Bully for You
Rooting for Goliath.
Writer at large and former senior editor Jason Cohen has written for Texas Monthly since 1995 (and texasmonthly.com since its first iteration). His 1997 story “The Ice Bats Cometh,” about minor league hockey in Texas, was the basis of his book Zamboni Rodeo (Greystone Press, 2001). He also wrote the magazine's first-ever Matthew McConaughey story, in August 1996. The coauthor of Generation Ecch! (Fireside Books, 1994) and coeditor of SXSW Scrapbook (Essex/University of Texas Press, 2011), he has also written for such publications as Rolling Stone, SPIN, Details, the Austin Chronicle, the Austin American-Statesman, Portland Monthly, and Cincinnati magazine. His 1995 Rolling Stone cover story on the band Hole prompted Courtney Love to yell at him from the stage at Lollapalooza in Austin, while his 2007 profile of the Portland strip club Mary's won a Sex-Positive Journalism Award. As one of the two primary writers for the TM Daily Post, Cohen wrote approximately five hundred stories for Texas Monthly in 2012. He has been a blogger since 2002 and has been known to maintain as many as five Twitter accounts.
Rooting for Goliath.
By Jason Cohen
Politics as sports (and sports as politics).
By Jason Cohen
The puck stops here.
By Jason Cohen
The case against the case against ticket scalping.
By Jason Cohen
UT and A&M Form Second Football TeamsAfter the top fifty NCAA programs were privatized, record revenues and stock splits made the IPO spin-offs inevitable. An antitrust lawsuit filed by Texas Tech and UTEP, whose teams remain not-for-profit university entities, was dismissed in federal court.¡Viva Los Cowboys!Dallas Cowboys head coach and
By Jason Cohen
Does it matter if college athletes graduate?
By Jason Cohen
The Astros couldn’t quite make it. The Cowboys have hit the skids. No wonder the state’s attention has turned to . . . hockey?
By Jason Cohen
A West Texas road race, the Super Bowl of six-man footballand, arguably, the world's first rodeo.
By Jason Cohen
To say that the private prison in Eden doesn't creep out the locals is an understatement. They're downright thankful for the place.
By Jason Cohen
Hollywood often fumbles the sports moviebut it could get back in the game right here in Texas.
By Jason Cohen
Houston Rockets general manager Carroll Dawson on new head coach Jeff Van Gundy, Yao Ming, and the game.
By Jason Cohen
Led by the NBA’s most inadvertently colorful coach, this year's Houston Rockets are so much more than an excuse to see a certain ninety-inch-tall Chinese import.
By Jason Cohen
Texas basketball legend Don Haskins on his 38 years courtside with UTEP and the Miners' prospects under new head coach Billy Gillispie.
By Jason Cohen
Astros general manager Gerry Hunsicker talks about second baseman Jeff Kent and a budget like the New York Yankees'.
By Jason Cohen
Yes, yescome playoff time, the Houston Astros have a history of reducing grown men to tears. But thanks to Jeff Kent, this season could be different.
By Jason Cohen
If your goal is to own a pro hockey team, Tom Hicks has a deal for you: He'll sell you the Dallas Stars for a mere $300 millionand throw in the prospect of an NHL-destroying lockout at no extra charge.
By Jason Cohen
What doesn’t kill Spoon makes it stronger. After seven years, an indeterminate number of bassists, and as much luck with the record biz as the Democrats had with Florida, the Austin combo hits the high-water mark with this tense, graceful, spike-pop jewel. Spoon already enjoys an in-the-know following, but Girls
By Jason Cohen
It’s easy to forget that Rodney Crowell is a Texas singer-songwriter and solo artist. He lives in Nashville and doesn’t trip over himself to write about bluebonnets or Huntsville. He has made nine albums but is particularly famous as a tunesmith (hits for everyone from Bob Seger to Lee Ann
By Jason Cohen
Lights Karma Action is the massive, rumbling, and beautiful second album from this Denton quartet, which is headed up by former Mazinga Phaser guitarist and Melodica Festival organizer Mwanza Dover. Given that pedigree, you could call the Falcon Project “space rock,” but the emphasis is firmly on rock—you feel this
By Jason Cohen
Coming soon to a radio near you: El Paso's At the Drive-In, the best new rock band in America.
