Texas Monthly March 2022

WHY SCIENTISTS KEEP DISCOVERING STRANGE NEW WASPS ON THE RICE CAMPUS The live oaks on Rice University’s Houston grounds provide more than just shade for students as they walk to class. As Rose Cahalan explains, they also provide a home for tiny gall wasps, which measure just a millimeter and were, until recently, unknown to science. Biology professor Scott Egan has a knack for discovering new species—roughly one a year during the eight years he’s worked at Rice. Neuroterus valhalla, the most recent find by Egan and his students, is named in honor of the fifty-year-old student pub near which it was first spotted. THIS ELON MUSK SUPERFAN KEEPS EYES IN THE SKY OVER TESLA’S FACTORY Three days a week, Joe Tegtmeyer wakes up well before dawn, boots up his Tesla Model S,…

When I made the switch from newspapers to magazines about a decade into my career, I was fascinated by the more-complex logistics involved in producing weekly and monthly publications. Photographs and illustrations and page design were of course far more important than at a daily, as were the staggered deadlines on which the magazines’ sections were produced. I visited a huge, modern printing plant in upstate New York and was especially impressed by the binding operation, in which various chunks of each magazine bounced along on what looked like a series of moving clotheslines. The first magazine for which I worked, TIME, employed a team of coordinators to keep all the editorial parts of its operation running smoothly. For that task at Texas Monthly, we employ Anna Walsh. Anna joined us in…

“Stating that Greg Abbott wants to hold office ‘no matter how many Texans get hurt’ was offensive and inconsiderate. The fact that you have different convictions from Abbott’s cannot justify labeling him as uncaring and ruthless.” Wrongful Convictions In reference to your Bum Steer of the Year [“Power for Its Own Sake,” January 2022], I was reading a history of the Civil War recently and came across a quote from Thomas Cobb, a brigadier general in the Army of Northern Virginia who had become disillusioned with Jefferson Davis, then president of the Confederate States. Davis, he wrote, was “the embodiment and concentration of cowardly littleness [which] he garnishes over with pharisaical hypocrisy. How can God smile upon us while we have such a man [to] lead us?” If there is a more…

Ruby had the carriage of a bantam cock and the energy of a steam engine as he churned through the streets of downtown Dallas, glad-handing, passing out cards, speaking rapidly, compulsively, about his new line of pizza ovens, about the twistboards he was promoting, about the important people he knew, cornering friends and grabbing strangers, relating amazing details of his private life and how any day now he would make it big. He once spotted actress Rhonda Fleming having a club sandwich at Love Field and joined her for lunch. You could always spot him at the boxing matches. He’d wait until just before the main event, when they turned up the lights, and he’d prance down the center aisle in a badly dated hat and double-breasted suit, shaking hands…

When the staff of Texas Monthly began assigning stories for its February 1973 debut issue, one of the most urgent tasks was to get in touch with Gary Cartwright, who lived in Austin after years of writing attention-grabbing sports stories for the Dallas and Fort Worth newspapers. One Cartwright column about Cowboys quarterback Don Meredith began, “Outlined against a gray November sky, the Four Horsemen rode again Sunday in the Cotton Bowl. You remember their names: Death, Famine, Pestilence, and Meredith.” To discuss a possible assignment, founding editor Bill Broyles and managing editor Greg Curtis met Cartwright for drinks at Austin’s Scholz Garten. Broyles had scraped the budget and made Cartwright the best offer he could: $500 for a feature on the enigmatic Cowboys running back Duane Thomas. He hoped Cartwright…

Chrissy Twomey was in no mood for guff when her husband, Jonathan, woke her at 2 a.m. on a spring morning in their family’s East Texas fishing camp, along the Sabine River in rural Panola County. “I was grumpy. I was tired,” recalled Chrissy, a 42-year-old champion catfish angler from Carthage, about fifteen miles away. “But I got up and pulled my boots on.” Another tournament awaited the couple in the darkness. ¶ Chrissy steered upstream through fog so dense she couldn’t see the front of her boat. “It was kind of like out of a Scooby-Doo movie,” she told me later. The couple approached their first fixed “throw line,” whose five hooks Jonathan had baited the day before with live perch. He’d then tied it to a branch poking…