Cover Story
How Data Centers Are Eating Up Rural Texas
layton Tucker’s family has owned a cattle farm in Lampasas, Texas, for four generations. In Texas, cattle prices are linked to rainfall, Tucker explained. In particularly bad drought years, like 2021-2024, there’s less hay. The price of cattle plummets. “The closest hay we could find was five hours away, and that forced everyone to start…
News
The Last Two Standing to Represent the City’s Core
Hyde Park, with its orderly layout, Old Austin grace, and nearness to the University of Texas campus, is a very Kathie Tovo kind of place. Tovo’s campaign signs stand at the edges of lawns throughout the neighborhood. I followed the candidate on a recent April afternoon as she canvassed the area, knocking on doors in…
Affordable Housing Community Opens to Help Address Chronic Homelessness
As the city continues to evaluate ways to assist the homeless population, a new affordable housing community, The Roz, opened in Southeast Austin on April 16. The 100-unit development offers permanent supportive housing (PSH), along with on-site social services, for individuals who have been unhoused for a year or longer. However, most of the residents…
MoPac Expansion Challenged by Residents, City Leaders
Austin residents and city leaders are organizing to stop or at least delay a plan to expand MoPac between Enfield Road and Slaughter Lane, saying it would pollute the water and air and kill endangered species living near the highway. The plan by the Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority – a local entity overseeing toll…
The Week’s Biggest News in Brief: April 23-29
GOP Gerrymandering Gets Green Light: In August of last year, Gov. Greg Abbott signed off on a mid-decade redistricting of the state’s congressional map, aimed to help flip five seats for Republicans come November. Shortly after, an El Paso district court blocked the map, stating that it had been racially gerrymandered. Just before the deadline…
Ten Commandments in Public School Classrooms Ruled Constitutional
On April 21, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit issued a close ruling that will now require Austin-area Lake Travis and Dripping Springs ISDs, along with seven other Texas school districts, to hang a 16-by-20-inch poster of the Ten Commandments in their classrooms, as required by Senate Bill 10. Last July, 15…
Music
Music Notes
Concrete Boys Thursday 30, Brushy Street Commons Fans shouldn’t count on a Lil Yachty appearance in Austin; he didn’t appear much on the last Concrete Boys tour and is currently involved in professional wrestling as WWE United States Champion Trick Williams’ manager. The rest of the Atlanta rapper’s collective showcased plenty on their high-energy sophomore…
Parliament-Funkadelic, Jimmie Vaughan, Chaparelle, and Other Reviews From Austin Blues Festival
Austin revived both Blues Festival and Psych Fest this time three years ago – a tough feat from the jump in an oversaturated live market, and one made trickier each year as the shindigs’ distinct genres fall further in the cultural consciousness’ rearview. No longer on the same schedule, the Antone’s affair had local music…
Arts + Culture
A Bloody Bridgerton Parody at Butterfly Bar
Bridgerdown sure goes down easy. Not in a thick cloying way. More like a cream puff. Light, fluffy, but without skimping on the cheese. It’s written and presented by local company La Fenice, which is committed to reviving Italian commedia dell’arte for the modern viewer. It’s a style of theatre based around super-broad caricatures like…
April Showers Bring May Markets
Oh, you’ve spring cleaned your entire home? And now it’s feeling weirdly empty of locally made trinkets, vintage items, jewelry themed around Shapes, etc.? Never fear, Reader, as spring has truly sprung a cavalcade of markets where many tangibles, goods, and consumables can be bought and incorporated into your previously organized home. If anything, this…
Screens
Hokum Review: A Terrifying Welcome in the Haunted Isle
Hidden down a leafy Irish backroad, the Bilberry Woods Inn is the kind of oak-paneled and leather-padded manse that was once a destination for the wealthy decades ago. Yet now it is tired, and closes for the winter season. The very name hides a bitter secret: Unlike its sweet colonial cousin, the blueberry, the wild-growing…
Everyone Is Lying to You for Money Review: Mr. McKenzie Goes to Washington
