Bloomberg
A very readable piece of how-we-got-here journalism, this article from Bloomberg’s CityLab winds through the events and policy decisions that led to Texas having only three passenger train routes, all while the writer, Benton Graham, chronicles his time aboard Amtrak’s Texas Eagle and Sunset Limited as those lines’ locomotives lumber across the state. To get from Dallas to Houston by train, Graham must first take a detour to San Antonio. Because of a long layover, the whole journey takes 23 hours—longer than it would have taken to bike.
Along the way, a member of a rail-passenger advocacy group sneaks up on Graham in the cafe car to chew his ear off about trains and a politician makes a peculiar suggestion that we may have simply skipped rail technology in favor of a better mode of transportation: autonomous vehicles. (Call me when a Waymo can get me to Dallas in ninety minutes.) The piece ends with a surprise meditation on what it means to be human. Yes, for Graham, the journey was about the friends he made along the way: a 22-year-old headed to Six Flags who had only been on a train once before, an 81-year-old Detroit Lions fan who was trying to use up a ten-ride pass before it expired, and many other “railfans” who dream of a train-abundant future. —Emma Balter
“ ‘I Feel Like I’ve Been Lied To’: When a Measles Outbreak Hits Home”Eli Saslow, The New York Times
Eli Saslow has mastered the art of telling humanizing stories about the most polarizing and unwieldy topics. While politicians and pundits, unable to sit with messy ambiguity, recite polished talking points, Saslow seeks out the real people caught in the grip of complicated forces. His reporting is an antidote to social media’s faceless vitriol. For this story, he gained the trust of two parents from Brownfield who had chosen not to vaccinate their children against measles, even though the vaccine has proved safe and effective for decades. When the kids contracted the virus during a nationwide outbreak centered in Texas, the couple rushed them to the hospital and watched in anguish as the disease took its course. Some readers will empathize with the parents, while others will surely judge them, but everyone will finish the article with a clearer picture of how the decisions of policymakers in Washington, D.C., affect the lives of people who are trying to do their best for themselves and their families. —Will Bostwick
“Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is handing more of his office’s work to costly private lawyers”Zach Despart, The Texas Tribune
Attorney General Ken Paxton often touts the high-dollar lawsuit settlements that his office reaches with Big Tech companies. Rarely mentioned, though, is who is doing much of that legal work. Now taxpayers know why: In July, The Texas Tribune and ProPublica reported on Paxton’s frequent use of outside, rather than in-house, lawyers, and how a loophole in state law has allowed him to award no-bid legal contracts to firms that have also donated to his political campaigns.
Some of the report’s numbers are eye-popping: more than $350 million in potential fees to a firm that helped the state secure a $1.38 billion settlement with Google; $24,570 paid for one day of work to a private lawyer helping the state sue Meta (which comes out to more than 38 times the cost of using in-house counsel). The outlets also found that Paxton ramped up his use of outside counsel in late 2020, after he dismissed numerous top-ranking deputies who’d reported him to the FBI for alleged corruption. That scandal led to Paxton’s impeachment, his acquittal, and a $6.6 million taxpayer-funded settlement with the whistleblowers he improperly fired. According to Zach Despart’s reporting, it also left the attorney general’s office scrambling for expensive outside help. —Robert Downen
“More Babies and Beef Tallow, Less Blue Hair and Birth Control”E.J. Dickson, The Cut
This colorful dispatch from the Young Women’s Leadership Summit, an annual conference held this June in Grapevine, captures the ascendance of MAGA culture. Out: feminism, reproductive rights, and pants suits. In: marriage, babies (the more the better), and sundresses. E.J. Dickson, a reporter for New York Magazine’s The Cut, speaks to a number of young women more interested in starting families than starting companies—although she points out that many of the speakers promoting that path don’t exactly walk it. Wellness influencer Alex Clark tells the audience to embrace traditional family life, yet Clark herself is a single, successful career woman.
