Texas Monthly

The Daily Crossword: November 5, 2026

Texas Monthly — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 11:00:00 +0000

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Word Wrangler: November 5, 2026

Texas Monthly — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 10:59:00 +0000

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Photos: James Talarico Parties Like It’s 1994

Allegra Hobbs — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 17:30:23 +0000

Even early in the night at Talarico’s watch party, the mood was elated—there was an understanding that something big was happening. “I feel phenomenal,” Jose Farrera, a 33-year-old Austinite wearing an “I’m a Talafreako” pin, told me as early numbers rolled in. “I could run through a wall right now,” said Democratic influencer Olivia Julianna, as the crowd waited expectantly for CNN to call the race. At 9 p.m., the line to get into the Long Center remained so long it snaked around the grounds and extended to the street. On the other side of a fence separating the unadmitted general public from the party, voices could be heard screaming “Let’s go, Talarico!” and “Let us in!”When the race was called for Talarico, around 10 p.m.,…

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At Ken Paxton’s Watch Party: Lots of Thoughts, Lots of Prayers

Robert Downen — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 16:27:27 +0000

Ken Paxton’s election-night party felt over before it even began.Before the first returns of the night came in, a few hundred supporters mingled in a banquet room of the Westin, a four-star hotel in Dallas’s Galleria area, picking at hot pretzels next to a literal cannon and a massive projector playing Fox News. But within an hour or so of the polls closing, the brief excitement had already turned into a subdued panic. “There’s still time left, but it’s not looking good,” a longtime Paxton supporter told me in the restroom around 8 p.m., capturing the vibes of the broader party.By 8:45 p.m. the mood had turned dour. A group of four men huddled in prayer as “Spirit in the Sky” blasted over a loudspeaker.…

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“MAGA Needs To Be Dead”: Dade Phelan on the Republican Wipeout

Eric Benson — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 16:00:29 +0000

Former Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan saw it coming—at least in part. Three weeks ago, when he and I sat down for an extended interview about the upcoming election, he told me the mood among Republicans was grim. “People are freaking out,” he said, exaggerating those last two words in his East Texas drawl for maximum effect. “You see it in their faces. There’s serious concern like I’ve never seen before.” Phelan could see the scenario in which a bad night for Republicans turned into a seismic shift in the state. If Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico won his race by six or seven percentage points, he predicted, it would be “a bloodbath downballot. I don’t know how people survive.”Talarico won even bigger than that.…

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Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders Barbies Are Hard to Find. They Were Even Harder To Make.

Taylor Prewitt — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000

This Old Thing highlights the stories behind notable Texans’ prized possessions. With long flowing locks and a game-ready smile, this collectible Barbie is gorgeous enough to qualify for the official roster—though we’d have to assess her high kick before drawing up a contract. The first batch of dolls was released in a limited edition run in 2007; each wears stars on her vest and belt and wields pom-poms made from the same material as the actual dancers’ cheer gear. The Barbie debuted thirteen years after Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders director (and former squad member) Kelli Finglass began campaigning for its existence, sending letters and sketches to Mattel. Today, the dolls are prized possessions among their real-life counterparts: The organization has a stockpile and awards one to a…

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At A&M, Hoping Reveille Doesn’t Bite

Ross McCammon — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000

I was driving along Texas Highway 21, just past a giant barn with “Gig ’em!” painted on it, when I realized that the students might ask me about the cover.Paul O’Donnell, a journalism professor at Texas A&M University, had contacted me after reading my February editor’s letter, in which I explained my eagerness to meet with students and professors across the state, particularly those in journalism departments. That note has resulted in some gratifying experiences. I’ve spoken with students and faculty across the University of Texas system, including in the Rio Grande Valley and in San Antonio, and I was excited about my trip to A&M.Texas Monthly already has strong ties to the University of Texas at Austin. Proximity plays a part, but so does…

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Roar of the Crowd: November 2026

Texas Monthly — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000

In 1965 some friends and I floated Boquillas Canyon for three days. The Rio Grande flowed gently from the campground across from Boquillas to Stillwell Crossing. We cooked and slept on the banks, enjoying the cool breezes moving down the river through the high cliffs. I recall only one place where we had to port our inflatable rafts.I greatly enjoyed, and learned from, Jack Herrera’s coverage of the state of the Rio Bravo [The Rio Grande Issue, September 2026] and abhor what is happening to it today. Dale Roberson, DriftwoodForty years ago, I took my mother on a trip to Creede, Colorado. She was captivated. She returned every year afterwards, staying longer each time until, in the nineties, she quit her job, sold her house, and…

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The Daily Crossword: November 4, 2026

Texas Monthly — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 11:00:00 +0000

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Word Wrangler: November 4, 2026

Texas Monthly — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 10:59:00 +0000

