Texas

Thursday

Michael Hann

Joyous and very, very funny: Beastie Boys Story reviewed

From our UK edition

The music of the Beastie Boys was entirely an expression of their personalities, a chance to delightedly splurge out on to record everything that amused them. And early on, in their teens-get-drunk debut album, Licensed To Ill, that resulted in obnoxiousness. But mostly they were kinetic and colourful, which is why the new Apple TV+ film about them works so well. The format suits the story. Beastie Boys Story simply documents a stage show where winningly they talk the audience through their personal history. It’s much like Netflix’s Springsteen on Broadway. But since the third Beastie, Adam Yauch, died in 2012, the band no longer perform, so where Springsteen punctuated his memories with songs, the Beasties do it with film clips.

Monday

James Jeffrey

Texas or Hell

The first time I saw Texas, I was more than ready for it. I crossed the state line in the middle of a month-long, coast-to-coast road trip after a hellish tour in Afghanistan. ‘You can go to Hell, but I am going to Texas,’ said Davy Crockett. I think he had a point. Texas is better, though it’s nearly as hot come summertime. My wingman and I did our best to honor Hunter S. Thompson’s advice to embrace ‘madness in any direction, at any hour’. Well, of a sort. We were both still subject to the army’s random drug tests, plus it was hard to entirely forget the chivalrous officer code drilled into us at Sandhurst, the West Point of Britain.

texas

Tuesday

Lauren Chen

The trouble with designating ‘incels’ a terror threat

The Texas Department of Public Safety has designated incels, or ‘involuntary celibates’, as an ‘emerging domestic terror threat’. What began online with what the Department’s report calls a ‘a personal grievance due to perceived rejection by women’ may already, the report claims, have morphed into ‘allegiance to, and attempts to further, an Incel Rebellion’.Incels have quickly become one of the few groups whose mockery and derision is deemed universally acceptable. The term has become a go-to insult for men who are merely undesirable or unpopular. The idea that some men are misogynists, embittered because they can’t get women’s attention, is now used to explain all manner of male behavior.

Tuesday

James Jeffrey

Buttigieg at home as he ranges into Texas

Austin, TexasShortly after Pete Buttigieg took to the stage at Buford’s Backyard Beer Garden in downtown Austin, I heard a loud thud from off to my right. A small circle of people crowded around a woman lying passed out on the ground.'She went down like a felled tree,' remarked a journalist next to me. Up front, Buttigieg was in full flow listing America’s many woes that need sorting. People crouched down to help — 'Give her space!

buttigieg texas

Friday

Caroline McCarthy

A marketer’s request: Make SXSW exciting again

This year at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSW), an impressive lineup of 2020 presidential candidates (and possible candidates) like Amy Klobuchar, Julián Castro, and John Kasich will take the stage for ‘Conversations About America’s Future,’ a series of one-on-one interviews with prominent media figures. Too bad everybody’s talking about Game of Thrones instead. In building its ‘Bleed for the Throne’ setup at the annual digital confab, HBO had to live up to the hype of last year’s SXSW stunt, where they surprised pretty much everybody by building an actual Westworld.

sxsw

Tuesday

Jacob Heilbrunn

The scariest news for Trump isn’t about a border wall

It’s classic Trump. A president who knows the virtues of suspense is not going to render a final verdict on the congressional spending deal – which Fox News host Sean Hannity deemed ‘garbage’ – until the very last moment, trying to make it look as though he’s the Decider, when he really has little choice about whether to sign off on it. El Paso, where he ranted last night about the need to finish a wall he never even started, was his personal Alamo.After the 35-day government shutdown, which tanked his favorability ratings, Trump can hardly afford to create déjà vu all over again with a fresh one.

donald trump border
trump beto border
Freddy Gray

How Trump could monster Beto O’Rourke in 2020

It will be a delicious irony when the 2020 Democratic nominee ends up being another rich white dude. Picture the scene in July next year, at the party’s National Convention in Milwaukee. After all the talk of a new, rich diversity, after all the noisy women candidates have canceled each other, after Cory Booker’s self-righteousness sets itself on fire, and after the superdelegates figured out another way to block Bernie Sanders, the Democrats have done the dumb thing and plumped for Beto O’Rourke. He gives a tiresome, Obama-lite oration on the need to put history back on track and rediscover a spirit of open-borderness. He gives the second half of the speech in Spanish. The media sings his praises.

Wednesday

William Murchison

Beto O’Rourke may be the opposite of Trump – but is that what Texas wants?

Donald Trump’s dominance of the US political scene shows up in surprising ways, at surprising moments. For instance, in the retort of an exuberant Democratic senatorial candidate striving for headway in a televised debate with his incumbent Republican opponent. ‘He’s dishonest,’ says Congressman Robert Francis ‘Beto’ O’Rourke, assailing Sen, Ted Cruz. It’s why the president called him Lyin’ Ted, and it’s why the nickname stuck.’ Oh, boy, the Dems are looking to Donald Trump for character references? As I keep saying – and you’ve probably had the same thought – it’s a weird time we live in, getting weirder by the minute.

beto O’Rourke

Wednesday

Leann Davis Alspaugh

A changing climate on the Texas Gulf Coast

It’s 9 a.m. on Sunday morning and my mother and I arrive at her church for Mass. Inside, I greet the mother of one of my oldest friends, ‘Buenos días, Señora, cómo está?’ ‘M’hija!’ she exclaims, and we embrace. My Spanish is serviceable, but it gets a real workout when I attend my mother’s church. At the Catholic church in my Texas Gulf Coast hometown, the Spanish Mass has the largest attendance. Everyone there, except my mother and me, is Hispanic. The altar servers are Hispanic. The middle-aged deacon is Hispanic. The only other exception is the parish priest, Father C., who is from India.

beto o'rourke texas gulf coast church

Monday

Daniel DePetris

Why Ted Cruz is craving a Team Trump trip to Texas

They were the words of a presidential candidate who had enough of the taunts and the insults. ‘This man is a pathological liar. He doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies. He lies practically every word that comes out of his mouth...The man cannot tell the truth, but he combines it with being a narcissist — a narcissist at a level I don’t think this country’s ever seen.’ ‘This man’ was none other than Donald Trump. And the person doing the ranting was none other than Ted Cruz, the junior senator from Texas who at the time was engaged in a nasty, divisive, and childish Republican presidential primary contest with the New York billionaire celebrity. How times have changed.

ted cruz