The story is filled with novelistic detail. Attendees line dance to a Christian hip-hop song, wear buttons that say “Dump Your Socialist Boyfriend,” and buy “MAHA red” lip gloss. It would have been easy to veer into mockery, but the piece greatly benefits from Dickson’s sympathetic approach: Dickson writes that she “could understand why younger women who may have watched their mothers become burnt out, angry, and depressed would rebel against pursuing the same path for themselves, opting instead for a seemingly softer, more traditional approach toward femininity.” —Michael Hardy
“A DNA Technique Is Finding Women Who Left Their Babies for Dead”
Isabelle Taft, The New York Times
As happens with many of the best stories, I still can’t decide how I feel about the complexities of the issues raised in Isabelle Taft’s piece for The New York Times. She recounts how forensic genetic genealogy led to the arrest of a 45-year-old Hondo woman for abandoning a baby on the side of a rural road two decades earlier. The law enforcement technique has cracked many cold cases in recent years, some of which we’ve written about in the pages of Texas Monthly. It’s increasingly being used to identify the remains of infants, so-called Baby Does. As Taft writes, “The new technology has brought the unearthing of long-hidden tragedies.” Some of the women affected, including Maricela Frausto, of Hondo, say their babies were stillborn, and any evidence to the contrary is unreliable. Investigators have a duty to seek justice for these children—but is justice served by long prison sentences that don’t take into account the postpartum mental health states of the mothers? —Jason Heid
“Inside the life of a 24/7 streamer: ‘What more do you want?’”Drew Harwell, The Washington Post
What happens when one’s entire life—from the most meaningful moments to the most mundane—becomes a performance for digital strangers? That’s the fascinating question The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell explores in his immersive feature about Emily, an otherwise ordinary twentysomething in Austin who is the world’s longest-running live streamer on Twitch. To reach hardcore online fame, Emily has renounced privacy and embraced a life defined by a contradictory mixture of hyperstimulation and acute isolation—her camera stays on as she eats, sleeps, and cries. More than three years in, her livelihood, notoriety, and personal self-worth are dependent upon her willingness to keep the reality show going, even as her real-world social connections erode and her isolation intensifies. Like the iconic 1990s documentary Hands on a Hardbody for the social media age, Emily’s life has become a bizarre experiment in endurance, one that says as much about our collective slide into voyeuristic obsession as it does about the digital diehards willing to trade their physical health and sanity for 2025’s equivalent of a brand-new Nissan truck. —Peter Holley
“ ‘Why Sergio?’ Deportation ends 36-year dream for celebrated Waco chef and family”Sam Shaw, The Waco Bridge
With its detailed look at a local case of the deportation of a beloved restaurant owner, this story reflects the many similar happenings around the state that remain unreported. Sergio Garcia, owner of Sergio’s Food Truck, built a community in the Waco area through successive businesses that sold ceviche and burritos, even earning the love of the White House press corps during the George W. Bush administration. He was deported in March after years of working with different lawyers to try to obtain legal status, and he immediately faced extortion, in his telling, across the border. The most telling part of the story is when the president of the local Hispanic chamber of commerce says many of Waco’s undocumented residents have essentially stopped leaving their homes, causing ripple effects in the city’s economy. Sadly, in the next few years, we can expect to see the dining scene diminish across the state as workers and customers stay home (as our own José R. Ralat reported) and many restaurants enter extremely precarious situations. —Kimya Kavehkar
“11 Women, 9 Dogs, Not Much Drama (and No Guys)”Lisa Miller, The New York Times
I went into this story about the Bird’s Nest, a small East Texas community of mostly unmarried women between the ages of sixty and eighty, hoping to gratify a fantasy, and the writer acknowledges that she did too: “I had been searching for real-life examples of a fantasy I have had since my 20s,” she writes. “After child-rearing and a career, my friends and I would buy a big house somewhere affordable and cohabitate the way we had done in college.” What makes this story great, though, are the little tensions. While the hamlet these ladies have built is in many ways a utopia, the women also deal with the same crap (figurative and avian) as any neighbors. They have sharply divergent politics, terrible cell service, arguments over cats and trash, and very little privacy. “We say we respect each other,” one says, but “it’s hard.” These women have been drawn to the Bird’s Nest by something other than fantasy, which is a much more interesting story. —Lauren Larson
