Cover Story
A Tale of Two Expansions
At the media preview of Still Austin Whiskey Co.’s new music and hospitality destination, the Still Austin Quarter, I reconnected with architect Richard Weiss, who worked with my husband for years at Alamo Drafthouse. Weiss, who designed the distillery’s expanded footprint, mentioned he’d also worked on Terrible Love’s new wine bar, the other project I’d…
News
Will Blue Wave Slow Executions in Texas?
The blue wave that swept over Texas last week has death penalty opponents wondering how the state’s new Democratic leaders will alter the rubber-stamping of capital punishment cases that Republicans have facilitated for decades. On Monday, Nov. 9, the Rev. Jeff Hood, founder of the Execution Intervention Project, urged Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa to declare an…
Can Gina Hinojosa Fix Texas Public Schools?
After 11pm at Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa’s election night party, in the astonishing wake of her decisive win of Texas’ top seat, we found a quiet corner to talk with Lynn Boswell about what it could all mean for Austin ISD. Boswell is AISD’s school board president – a role Hinojosa once held – but clarified…
The Week’s Biggest News in Brief: Nov. 5-11
Project Connect to Reach AUS?: On Tuesday, Nov. 10, the Austin Transit Partnership announced that it is working to add a rail line extension connecting Project Connect to Austin-Bergstrom International Airport. The three-mile extension will stretch from the Yellow Jacket Station planned to be constructed in Southeast Austin to a station at the airport. ATP’s…
City Releases Data on Homeless Camp Sweeps as Advocates Continue to Criticize the Plan
After nearly five years spent living with her friends undisturbed in the woods off Slaughter Lane, August Lozano took the stand during last week’s Public Health Committee meeting and spoke of losing everything she had – from her belongings to her sense of security – in the four times city crews swept through her camp…
Election Procedures in Travis County Went Unexpectedly Smoothly
Despite a few hiccups at the University of Texas-Austin and City Hall, voting in this year’s midterm elections went surprisingly smooth for over 550,000 voters in Travis County. Claudia Torres-Yañez, vice president of voters service at the Austin-area League of Women Voters, was on call for any election issues that needed to be escalated or…
Music
Music Notes
JahleelFaReaL Saturday 14, Dear Diary Coffee Laid-back Austin rapper JahleelFaReaL teams up with Dear Diary Coffeehouse for a unique EP release party. He’ll play his forthcoming project, topically named Coffee, at the Eastside shop this Saturday afternoon. Take a sip of the “FaReal Blend,” a special-edition brown sugar cinnamon coffee, for the full experience. Durawa…
Arts + Culture
Where’s My Community?
They say bisexual folks will never be satisfied. They’ll always want a boyfriend AND a girlfriend. But that’s just a stereotype, right? It’s exactly the kind of stereotype Jarrott Productions’ newest show, Bisexual Sadness, revels in presenting before it’s gleefully dismantled. Sometimes the play sits in those bald-faced stereotypes – the toxic girlfriends, the soft…
Texas Book Festival Finds Big Feelings Behind the Wheel
This weekend’s Texas Book Festival rolls into Downtown Austin with literary vehicles of all genres and formats, but four wheels and a couple tons of steel take on a shape far bigger than a car in two children’s tales from Austin authors Debbie Zapata and Laura De La Cruz. Zapata’s A Taxi for Everyone: How…
Screens
Fatherland Review: The Good German
The 2026 midterm elections have raised a certain hope in America: that the last half century of a rising tide of right-wing extremism and a nascent dictatorship cannot only be defeated but can be ended. The question now is, what’s next? That’s an issue of national identity, a concern shared with Fatherland. In this historical…
Mouse Review: The Left Behind
In a high school theatre class, running through improvisatory exercises, the teacher (David Hyde Pierce) coaches his students as they mill around the room. First, what does your public self look like? Most students throw their arms wide, all performative bigness. Only one student, Minnie (Katherine Mallen Kupferer), takes the opposite posture, curling her body…
Club Kid Review: Coming Down and Growing Up
If there’s a suitable single-word description for Peter (Jordan Firstman), a party promoter in Manhattan, it would be fuckup. His business partner, Sophie (Cara Delevingne), is a massive cokehead, and she’s the organized one of the two. The closest he’s got to a mature friend is Devon (a delightfully understated Nigil Whyte), who at least…
Ebenezer Review: A Christmas Ghost Story Both Familiar and Unique
Marley is not dead: to begin with. This must be distinctly understood or nothing that makes Ebenezer so loyal to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and yet so unique can be understood. This adaptation of the classic Christmas morality tale begins with a scene not in the book: Ebenezer Scrooge (Johnny Depp) and his business…
How to Rob a Bank Review: TikTok Marxism
Films about social media rarely feel authentic. For every Zola, there’s a dozen or more Sprees. That high-octane subversive action flick How to Rob a Bank feels like its online elements were really crafted with real-world software, and looks like it would find a real streaming audience, is a serious achievement. It’s also one of…
