Michael Agresta – words & ideas

I write about art, ideas, culture, and

Portfolio

The Catastrophe Guru

The Great Mellowing

Forgetting How to Read? Stop Reading Online.

No Gogh!

The ‘Moby Dick’ of Texas Football Novels Is Hard-hitting as Ever

At Age 86, Painter Roger Winter Is Still Reinventing Himself

Will the Next Election Be Hacked?

The Great Texas Novel about the Spanish Flu

Houston Photo Exhibit Documents First Markers of Modern U.S.-Mexico Border

No, Austin Won’t Become Silicon Valley 2.0

The Steve Jobs of West Texas

The Fantastic World of Cande Aguilar

Cult or Cure? (MDMA and PTSD)

The Wonderful World of Bluth

Dario Robleto artist profile

100 Ways to Draw a Line (Transborder Biennial)

Robert Pruitt: Wards Matter

Illustrating Border Life for the Next Generation

What Will Become of the Library?

What We Talk About When We Talk About Cults

Pacific Standard

Welcome to Texas, Elon

What Is the Greatest Artwork in Texas?

Vincent Valdez: The Big Picture

Did Texas Blackouts Reveal Austin’s New Real-Estate Hot Spots?

Robert Irwin in Marfa

Houston’s National Women’s Conference, 40 Years Later

While We Were Sleeping: The Feds Say a Price-fixing Scheme Costs Texas Patients Tens of Millions

No Sign of Trump’s “Millions” of Illegal Voters in Texas

Wall Flowers

EAST Austin Is Over. What’s Next for an Art Scene That’s Losing Its Nucleus?

What Will Become of the Paper Book?

Can Hackers Mess With Texas’s Elections?

How Texas Women Delivered the Nineteenth Amendment

The Last Book Sale

The Clothes that Make the Man

Thinking Outside the Ballot Box

Adios Utopia, Hello Texas

A Bigger Canvas (Houston Feature)

Travel & Leisure

Unveiling “Austin”

Giant Steps

“Trapped” in the Limelight

How the Western Was Lost, and Why It Matters

Trenton Doyle Hancock: His Pet Monsters

Has a San Antonio Inventor Solved a Problem of Small-scale Wind Power?

Cody Wilson, Austin’s Edgelord Prince

Mark Rothko, Houston’s Absent Son

Marfa, Texas Is Getting Its Own Solar-Powered Stonehenge

The Psychedelic State of South Texas (Fernando A. Flores)

Lives in Limbo

Luz Maria Sanchez: Narco Violence, as Seen by a Journalist-Turned-Artist

A Tree Grows in San Antonio (Margarita Cabrera)

Brutally Suppressed in Her Lifetime, Gertrude Beasley Is Finally on Our Bookshelves

The Redemption of Sinead O’Connor

Life During Wartime (book review)

LA Review of Books

The People’s Champion (Vincent Valdez’s ‘Dream Baby Dream’)

Sedrick Huckaby Looks His Subjects in the Eye, from Dreamers to an Ex-President

Bonnie and Clyde at 50

The Image in the 21st Century