"The New New York"

"Simply put, it's time for California to accept reality. There will never be '50 Million Californians,' as demographers have predicted for decades. Instead, the population will stall out at about 40 million. Eventually, California will fall behind Texas as the nation's most populous state, just as New York fell behind California back in the '60s."

William Fulton at Slate tells Californians to "let Arizona, Nevada, and Texas try to build prosperity based on population growth."

"What Changed in 2020 Is That Conservative Hispanic South Texans Voted Like Their Non-Hispanic White Neighbors"

"The final theory does not portend doom for national Democrats but is nevertheless dour news for the party's chances of flipping Texas. Even if Hispanic voters across the country largely stay blue, Tejanos, like Cubanos in Miami, may be outliers: 'The Rio Grande Valley is just super weird,' in Shor's words. Though the language of 'trying to be white' is crude and ascribes intent that may or may not exist, it's clear that political anxieties were powerful enough to overcome traditional party allegiances in 2020. And that suggests that Tejano identity is changing. Tejanos, like the Irish Americans before them, may continue to align more closely with the interests shared by their Anglo neighbors than with those of immigrants and people of color."

Jack Herrera at Texas Monthly explains "Why Democrats Are Losing Texas Latinos."

"They Remember, Even if the Rest of the Country Does Not"

"Just as these white settlers began moving into the region, a series of events in Mexico (a recession in 1906; the Mexican Revolution in 1910) caused an increase in Mexican immigration, as people fled instability in their home country. The decadelong revolution in Mexico ended the reign of Porfirio Diaz, a dictator who had supported wealthy landowners and industrialists. The reforms called for by Mexicans who challenged Diaz's rule included land redistribution. This scared Anglo Texans, who worried that revolutionaries might look at Texas—where some Anglos had begun to accumulate huge tracts of land that once belonged to Tejano smallholders—and see fertile ground for protest and action."

In a 2016 Slate article, Rebecca Onion discusses the era of "La Matanza" in early-twentieth-century Texas.

Where the Pyramid Met the Eye

"In 1965, his group the Spades released a single containing two Erickson songs that became crucial to the Elevators–You're Gonna Miss Me and We Sell Soul. But the leap into innerspace came when he paired up with Tommy Hall to form the Elevators in Austin, Texas, later that year. Hall was the psychedelic visionary–the one who shaped the band’s debut into being The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators, the principal lyricist, and the player of the electric jug, the sound that gave the band their unearthly wobbliness–while Erickson was the singer and main composer; and what extraordinary music he composed. On that debut album, Roller Coaster is disorienting and sinister, a combination of rock'n'roll and raga-like intensity; Reverberation (Doubt) a claustrophobic nightmare; Fire Engine is garage rock taken to its logical extreme. As Rob Chapman wrote in his book Psychedelia and Other Colours: 'The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators and its follow-up, Easter Everywhere, contain some of the most primal yelps of discomfort and joy heard anywhere in rock'n'roll.'"

Michael Hann at The Guardian writes an appreciation of Roky Erickson.

"Arguably Serving as the Most Politicized and Abusive Branch of Federal Law Enforcement"

"The viciousness we are witnessing today at the border, directed at children and adults, has a long history, a fact that should in no way mitigate the extraordinary cruelty of Donald Trump. But it does suggest that if the U.S. is to climb out of the moral abyss it has fallen into, it has to think well beyond Trump's malice. It needs a historical reckoning with the true cause of the border crisis: the long, brutal history of border enforcement itself."

Greg Grandin at The Intercept discusses the history of the U.S. Border Patrol.

"Texas Became a Model"

"There is a national Republican agenda for cutting back taxes. Naturally, that causes a failure to deliver the services. You can see that in education, all over, especially in the deep red states— Kansas, Oklahoma, our neighbors, where teachers are seriously underpaid, and the education of our children is really suffering. That's true in Texas. The nation's report card, which came out a couple weeks ago, has Texas down in the bottom 10 or 15 percent of the nation’s students. It's at the bottom or right next to the bottom in terms of how much money it spends per student in the state, which is similar to what's happening in other states. A lot of it has its origins in Texas."

Isaac Chotiner at Slate interviews Lawrence Wright about Wright's new book, God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State.

"A New Generation of Historians Seeks a More Diverse Set of Characters"

"For generations, a romanticized vision of Texas history was of white male settlers taming a wilderness; of James Bowie and Davy Crockett falling at the Alamo; of cowboys herding cattle across the plains; and of gushing oil wells. That vision largely left out Native Americans, women, African-Americans, and other groups.
"Texas is far from unique in that sense, as evinced by roiling battles over the removal of Confederate monuments in the South and revisionist accounts of the rebels' cause. Still, in recent years the state has taken steps to promote more diverse and unvarnished perspectives on its history, even as conservatives have pushed back on school textbooks.

