{"id":340233,"date":"2026-06-17T19:39:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-17T19:39:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/340233\/"},"modified":"2026-06-17T19:39:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-17T19:39:09","slug":"national-welcomes-its-first-texas-culture-reporter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/340233\/","title":{"rendered":"National Welcomes Its First Texas Culture Reporter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sasha von Oldershausen has ridden shotgun<\/a> with the only hospice nurse in a Texas county bigger than Connecticut. She\u2019s watched a Texas film crew<\/a> pour chocolate syrup all over an actor\u2019s head to stage the moment of striking oil. She knows it takes Amtrak\u2019s Sunset Limited the better part of 24 hours to cross the vast expanse of Texas \u2014 she\u2019s ridden it, in the sleeper car<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Over the course of 10 years covering Texas, Sasha has turned small moments like these into big stories that reveal something essential about what is an influential and endlessly interesting state.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now, Sasha will bring that boundless curiosity and unlimited appetite for reporting from every corner of the state to The New York Times as our first Texas culture reporter. A key addition to our new Texas hub, Sasha will cover an expansive beat chronicling life in Texas \u2014 culture, food, the arts and anything else that enlivens the days and nights of Texans. She joins a terrific and growing team of journalists spread all across the state, covering everything that makes Texas tick.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sasha\u2019s love affair with Texas began in 2014. Fresh out of journalism school, she took a job covering the border in the West Texas town of Presidio for The Big Bend Sentinel \u2014 a weekly paper an hour up the road in Marfa. For a while she was the only reporter in town. And she knew no one. So she learned it the slow way, by living there and sitting through county commission meetings until she could see what the small stories were really about. A three-part series she wrote on Mexico\u2019s Mennonite communities won first place for feature writing from the Texas Press Association.<\/p>\n

She left The Sentinel, but she stayed in the desert. She freelanced out of a crumbling adobe house off a country highway. When Antonin Scalia died on a remote ranch, she was one of the first reporters to get there<\/a> \u2014 hours before the national press could reach the scene, and she filed for The Times.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Her byline has turned up here in Culture, Styles and Metro while freelancing for the better part of a decade. Since 2023, Sasha has been a senior writer at Texas Monthly.<\/p>\n

\u201cSasha was one of a handful of freelance writers who consistently provided smart, original features for Metropolitan during the coronavirus pandemic,\u201d said Hilary Howard, who was Sasha\u2019s former editor on Metropolitan at The Times. \u201cFrom New York City\u2019s bicycle shop boom<\/a> to its underground comedy scene<\/a>, from Persian culture<\/a> to a woman who returned an overdue book to a Queens library after 63 years<\/a>, Sasha wrote lively stories that inspired hope during a challenging time.\u201d<\/p>\n

A couple of things her clips won\u2019t tell you: Sasha studied Near Eastern studies in graduate school and speaks a little Persian. And she didn\u2019t learn to drive until she was 25, when Presidio left her no other way to get around (except, of course, the Sunset Limited train).\u00a0<\/p>\n

She starts in July. Please join us in welcoming her.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Nestor and Fernando<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sasha von Oldershausen has ridden shotgun with the only hospice nurse in a Texas county bigger than Connecticut.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":340234,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[27,29,28],"class_list":["post-340233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=340233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340233\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/340234"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=340233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=340233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=340233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}