By Jason Cohen
A songwriter’s songwriter and a cult figure’s cult figure, Houston’s Mickey Newbury authored pop and country hits in the late sixties and early seventies, among them “Sweet Memories” and the Elvis Presley stalwart “An American Trilogy.” He’s the sort of artist Texas produces as naturally as oil or running backs.
By Jason Cohen
American cutie-pie.
By Jason Cohen
If you haven’t heard of Centro-matic, it’s certainly not for lack of effort on the group’s part. All the Falsest Hearts Can Try is the Denton band’s third CD in little more than a year; it dates back to a 1998 recording session that produced more than sixty songs, completing
By Jason Cohen
Houstonians by way of Rhode Island, Peglegasus has been based in Austin for six of their ten years, though the group first took shape in 1979, when drummer Peter Voskamp and his guitarist sibling John acquired a stepbrother in guitarist Berke Marye. (Bryan Nelson, the unfortunate recipient of many parentheticals
By Jason Cohen
For the hottest Texas band that isn’t the Dixie Chicks, the path to the top of the pop charts led through the Christian- music scene—and Dawson’s Creek.
By Jason Cohen
Comeback kid.
By Jason Cohen
London calling.
By Jason Cohen
Hockey in Texas? And the team is good? Don’t laugh. The Dallas Stars could win it all this year, and sports fans across the state could soon be drinking Shiner Bock from the Stanley Cup.
By Jason Cohen
Why are Randy and Alan Hendricks the only people in Houston who are glad Roger Clemens didn’t end up with the Astros? Hey, it comes with the job.
By Jason Cohen
Dan Jenkins has just published his eighth novel. It’s called Rude Behavior. Spend a few hours with him and you’ll know why.
By Jason Cohen
Forget about the hair (and the tattoos). Ricky Williams has his head screwed on straight, which is why he’s still playing football at the University of Texas.
By Jason Cohen
Teen screen queen.
By Jason Cohen
Plano’s Steve Harvey has been a successful comedian for years. Now he’s a sitcom star too.
By Jason Cohen
Could he be Texas film’s new king of the hill?
By Jason Cohen
Austin’s major-label bands-of-the-moment
By Jason Cohen
A couple of indie film producers.
By Jason Cohen
Like it says on her newly acquired bumper sticker, movie mogul Lynda Obst is “Texan By Choice.” But while you can take the girl out of Hollywood …
By Jason Cohen
The state prison name game; Dallas alternative-country band the Old 97’s is feeling no depression.
By Jason Cohen
The career of Austin young-adult writer Rob Thomas is going through a growth spurt.
By Jason Cohen
Breezeway, Suburbia, and Words of Our Ancients may have been our only pure-pedigree entries in Park City, but other films boasted Lone Star connections. Most notable was director-screenwriter Morgan J. Freeman’s sweet but hard-hitting teenage street drama Hurricane, which won three awards. As they did for Bottle Rocket, fellow Dallas
By Jason Cohen
An Austin filmmaker hopes to be the next Sundance kid.
By Jason Cohen
Mike Judge plays King of the Hill .
By Jason Cohen
Few Austin musicians have been as close to stardom, and unable to reach it, as Alejandro Escovedo. But for him, fame has never really been the point.
By Jason Cohen
Even when they’re not winning games, minor league hockey teams like Austin’s are winning fans by the thousands. Who’d have thought skaters would score in Texas?
By Jason Cohen
Rock, don’t run, to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, where Texas greats from T-Bone Walker to Sly Stone get their due.
By Jason Cohen
The gospel according to Michelle Shocked.
By Jason Cohen
BEN KWELLER WON’T BE SEEING THE INSIDE of a high school classroom this year, though he could have penned a pretty nifty “What I Did on My Summer Vacation” essay. The fifteen-year-old is the singer, songwriter, guitarist, and pianist for Radish, an astonishingly tuneful alternative-rock trio that has spent the
By Jason Cohen
Fourteen-year-old country prodigy LeAnn Rimes is singing a Blue streak. But she’s not the only Texas teen tearing up the music scene.
By John Morthland, Jason Cohen and Ramiro Burr
He shone in Lone Star; now he’s thrilling ’em in A Time to Kill. How talent and timing made native Texan Matthew McConaughey Hollywood’s hottest leading man.
By Jason Cohen
Austin’s Butthole Surfers have always been very strange. But these days, the strangest thing about them is their mainstream respectability.
By Jason Cohen