With the tricentennial of San Antonio, Henry Gass at The Christian Science Monitor takes a look at the state of Texas history.

"Why Did Houston Pave Over Their Floodplains?"

"In these acute crises, we see inspiring stories over and over: Communities come together. People risk their lives to save their neighbors as well as strangers. It is heartwarming. It reinforces everything that we want to believe about ourselves as Americans, as Texans, as Floridians, as Louisianans.
"But examining why these moments of heroism become necessary tells a darker story about America. People don’t just find themselves in places vulnerable to flooding. They are pushed there by racial injustice, economic inequality, and short-term, profit-driven development practices. The long-term decay of the nation’s infrastructure is a direct result of policy decisions that politicians and communities make time and again. The Gulf Coast is an extreme example of this, a laboratory for what happens when you combine lax planning policies, aging flood-control mechanisms, and a geography that channels storms from the warm (and warming) waters of the Gulf into the cities that line it."

Alexis C. Madrigal at The Atlantic interviews Cindy Ermus about her new book Environmental Disaster in the Gulf South.

The editors of The Washington Post take Texas public officials to task.

Steve Russell at Newsweek writes that "Houston Is Drowning--In Its Freedom From Regulations."

And Thom Patterson at CNN explains "How Houston's layout may have made its flooding worse."

Faithless

"Alexander Hamilton provided a blueprint for states' votes. Federalist 68 argued that an Electoral College should determine if candidates are qualified, not engaged in demagogy, and independent from foreign influence. Mr. Trump shows us again and again that he does not meet these standards. Given his own public statements, it isn't clear how the Electoral College can ignore these issues, and so it should reject him."

In The New York Times, Texas elector Christopher Suprun announces that he "Will Not Cast My Electoral Vote for Donald Trump."

"Story of a Smoldering Grudge"

"The public has embraced the notion that the greatest crime of the 20th century must have been the product of an equally grandiose conspiracy.
"But none of these conspiracy theories hold up when the events of the six months before Nov. 22, 1963, are carefully studied.  Oswald was no coldhearted professional assassin under orders.  The real answer to the reasons he took aim are to be found in his frustrations and obsessions."

James Reston, Jr., speculates in the Los Angeles Times that Texas Governor John Connally was Lee Harvey Oswald's target in Dallas.

"A Campaign of Fear against Immigrants"

"What the newsreels didn't show were those same detainees, now with shaved heads, crammed onto trains or trucks bound for the middle of the desert, where they were left 15 miles across the Texas border on the highway. A leader with the largest Mexican labor organization (Confederación de Trabajadores de México) described the transportation of these deportees as being like 'truckloads of cows.' In one instance, near Mexicali, across the California border, 88 deportees died of exposure in the 112-degree heat. Others—about a quarter of those deported—were shipped to Mexico by boats from Port Isabel, Texas. Congressional investigators, historian Mae Ngai has written, likened the boats 'to an "eighteenth century slave ship."' The press coverage also failed to capture the many instances in which immigrants were roughed up, detained, and summarily deported without due process, often with no chance to notify their families that they had been swept up in raids on factories, fields, boarding houses, and even the same movie theaters that showed the newsreels. Mexican Americans had to prove that they belonged. INS agents dismissed the legitimacy of draft cards or Social Security cards, insisting on birth certificates, which few people carried around on their person. Mexican Americans who couldn't produce birth certificates quickly enough were deported."

Louis Hyman and Natasha Iskander in Slate revisit the mass deportations carried out by the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s.

Add Slate republishes Dahlia Lithwick and Laurel Reiman Henneman's 2015 article on Japanese-American internment during World War II.

"The Death of Flair"

"By the mid-1990s, casual theme dining was becoming the butt of jokes. On a 1995 episode of 'The Simpsons,' saloonkeeper Moe opens a restaurant called Uncle Moe's Family Feedbag, specializing in deep-fried food. Moe wears a barbershop quartet costume with candy-striped shirt, bow-tie, suspenders, and a sleeve garter. In a commercial, Moe says, 'If I'm not smiling when your check comes, your meal's on me.'
"His décor includes ferns, a vintage gas pump, stained-glass windows, several taxidermy trophies including an alligator head wearing sunglasses and a cowboy hat, license plates, a '50s jukebox, and a 'Yield' traffic sign. 'Street signs! Indoors? Hmm, whatever!' Marge exclaims."

Lisa Hix at Collector's Weekly traces the rise and fall of antiques-stuffed casual restaurants.

