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Highlights from the Texas Book Festival
Shaking out the best of my notes from a wonderfully busy weekend at the 15th annual Texas Book Festival (visit The Reader blog for more festival coverage from my colleagues Joe Gross, Patrick Beach and...
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Highlights from the Texas Book Festival, part 2
I started the festival’s final day Sunday in the Capitol Extension listening to James Hynes talk about his masterful new novel, “Next.” Hynes is a native of Michigan and graduate of the Iowa Writers’...
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'Our White Boy': A Texas baseball story
With the Rangers’ mighty bats silent and the team down 3-1 in the World Series, things are looking grim here in Mudville, Texas. So let’s turn instead to a baseball story from yesteryear that we’re...
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Q&A with Sarah Vowell about her new book, 'Unfamiliar Fishes'
I interviewed Sarah Vowell about her new book, “Unfamiliar Fishes,” for today’s Life & Style section. You can read the article here. “Unfamiliar Fishes” is about the Americanization of Hawaii by...
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Q&A with Mary Roach, author of 'Packing for Mars'
We simply weren’t made to live without gravity. That fact has always been the biggest challenge about space travel. Think rocket science is hard? Try building a toilet that works in zero gravity. In...
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Exploiting faith in Iowa
The Iowa caucuses are in two weeks and Texas Gov. Rick Perry is touring the state in a bus that carries a slogan that matches the changed focus of his endangered presidential campaign: “Faith, Jobs and...
View ArticlePerry carries on
We began the day thinking Gov. Rick Perry was headed back to Texas to reassess his presidential run after his distant fifth-place finish in last night’s Iowa caucuses — meaning we began the day...
View ArticleLooking for the beat in South Carolina
After a slight rewrite, my last blog item about Gov. Rick Perry’s piano playing was published Sunday as a column in the American-Statesman. Since then I’ve heard that Perry can also play the drums....
View ArticleRick Perry calls it quits
Gov. Rick Perry accepted the inevitable today and ended his inept run for the presidency. A Perry-Mitt Romney battle royale for the Republican nomination stretching deep into the primary season seemed...
View ArticleThe unstately State of the Union
The State of the Union address has become a tiresome pageant, overstuffed with partisan grandstanding, special guests and a laundry list of sometimes half-baked policy proposals. You want courage in...
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Craig James is Craig James
I don’t know why Craig James is running for U.S. Senate. If I were paid to talk about college football at ESPN there’s no way I’d give it up to make a likely futile run for public office, but the...
View ArticleHistory turns on a dropped pass
The New England Patriots lost last night’s Super Bowl. Well, OK, the New York Giants won, but sometimes games are lost more than they’re won, and the Patriots lost Super Bowl XLVI. The loss came with...
View ArticleDavy Jones: First Marcia Brady, then Stephen Stills
Like so many others who were 10-ish in the early 1970s, I immediately thought of Marcia Brady when I heard Wednesday that the Monkees’ Davy Jones had died of a heart attack at age 66. Forty years ago,...
View ArticleHealth care and the Supreme Court
I wrote a column for Sunday’s American-Statesman about the Supreme Court arguments this week on the constitutionality of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as...
View ArticleHealth care's future awaits the Supreme Court
And now we wait. Unless they surprise everyone and issue an opinion much sooner than expected, it’ll be late June before the Supreme Court’s nine justices reveal their decision on health care’s future....
View ArticleObamacare and the Supreme Court, once more
I adapted my last blog entry into a column that ran Saturday in the American-Statesman. Here are a couple of brief thoughts generated by a few responses to that column: Opponents of the health care law...
View ArticleWords on the Titanic anniversary
I hadn’t planned to take any special note of this weekend’s 100th anniversary of the Titanic disaster. Nonetheless, I found myself watching “A Night to Remember” Saturday night on TCM. The movie,...
View ArticleThe price of Bill Buckner's flub
Memorable moments in sports have a way of distorting sports memories. Friday, the baseball that rolled through the legs of first baseman Bill Buckner in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series between the...
View ArticlePhil Collins always remembers the Alamo
This month, Phil Collins — he of Genesis and “Sussudio” — received an honorary doctor of history degree from McMurry University in Abilene. As an Abilenian born and raised, here’s what first struck me...
View ArticleMore anything? More everything!
Austin Mayor Lee Leffingwell, City Manager Marc Ott and Police Chief Art Acevedo, along with Sue Edwards, the assistant city manager for development services, and Rodney Gonzales, the deputy director...
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