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Storytelling and news about Texas’s media industry
Feature|
November 1, 2003

Anchor Away

What Walter Cronkite really thinks about cable TV shoutfests, the length of network newscasts, and (ahem) Jayson Blair.

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Politics & Policy|
November 1, 2003

Weapon of Mass Communication

This was the summer of George W. Bush's discontent, when sixteen specious words in the State of the Union address threw the White House into disarray. Can his 32-year-old mediameister, Dan Bartlett, get the message and the messenger back on track?

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Web Exclusive|
April 1, 2003

Underneath It All

Misty Keasler talks about her young photography career and the intense images she captures, including this month's photos of the present-day Branch Davidian compound.

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Feature|
March 1, 2003

Bard of the Border

The most promising young fiction writer in Texas is Oscar Casares, whose tales of life in Brownsville have put him and his hometown on the literary map.

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Web Exclusive|
February 1, 2003

A Q&A With Anne Wilkes Tucker

Not too long ago the photography collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston was nonexistent. But thanks to curator Anne Wilkes Tucker, it is now considered one of America's best. Here, she discusses her career, photography and being a woman in the field.

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Web Exclusive|
February 1, 2003

A Q&A With Hilary Duff

Hilary Duff, star of the breakout Disney Channel program Lizzie McGuire, is, at 15, already a legitimate phenomenon. In addition to her acting, which has spanned stage and screen, Duff's single "I Can't Wait" from the Lizzie McGuire soundtrack went gold this year.

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Feature|
February 1, 2003

Cover Girls

From Ann on a Harley to Anna Nicole on a Bum Steer binge, we present our fifty favorite Texas Monthly issues with a female face.

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Arts & Entertainment|
August 31, 2001

Dawn

In the June 1991 issue, in an article called “Voices From the Dark,” I told the story of Dawn, my mother-in-law. It was an account of her brief career as a singer in Hollywood in the late forties, how schizophrenia had brought that career to a tragic end, and how

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Feature|
April 30, 2001

The Book on Willie Morris

The former editor of the Daily Texan and the Texas Observer was a good ol’ boy, a haunted soul, and my greathearted friend. A remembrance.

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Media|
August 31, 1999

Schmooze Paper

What do gossipeuse Liz Smith, politico Paul Begala, and Hollywood hotshot Robert Rodriguez have in common? They all worked—and networked—at the hundred-year-old Daily Texan.

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Media|
May 31, 1999

Lynch Mob

Like the coffee and pie in the fictional town of Twin Peaks, the Arlington-based fanzine Wrapped in Plastic is damn fine.

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Media|
March 1, 1999

Urban Cowboy

Peter Jennings. Liz Smith. Barbara Walters. Joe Armstrong? You may not know the name, but New York publishing’s most famous ex-Abilenian is at home among the stars—and is a star in his own right.

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The Ex Files|
February 1, 1999

The Ex Files

David HalberstamMy father was stationed in El Paso at Biggs Field, which would later become a huge air base. You could see all these planes that were lined up, the bombers that were going to be used. I loved El Paso; it was so different from growing up in New

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Feature|
January 1, 1999

You Can’t Go Home Again

Folk singer Nanci Griffith thinks the Texas media have been mistreating her. The way she’s fighting back guarantees her trouble with the press isn’t going away.

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Face|
November 1, 1998

Luann Williams

Luann Williams, the editor and publisher of Pop Culture Press, isn’t the type who waits for opportunity to knock. “In the mid-eighties I was working at a Memphis record store and loved music magazines,” says the thirtysomething Tennessee native. “I was looking at a couple, and I thought, ‘You know,

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The Stand Up Desk|
May 31, 1998

Witt and Wisdom

BILL WITTLIFF IS A RENAISSANCE hombre. An author, a publisher, a film producer, and an arts patron, the longtime Austinite is best known for his screenplays, including The Black Stallion, Raggedy Man, Legends of the Fall, and Lonesome Dove; his adaptation of the latter revived both the miniseries and the

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The Stand Up Desk|
April 30, 1998

An Evan Smithee Production

The first film Texas Monthly deputy editor Evan Smith ever saw was A Boy Named Charlie Brown. That was in 1969, when he was only three. But Snoopy, Lucy, and the gang must have had a potent effect because film has been a steady and powerful presence in Smith’s

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The Stand Up Desk|
March 1, 1998

Banks a Lot

BEFORE SHE BEGAN putting together finely detailed service pieces for magazines like this one, Suzy Banks was occupied with another kind of construction. “I graduated from college in 1981 with a useless degree in film, but I didn’t want to leave Texas,” says the 39-year-old, who lives in Dripping

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Business|
December 1, 1997

Weekly, Strongly

Why are small-town Texas newspapers thriving? Because unlike big-city dailies, they know their readers, and they give them what they want.

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Books|
September 30, 1997

Dan Rather

MY MATERNAL GRANDMOTHER, Grandma Page, was up at three-thirty or four o’clock in the morning to bake and churn and get ready for the cotton fields on our family farm in Bloomington. At night, after all the cooking and sewing, there was energy left for her reading. “Come, Danny, I’ll

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Books|
July 31, 1997

J. C. Herz

Growing up in Houston, J. C. Herz spent much of her time defending the city from incoming ballistic missiles. She accomplished this while sitting in front of her family’s television and playing Missile Command—just one of the many video games lovingly described in her second book, Joystick Nation (Little, Brown;

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Arts & Entertainment|
June 30, 1997

Quiz Show

What in the world can make learning fun? Would you believe—the National Geographic Society? When the staid Washington, D.C., institution wanted to turn the database of questions from its National Geography Bee into a computer game that would appeal to parents and kids alike, it turned to Austin’s Human Code,

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Arts & Entertainment|
May 31, 1997

Uma Pemmaraju

While she was still in high school, Uma Pemmaraju persuaded the editors of the San Antonio Express-News to let her write the weekly fishing report—even though she was, so to speak, out to sea on the subject. “I knew nothing about fishing,” she says. “I was basically calling around different

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Arts & Entertainment|
April 30, 1997

Mission Accomplished

The newest game from Dallas’ Digifx Entertainment is ready for prime time. In Mission to Nexus Prime, whose storyline has been crafted by Star Wars author Timothy Zahn, you command your troops through a series of battles to gain control of planet Nexus Prime and its complex network of wormholes

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Arts & Entertainment|
April 30, 1997

Liz Smith

I entered the University of Texas before World War II ended; I was fresh out of divorce court. I didn’t know a soul in Austin, and there were only very young men—prodigies—or very old men on campus. American guys were still at war! So I spent my time swinging between

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Arts & Entertainment|
April 1, 1997

Game Daze

IF FILLING OUT YOUR TAX forms this month wasn’t complicated enough for you, Richardson’s 7th Level has a new computer game that may be right up your alley. In G-Nome, you can pilot a lumbering craft that looks like one of the Imperial walkers from The Empire Strikes Back. But

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Arts & Entertainment|
March 1, 1997

Linda Ellerbee

When I was a little girl, the thing that I most wanted to do was to be able to sing, but as fortune would have it, I can’t carry a tune. One year at River Oaks Elementary School, a humane decision was made by the principal that anyone who wanted

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