“The House on West Clay Street”Ian Frisch, Curbed
This creepy, haunting story efficiently weaves multiple narratives into one. It’s a murder mystery about how an apartment tenant pieces together what appear to be clues to a horrific crime. It’s a procedural about how the Houston Police Department doesn’t seem to take criminal complaints from poor people seriously. As our Houston-based senior editor Emma Balter points out to me, it’s a policy story about the high stakes of housing insecurity in Texas. Finally, and perhaps most stirringly, it’s a psychological thriller about why a woman would continue renting a room in a house in which she has found—and even cleaned up—significant biological evidence of a deadly act. —Ross McCammon
A Whole Other CountryZoe Kurland, Marfa Public Radio
In telling the story of Rick McLaren, an outsider who came to the Davis Mountains in the nineties and led a militia in an ill-fated stand for Texas independence, this narrative podcast grapples with the big ideals of Texas’s mythology—the kind that seem to have inspired McLaren to fancy himself the star of his own Walt Disney western. The show shines, though, in telling the particulars: the surprising history of the Davis Mountains Resort, where McLaren began his campaign, and the tales of the residents who can still hardly believe this story themselves.
There is plenty of Texas Monthly in this podcast. It was a story about West Texas grapes in this magazine that apparently first drew McLaren to the Davis Mountains, where he tried his hand as a vintner. And a recurring voice in the podcast is that of Joe Nick Patoski, recalling his time reporting on the standoff for Texas Monthly. But the show is better off for Kurland’s hyperlocal perspective, as someone who lives in the region herself. It isn’t a story just any reporter could get: Many who lived through the Republic of Texas standoff would rather forget it, and almost three decades later, some sources will still only speak about it anonymously. Best of all, though, is the way the show dances between dismissing McLaren’s pipe dream and admitting that, really, there is something different about this part of far West Texas—the way time can fold in on itself and make the past feel present, and the way impossible things can feel dangerously close to true. —Patrick Michels
“They Who Have Been Exiled: The Strict Religious Group Behind I-35’s Cheese Cave”Emma Ruby, the Dallas Observer
I was fascinated and horrified by this chilling report about the Waco-based religious group Homestead Heritage, which runs a farm, a cafe, an inn, and craft shops in a village not far from the “Cheese Cave” motorists on Interstate 35 have likely seen advertised on billboards along the highway.
Aspects of the insular community, which imposes strict gender roles, are undeniably cultlike, according to the former second-generation members Ruby interviewed for the story. Morning Alexander, a woman who left the group at age 26, described being ostracized for listening to “secular radio” and learning how to make brooms just so she had someone to talk to. Wearing red, the color of prostitutes, was unacceptable, she said. Hope Glueck, another former member, described how “thinness was prized,” Ruby writes, while “working out, especially in athletic wear, was deemed immodest,” which led Glueck to watch workout videos on YouTube as a teenager and go jogging in secret at night.
This story is worth reading for its exploration of the circumstances these and other Homestead Heritage women faced and the considerations they weighed in deciding to leave the group, which has members in five states and ten countries, including India, South Africa, and New Zealand. —Aaron Parsley
“The untold origin story of Trump Burger: A $250K murder-for-hire plot, ICE arrest and vaccine scam”Sarah Smith, the Houston Chronicle
Decades ago, academics and theorists determined that everything—where you eat, where you shop, what movies you watch—was political, often in some opaque sense. Our current moment, for better or worse, has ensured that everything is political in the most blunt way. Time was, you’d have to really think about what your choice of cellphone plan or coffee beans meant for union workers in America and farmers in Africa, how your consumer habits reflected a larger values system. Now we have Black Rifle Coffee and Patriot Mobile. Now, moreover, we have Trump Burger.