First-time filmmaker Ben McKenzie wastes no time letting the audience know exactly how he feels about cryptocurrency, the subject of his lively new documentary Everyone Is Lying to You for Money. Just under two minutes in, he turns to the camera and delivers his verdict on crypto with the kind of expert timing and camera-readiness…
Animal Farm Review: Not All Adaptations Are Created Equal
There’s a famous episode of classic British anthology comedy series The Comic Strip Presents… titled “The Strike.” In it, Hollywood producers make a big budget version of the story of the 1984 miners’ strike – an event that devastated communities across the UK – and in doing so one of the great crimes of class…
Mārama Review: Cold Vengeance From the South Pacific
Aotearoa. That’s what the Māori called New Zealand before colonizers stole and occupied it. Nearly three centuries later, many feel that there has been no real reckoning, and so Taratoa Stappard’s Mārama gives at least a glimpse of what that angry recompense might look like, albeit through a Victorian Gothic frame. This is the highest…
Columns
Day Trips: Palo Pinto Mountains State Park, Strawn
Palo Pinto Mountains State Park opened on March 1, giving visitors a chance to explore a large swath of the Cast Iron Forest. The first new state park in North Texas in more than 25 years, the 4,871-acre former ranch contains a rugged landscape that was so impenetrable that early settlers dubbed it “cast iron.” …
The “Special” Mind Behind Austin FC’s Biggest Strength
It’s hard to overstate just how badly Austin FC needed Saturday’s 2-0 win over the Houston Dynamo at Q2 Stadium. The result ended an eight-match winless streak, marked the club’s second victory of the season, and alleviated some of the immense pressure that had been building around the club both externally and within the locker…
The Luv Doc: A 20-Year Bait and Switch
Dear Luv Doc, At the risk of sounding like a whiny “Austin was better back when” person, one of the things that annoys me about new Austin is all the people pretending to be weird or edgy as some sort of business grift to make them seem authentic. It’s disgusting. I am from Austin. I…
Qmmunity: The Whole Tooth
Short column this week. SOMEBODY broke one of their dental crowns while eating fries and watching Dexter’s Laboratory. This has made any real brilliance totally impossible. All this unnamed yet very handsome and noble person can do is write very plain copy about upcoming events and recent news. Will this be enough for you, Reader?…
High Holiday
Amid the legal battle between Texas lawmakers and the Texas hemp industry arrived the stoner high holiday: 4/20. The myth of “420” as a code for weed has ambiguous origins. Some people are convinced that it spawned from a police code for marijuana possession, others that it derives from Bob Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women No.…
Opinion: Labor Solidarity Needed for a Safer Austin
This Friday, May 1, we celebrate May Day, a day globally recognized as International Workers’ Day. On this day we acknowledge the hard-fought gains that workers in this country have won, like the eight-hour workday and OSHA protections. Those lessons from history still hold: Every gain working people have ever won came from collective action…
Mr. Smarty Pants Knows
This month, the Merton College Library in Oxford, England is celebrating its 750th anniversary. According to Scientific American, humans riding a bicycle are more energy efficient than any other animal on Earth. Jacqueline Onassis was a chain smoker who had a three-packs-a-day habit for more than 40 years. Upon her passing in 1994, a black enamel…
Feedback: May 1, 2026
Don’t Forget D1 Dear Editor, This is obviously a high-profile election season and with the House and Senate hogging the headlines it will be easy to let smaller local elections just kind of glide through without notice. I want to encourage Chronicle readers not to sleep on the District 1 race for City Council. Of…
Fun + Games
Free Will Astrology
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): May is Free Thinking Month for you Tauruses. It’s also Free Feeling, Free Wheeling, and Free Healing Month. Wow! To observe this festive grace period, indulge in any of the following jubilant acts: 1) Declare your independence from anyone who tries to tell you how you should live your life or…