"Frustrated Gunman Can’t Believe How Far He Has To Drive To Find Nearest Planned Parenthood Clinic"

"'God, the nearest one isn't even in this state. It's actually faster for me to drive across the border to Santa Fe, and even then it's still a four-hour trip. That barely leaves me enough time to buy ammo.'"

From The Onion.

"Where, For More Than a Century, Conflicts Over Race and Class Have Often Surfaced"

"Today, that complicated legacy persists across the United States. The public pools of mid-century—with their sandy beaches, manicured lawns, and well-tended facilities—are vanishingly rare. Those sorts of amenities are now generally found behind closed gates, funded by club fees or homeowners' dues, and not by tax dollars. And they are open to those who can afford to live in such subdivisions, but not to their neighbors just down the road."


Yoni Appelbaum in The Atlantic discusses McKinney, Texas, and the history of segregated pools.

"We Certainly Have a Lot More in Common With Mississippi Than We Do With California, Alright?”

"'When modern Texans in cities such as Houston put on their boots and Stetsons and head for the rodeo or hearken back to the days of movie westerns that portrayed their state as cowboys, rustlers, and gunfighters, they are drawing on a collective memory that, although it has a basis in fact, is not the essence of Texas,' writes historian Randolph B. Campbell."


John Nova Lomax in Texas Monthly writes about how a southern state presented itself as western.

"Throw Millions Out of Work—as Long as We Get a Chance for Our Turn at the Trough"

"Then we will proceed to do exactly what Enron or AIG or Goldman Sachs wanted us to do all along. We will convince ourselves that these terrible things happened to us because markets aren't free enough—that our only mistake was in not carrying our campaigns for deregulation or tax cuts to their logical conclusions. After Enron collapsed, let's recall, the nation decided that Enron had been right all along: California had such terrible problems because it was run by tree-hugging liberals who stifled entrepreneurship with their preposterous interfering ways.
"And today, after one of the clearest lessons in deregulatory folly that history is likely to provide, we are once again on a national crusade against regulation. We have filled Congress with clear-eyed believers who know that economic rules are an affront to freedom itself. We have signed up by the millions for Tea Party groups organized by anti-regulatory outfits like FreedomWorks—which, in its earlier incarnation as Citizens for a Sound Economy, took some $20,000 in funds from none other than Enron."


In Salon, Thomas Frank revisits a 2011 article declaring that America was still living in the "Age of Enron."

Mercury Kings Play Songs of Gummi

The Los Angeles Times runs obits for film critic Stanley Kauffmann, astronaut Scott Carpenter, novelist Oscar Hijuelos, candy promoter Hans Riegel, actor Kumar Pallana, football coach Bum Phillips, cartoon-studio chief Lou Scheimer, and former House speaker Tom Foley.

"An Angry Place, a Stew of Superpatriotism Fueled by Anti-Communist Paranoia, Fierce Racism and Anti-Semitism"

"It was an amazing confederacy. People were lured to Dallas, they were marching to Dallas. There was just this rising sense of anger and distrust toward Kennedy, toward perceived socialism, religion. People feared him as a Catholic.
"I found that Dallas became really one of the most singular cities on planet Earth. For some reason out in the heartland in the middle of Texas, really powerful people coalesced around this notion that Kennedy was a traitor and in fact was guilty of treason. And these weren't just folks who were idly thinking these thoughts; they were acting on them and forming organizations and movements to essentially overthrow Kennedy."

Melissa Block on National Public Radio talks with Bill Minutaglio about Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis's new book, Dallas 1963: Patriots, Traitors, and the Assassination of JFK.

And inspired by Dallas 1963, Adam Gopnik at The New Yorker traces the Tea Party to the John Birch Society.

And James McAuley ruminates in The New York Times.

Time Out for Strange Love

The Los Angeles Times prints obituaries for Disney designer Mel Shaw, guitarist Mickey Baker, former congressman Jack Brooks, architect Oscar Niemeyer, pianist Dave Brubeck, and news helicopter creator John D. Silva.

Sun Bloc

"It was Reagan whose election as president seemed to mark the coming of the political age of the Sun Belt, but also of what Kenneth M. Duberstein, the White House chief of staff for Reagan, referred to as 'the lock': the notion that the Republican Party could consider the Sun Belt in the political bank. As late as 2002, Karl Rove, the chief political adviser to George W. Bush, was arguing that California was fertile ground for Republicans.

"'Reagan in many ways seemed to be the beginning of the wave, but in retrospect, it’s going to be remembered as the peak of the wave,' Mr. White said."

Adam Nagourney in The New York Times argues that Republican dominance in the Sun Belt is slipping.