Table of contents for May/June 2020 in The Texas Observer

Gentrified Architecture I enjoyed reading your story regarding the aesthetics of new residential construction in older neighborhoods (“Baffled City,” March|April issue). I especially enjoyed seeing the photos, since I live in Atlanta and the moderns being built here have similar but slightly different characteristics. ¶ I wish that stories like this would shy away from the cliches of gentrification that are sympathetic to one socioeconomic sector and vilify the other. Time marches on, and aging structures will eventually need to be replaced. Someone is being paid handsomely from the sale of these old properties, and the value of others increases from this injection of new construction. I would love if your story had included some sketched outlines by the architect of better massing forms that would be more sensitive to…

In 2016, a team of Texas scientists had developed a vaccine that could be effective against COVID-19. But they couldn’t raise the estimated $3 million necessary for clinical trials in humans, so the research stalled. The United Nations now estimates the coronavirus pandemic will cost the global economy more than $1 trillion. More than 200 University of Texas at Austin students ignored warnings not to travel during the coronavirus pandemic, forging ahead with their spring break trip to Cabo San Lucas. As of April 7, 49 of the students had tested positive for the virus after returning from Mexico. Dallas-based industrial supplier Hatfield and Co. tried to sell an oil company 1 million coveted N95 face masks for $6.3 million—six times the normal price. Texas’ price gouging law makes it…

ON THE FIRST MONDAY IN APRIL, I drove to the Texas Observer office to print proofs of this issue. The office was empty—it had been for three weeks, when we all started working remotely. I rescued my desk plants, parched and tilted toward the sun, and threw away the to-do list sitting on my desk, an artifact of another era, back when we were still planning events and reporting trips and all-staff meetings. For now, the foreseeable future is constricted to the near-present moment. At the Observer, our new era began on March 16, when we crowded onto one screen from our respective homes to discuss how we should cover the coronavirus pandemic. As the days unfurled, both the virus and the state’s response to it revealed much of what…

THE GO-GO’S WERE USED TO HAVING THEIR STORY WRITTEN FOR them. It’s happened to any band that has weathered a press junket: the same handful of anecdotes, origin myths, and quotes trotted out in every interview, profile, and concert preview. Let’s get that out of the way quickly, then. When the Los Angeles-based five-piece first began gigging at clubs on the Sunset Strip in the late ’70s, most of them were novices. “Every story mentioned how the Go-Go’s could barely play when they started, and look at them now,” bassist Kathy Valentine, an Austin native, would write years later. “It gave every writer a ready-made story hook, the fairytale fable.” How many people have been to a show, shoes epoxied to the floor by layers of spilled drinks, and watched…

Black widows in my writingshack. They spin their jaggedsilk in the corner by the doorand hang their eggs, bulging,by the score. I see their shadowed legs onthreads poking out behindbare studs like a needle on arecord’s tread. I know they feelmy footfalls shake their web asI pass in and out. We aredeath to each other—andtolerate the tension. But wekeep our feelers out, it is howwe eat and how we remaindevout. A fifth-generation Texan, S.J. Dahlstrom lives and writes in West Texas with his wife and children. He is the author of the Wilder Good book series.…

Once the virus passes, there’s no reason to let the powerful return peacefully to business as usual. A Time for Disaster Progressivism It’s time for progressives to exploit a crisis for political gain. ¶ The novel coronavirus hasn’t tanked an otherwise healthy country; it’s exposed our society for the wobbly tower of inequity and brutishness it already was. Our prisons are full of the harmless and elderly, our jails jam-packed with the legally innocent—all sitting ducks for the disease. Our streets are crowded with the unhoused, and thousands more each day lose their homes to eviction. Our health care system is a colossus of greed and waste, and workers labor through illness while still living paycheck to paycheck. The virus finds these seams in society and rips them open. As…

Rachel Rodriguez remembers her son Ruben being a very attached child. Even as Ruben got older and started getting into trouble, the mother and son remained close. “He was always just right there, right next to me,” she says. In 2013, when he was 20, Ruben went to prison on a 20-year sentence for a robbery. But Rodriguez considered herself lucky that he got sent to a lockup about an hour’s drive from her home in Corpus Christi. “I visited him every weekend, like religiously, because I wanted us to stay close while he was in there,” she says. “I thought we both needed that.” Less than three years into the sentence, however, their communication came to an abrupt halt. After her last visit with him, in June 2016, corrections…

Humor helps people get through tough times—and that’s certainly been true during the coronavirus pandemic. Which of the following funny coping strategies did Texans not turn to recently? a. A Houston mom posted a sign on her door for her kids to consult while she was in a video meeting, including answers like “I don’t know what’s for dinner.”b. Senator John Cornyn told Texans not to panic during the crisis by posting a picture of an ice-cold Corona beer.c. The city of Bastrop urged residents to “Wash your hands like you just got done slicing jalapeños … and you need to take your contacts out.”d. A Dallas man hosted a coronavirus fashion show on Twitter, modeling his sweatpants and pajamas. ANSWER: (A) A mom did in fact post such a…

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