Michael Agresta – words & ideas

I write about art, ideas, culture, and

Portfolio

The Steve Jobs of West Texas

No Gogh!

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

The Catastrophe Guru

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

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

Mark Rothko, Houston’s Absent Son

How Texas Women Delivered the Nineteenth Amendment

Can Hackers Mess With Texas’s Elections?

What Will Become of the Paper Book?

Adios Utopia, Hello Texas

Giant Steps

What Will Become of the Library?

Robert Pruitt: Wards Matter

How the Western Was Lost, and Why It Matters

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

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

The Great Mellowing

The Image in the 21st Century

Trenton Doyle Hancock: His Pet Monsters

100 Ways to Draw a Line (Transborder Biennial)

At Age 86, Painter Roger Winter Is Still Reinventing Himself

Wall Flowers

Vincent Valdez: The Big Picture

Dario Robleto artist profile

What Is the Greatest Artwork in Texas?

What We Talk About When We Talk About Cults

Pacific Standard

Life During Wartime (book review)

LA Review of Books

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

Lives in Limbo

The Fantastic World of Cande Aguilar

Cody Wilson, Austin’s Edgelord Prince

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

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

The Clothes that Make the Man

A Bigger Canvas (Houston Feature)

Travel & Leisure

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

The Redemption of Sinead O’Connor

Robert Irwin in Marfa

Welcome to Texas, Elon

No, Austin Won’t Become Silicon Valley 2.0

Cult or Cure? (MDMA and PTSD)

The Great Texas Novel about the Spanish Flu

Bonnie and Clyde at 50

The Wonderful World of Bluth

Forgetting How to Read? Stop Reading Online.

Thinking Outside the Ballot Box

The Last Book Sale

Will the Next Election Be Hacked?

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

“Trapped” in the Limelight

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

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

Unveiling “Austin”

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

Illustrating Border Life for the Next Generation

A Tree Grows in San Antonio (Margarita Cabrera)

Marfa, Texas Is Getting Its Own Solar-Powered Stonehenge