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The Night Texas Turned Blue

Forrest Wilder — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 07:52:58 +0000

I’ve covered every election in Texas since 2006. Tuesday night’s results are, by far, the most shocking I’ve ever seen. For my whole adult life, the script has been more or less the same for Texas elections: Republicans win, Democrats lose. In recent years, the story has been about the GOP civil war: the far right winning and the Republican establishment retreating in defeat. The governance story was also predictable: Those in power did what they wanted, and everyone else suffered what they must. That timeworn script was ripped up in just a few hours. A good night for Democrats was certainly indicated by the usual metrics—polling, prediction markets, reporting, and vibes. I thought Talarico would win by a few percentage points. But I’m not sure…

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Bo French Ran an Openly Racist Campaign. Texas Voters Went With His Opponent Instead.

Robert Downen — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 06:13:42 +0000

Bo French really only had one job.Heading into the midterm election, the general wisdom was that French, who has a long history of making overtly racist and bigoted comments, was by far the weakest of the Republican statewide slate but that his race for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission was so far down the ballot that he might sneak past voters’ attention and into office. All he needed to do was maintain a low profile—keep his head down. Sign up for Texas Daily All our stories in one daily email. Email address First Name Last Name Sign Up You agree to our Privacy Policy But French was never going to do that. On September 13, the day after the University of Texas at Austin’s…

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The Making of Bobby Pulido’s Big Night

Eric Benson — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 05:22:55 +0000

Bobby Pulido said from the start of his campaign that he knew how to win over Republican voters in Texas’s Fifteenth Congressional District. Many of them, he said, were friends of his, or friends of friends, or just the kind of people he’d grown up around and understood intimately. “They would tell me, ‘Look, I’m not a Republican Republican. I’m not a MAGA-hat-wearing guy. I know Trump is full of s—.’ But they still voted for him,” Pulido told me in September. There were a lot of those voters. In the redrawn Fifteenth Congressional District, Trump would have won by eighteen percentage points in 2024. But Pulido believed that the right kind of Democrat—someone just like him, in fact—could win them back. Sign up for Texas…

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Gina Hinojosa’s Surprise Victory Over Greg Abbott Changes Everything in Texas

Michael Hardy — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 04:08:08 +0000

A little over a year ago, Gina Hinojosa stood before an audience of more than a hundred supporters in her hometown of Brownsville and announced her candidacy for Texas governor. At the time, her campaign seemed like the longest of long shots. The five-term state representative had little funding and was practically unknown outside her Austin district. Republican Governor Greg Abbott, who would later announce a war chest of more than $100 million, had never lost an election. The last Democrat foolish enough to challenge him, Beto O’Rourke, had been crushed by eleven points.On Tuesday, Hinojosa pulled off one of the greatest upsets in Texas political history. Buoyed by a massive national backlash to President Donald Trump, Hinojosa and fellow state Representative James Talarico, elected…

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Talafreako Goes to Washington

Christopher Hooks — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 03:37:12 +0000

State Representative James Talarico, the slight-of-frame Presbyterian seminarian who was until recently a minor social media influencer in the powerless ranks of the unblessed and forsaken Texas Legislature, has entered, against all odds, the great pantheon of the gods of Texas politics, where he will remain for all time. Decision Desk HQ has called the race for U.S. Senate for Talarico, who defeated Republican candidate Ken Paxton. Talarico has broken the uninterrupted losing streak in the state that has haunted his party for decades. He has become the first Democrat to win a statewide race in Texas since 1994 and the first of his party elected to the U.S. Senate from Texas since 1988, two years before this rapidly graying author was born.In the weeks…

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In November, the Texas Book Club Is Reading . . .

Texas Monthly — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 23:19:13 +0000

Do we have any Texas-history lovers in the Texas Book Club? Our November pick, El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory, by Jazmine Ulloa, explores the history and pivotal role of our state’s largest border town. Sometimes called the other Ellis Island, Texas’s westernmost city has long been defined by its binational population, culture, and industries. It’s often miscast as a sleepy border town, and Ulloa aims to spotlight the city’s long-standing influence in both statewide and national affairs through vivid, human-forward historical reporting. El Paso follows the stories of five families as they migrate to the United States, build lives and livelihoods along the border, and persevere during times of tumult and political change. Born and raised in El…

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His Grandfather Became a Household Name. Now, He’s Trying His Hand at BBQ.

Daniel Vaughn — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Rocky Stubblefield grew up in legendary Texas barbecue joint Stubb’s Bar-B-Q, run by his grandfather C. B. Stubblefield, better known as Stubb. His eponymous Lubbock restaurant opened in 1968. The little place on Broadway became a haven for the growing West Texas music scene before closing in 1984, due to an insurmountable bill for back taxes. Rocky remembers his time there as a boy, hoping to get some coins for the candy machine from his tall, deep-voiced grandfather. “He told me to go bus a table and get the change off it to put the money in the machine,” Rocky said. The lesson was to work for what you want.The family name lives on through the barbecue sauce company Stubb cofounded in the early nineties and…

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The Texas Theatre Embraced Its Uneasy Connection to Lee Harvey Oswald. It’s Thriving.