I Play Rocky Review: Every Underdog Has Their Day
It’s almost impossible for a film to simultaneously be a great biopic, a wonderful date-night movie, a hilarious film industry comedy, and the kind of movie that you could take every relative to see on Thanksgiving. Somehow, I Play Rocky pulls it off. That’s fitting, considering it recounts an equally epic real-life movie triumph. When…
Food
Half Full Learns the Ropes
On Ladies’ Night at the recently opened Half Full, the wood-lined barroom is crowded, a shuffling line at the bar eager for another $2 batch-mix martini or $2 chicken tender. Sized for the price, the tangy drinks would not stand out on a tasting tray, but the house-made chicken tenders – and the $2 fried…
Texas History on Tap
When Threadgill’s closed in 2018 after 22 years, its outdoor stage could’ve ended up in a landfill. Instead, Real Ale Brewing Company owner Brad Farbstein bought it, cut the stage and its cantilevered roof into sections, and hauled them to Blanco. It took about two and a half months to reassemble everything. Nearly every board…
Drinkin’ Dirty
A combination of soda, flavored syrup, and various creams (coconut, half-and-half, coffee creamer – each choice has a backing of fervent fans), dirty soda isn’t new, but its prevalence in recent years certainly seems to be – at least to our Secret Lives of Mormon Wives-obsessed eyes. Just as we’ve grown alternately endeared and enraged…
Cocktails With Heart (Horse)
The sign out front of Sara and Tim Lupa’s new East Austin watering hole, Stoney’s Good Time Ranch, sums up their mission: “All y’all are welcome but you gotta act right.” Named for a close friend’s speckled black-and-white horse, the bar scene veterans’ latest concept builds upon a familiar legacy at the East Seventh and…
Revival Elixirs
Darcie Duttweiler Food Writer Extraordinaire 2 ibuprofens, super chug of water, an Electrolit (cucumber-lime), followed by two breakfast tacos (typically Tacodeli’s Jess Special and an Otto – add egg) with a Mexican Coke, and THEN if I’m still in rough shape a long-ass bubble bath to sweat that shit out. And maybe a nap if…
Shug’s Bagels Brings a Taste of NYC to ATX
Walking into Shug’s Bagels gave me a weird sense-memory. It’s familiar, yet not. It smells of boiling bagels, and a line snakes out of the green-tiled lobby. But I can close my eyes and still see Austin Java. When I first moved from the ’burbs to Austin proper, I lived in an apartment off Enfield.…
Columns
Qmmunity: Birthday Tidings
Reader, there’s something you ought to know: It’s my BIRTHDAY this coming Tuesday. Yes, 33 years ago the columnist whose words you skip in order to read about the latest drag shows was born unto this gay little world. I share Nov. 17 with two other short kings, Martin Scorsese and Danny DeVito, the latter…
Add Another Failed Season to Austin FC’s Increasingly Pitiful History
The Austin FC experience was never supposed to be this. Marrying America’s growing pro soccer obsession with the burgeoning, hip city of Austin – at the time, the largest U.S. market without major pro sports – was supposed to be kismet. A no-brainer, can’t-screw-it-up, paradigm-shifting kind of deal. How wrong we were. Six years in,…
The Divine Feminine and The Raunchy Rim
Cannabis comes in every form you can think of these days: flower, gummies, vapes, dab rigs, and every denomination of beverage from caffeinated lemonade to apple cider. After almost a year as the Chronicle’s cannabis columnist, I thought I had seen it all. That is, until I came across The Raunchy Rim, a “beverage enhancement”…
The Luv Doc: Nut-Kicking
Dear Luv Doc, In this woke day and age, in this woke-ass town, is it socially acceptable for a normally woke woman to kick her cheating ex in the nuts if he dares to show up in the honky-tonk where he knows she will be? Or should she just request the band play songs like…
Day Trips: Lindenau Dance Hall, Cuero
The Lindenau Dance Hall is among the last remnants of a once thriving German farming community on the Coastal Plains five miles northwest of Cuero. The rolling hills were empty except for a few nomadic Karankawa Indians along the coast when empresario Green DeWitt was authorized by the Mexican government in 1825 to settle 400…
Feedback: November 13, 2026
Fix Our Hearts Dear Editor, Incredible headline on James Talarico’s win [“Talarico’s ‘Politics of Love’ Wins Him the U.S. Senate Seat,” News, Nov. 6]. Cut it right out and put it right up on the fridge from now until the end of time. His victory speech moved me in a way a politician hasn’t in decades…
Mr. Smarty Pants Knows
Your turmeric supplement may or may not have any turmeric in it, according to Marion Nestle, professor emeritus of nutrition at New York University. Per The New York Times, Mississippi and New Mexico have no minimum age for getting married. While it’s true that Gina Hinojosa will be the first Latina governor of Texas, the…
Fun + Games
Free Will Astrology
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Some of our most powerful medicines come from feared venoms. A compound from the deadly cone snail became a painkiller stronger than morphine. Venoms from vipers and lizards have yielded drugs that treat blood clots and diabetes. The very chemistry that evolved to harm, once understood and transformed, becomes the chemistry…