In a wild feature for the Houston Chronicle, Sarah Smith reports on the Bellville-based eatery and how it came to be. It’s a tale of immigration, a vaccine scam, and second chances. It goes to places you wouldn’t expect—and ends with a perfect kicker. While it might be obvious what choosing to patronize Trump Burger suggests about one’s politics, it’s less obvious what the story of the restaurant says about our times, and I’m jealous of how Smith arrived at an answer. —Ben Rowen
“The Nuns Trying to Save the Women on Texas’s Death Row”Lawrence Wright, The New Yorker
I’ve got a thing for nuns. I came by my affection gradually—and well after my eleven-year stint in Catholic school—after being exposed to the feisty, Catholic-social-teaching-in-action exploits of women like Sisters Norma Pimentel and Simone Campbell. Even the warmest Catholic priest still dons the finery of the cloth and speaks from an elevated pulpit with divine affect. Nuns are in the trenches. Near Gatesville, the members of a convent of the Sisters of Mary Morning Star, a contemplative order focused on prayer and silence, are in the trenches of death row at the Patrick L. O’Daniel Unit.
Lawrence Wright tells their story of unintentional communion with incarcerated women in his expansive New Yorker feature. Through that lens, Wright also reveals the workings of criminal justice and capital punishment in Texas—prisoners scheduled to be executed “[mount] a gurney in the shape of a cross.” —Sandi Villarreal
“His Daughter was America’s First Measles Death in a Decade”Tom Bartlett, The Atlantic
Tom Bartlett’s dispatch from the measles outbreak in Seminole is proof that the best journalism often comes from simply being on the ground. Whenever major news breaks, we have an internal dialogue about the right approach. Should we rush to cover it or, as a magazine with the luxury of time, wait until the initial news cycle settles so we can return to the story with more clarity and perspective? Bartlett’s answer was to go straight to the heart of the outbreak: Seminole, home to a large Mennonite community and, by the end of February, the home of the epidemic’s first measles casualty, a six-year-old girl. By chance, one of the first people Bartlett met there was the child’s father. The result is a moving snapshot of a community grieving one of its own and grappling with a deepening distrust in the medical establishment. —Sasha von Oldershausen
“ ‘It’s Money and Greed’: Oil, Politics, and Dead Cows in a Small Texas County”Mitch Moxley, Rolling Stone
This true crime story set in tiny Loving County has it all: cattle rustling, political intrigue, fracking, violent men, and characters who talk like they walked out of a Taylor Sheridan script. (“He is a silver-tongue devil,” says “cow cop” Marty Baker of the story’s ostensible bad guy, a county judge named Skeet Jones. “He is the kind of guy that will be in that courtroom and get up there on the stand and talk that jury plumb out of a guilty verdict. He is that smooth.”)
The story opens with a crime scene: five cows shot dead on a highway near the lonely oil patch town of Mentone. What unspools is a baroque, cinematic tale. Baker uncovers a cattle-rustling scheme, with Skeet Jones, the county’s top elected official, at its core. Baker arrests Jones, but the criminal aspect is just the tip of the iceberg. The powerful Jones family is split into factions, with Skeet and his allies on one side and Skeet’s nephew, Constable Brandon Jones, on the other. “This is not quite the Hatfields and McCoys,” explains the county attorney. “It’s like the Hatfields and Hatfields, right? I mean, it’s brother against brother, uncle against nephew.” The intrafamily fight has all the inscrutable, irrational emotions of a family feud, but it’s clear enough what material interest the Joneses are fighting over: the area’s unbelievable oil wealth and the bounty of tax dollars the industry yields to a county with a population of less than a hundred. (The number of eligible voters is another matter of brutal contention.) Moxley seems almost in awe of this strange, wild corner of Texas—a cruelly barren landscape that is a canvas for all the foibles of the human character. I look forward to the movie. —Forrest Wilder
Read Next