Sean O'Neal — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000

It is arguably the most famous movie-theater seat in the world, yet there is no historical marker, no plexiglass enclosure to signal its significance. I mill about in the back rows of the Texas Theatre, in the Oak Cliff area of Dallas, debating its exact location with a couple of fellow gawkers. Eventually we’re spotted by Ashton Campbell, director of the Oak Cliff Film Festival. He strides across the theater floor, his finger already pointing at row three, aisle two, seat five: one of the two places where Lee Harvey Oswald sat on the afternoon of November 22, 1963, moments before his arrest and a little more than an hour after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in downtown Dallas. It’s not the actual chair,…

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Election Results: A Historic Night in Texas

Tue, 03 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Editors’ note: We’ve made this article free to access as a service to our readers. To support our ongoing coverage of this election cycle, sign up for our free Texas Daily newsletter. SKIP TO: So, Texas Is Blue Now? “These Are Extinction-Level Numbers” Greg Abbott Concedes That’s All, Folks Ben Rowen, 1:32 a.m. A strange thing happened around 8 p.m. Central tonight, just five-plus hours ago, in the old political order: As extremely favorable early results rolled in for Democrats, liberals publicly urged caution, while a few GOP strategists I was chatting with were ready to declare a five-alarm fire. On this front, the GOP strategists proved as correct as they have for the last three decades, during which their party has never lost a…

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The Daily Crossword: November 3, 2026

Texas Monthly — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 11:00:00 +0000

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Word Wrangler: November 3, 2026

Texas Monthly — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 10:59:00 +0000

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Before You Head to the Polls, Read This

Taylor Prewitt — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 20:13:56 +0000

The upcoming midterm election is one of the most competitive in recent Texas history. In contests for statewide seats that have been held by Republicans for decades, polling shows several Democrats running neck-and-neck with their rivals, and even sometimes ahead of them.The following Texas Monthly reads will give you insight into this election’s important players and issues ahead of Election Day, on November 3. As a service to our readers and in an effort to help inform the electorate, we’re offering these articles free, without a paywall. To support more journalism like the work below, consider becoming a Texas Monthly subscriber, or sign up for a newsletter to receive stories like these in your inbox. After you vote, tune back in for our coverage of election…

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Texas’s Most Elusive Mammal Is Ready for Its Close-Up

Katy Vine — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 19:36:12 +0000

I met Karen Olsson almost thirty years ago, when she was coediting the Texas Observer. Karen was confident in her opinions, and she could listen to an entire conversation in silence, wait for her moment, and then strike with the funniest comment of the night. When she joined the staff of Texas Monthly for a three-year stint in 2006, she could choose any topic and make it sing, whether she pointed her attention toward dark energy or noted mating expert David Buss (“An authority on prehistoric nooky—who wouldn’t want to ask the man a few questions?” she wrote). She brought the same insight and humor to her first novel, Waterloo (2005), about the Slacker days of Austin; to the family drama All the Houses (2015);…

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One Woman’s Fight to Free Herself From a Mental Hospital

Mimi Swartz — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000

John Kerr thought he was doing right by his only daughter when he put in a call to the Menninger Clinic, known as one of the best psychiatric hospitals in the country. Millie Kerr was 41 and had been going through an awful time. She had flown to San Antonio from her adopted home in London a week earlier for surgery. Theoretically, the operation was no big deal—the removal of some scarlike tissue that was causing Millie pain—but it was a follow-up procedure to surgery she’d had the year before to treat ovarian cancer. She’d been in remission for a few months, but the surgeon had some concerns about a recurrence and so took a tissue sample for a biopsy as well. Sign up for Texas…

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Dems Are Finally Admitting Texas Is a Red State. It’s Why They Might Actually Win.

Ben Rowen — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000

It was no surprise that James Talarico was ready for the Question, only that he hadn’t been asked it before. It’s the inquiry pundits have posed for three decades, the one that blossoms on the lips of hopeful national Democrats every election-year spring and then, like a rock rose, withers ignominiously in early November. It’s the question most everyone has tired of: Will Texas go blue? It was asked of Talarico in Killeen last week, at a press conference during which the genteel Presbyterian seminarian accepted the endorsement of a number of grizzled combat veterans. After he fielded inquiries about tax exemptions for servicemen and his veterans’ relations staff, a reporter asked him the old classic. “I’m not interested in turning Texas blue,” Talarico answered, in…

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