Olivia’s high school mascot, the proud Rogers Mountaineer (moonshine no longer included)
Twenty nine days in February means plenty of extra time to read for fun! Olivia just finished Gone Home: Race & Roots Through Appalachia by Karida L. Brown—a historical and sociological look at black workers and their families who moved from the Deep South to Harlan County, Kentucky to work in the coal mines. Amal’s book of the month: Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond. It traces just how easy it is for families to fall into a cycle of housing instability, especially when landlords can find every loophole in the book to squeeze the last cent out of renters in precarious positions.
And now we realize that maybe we’re not as fun as we thought we were.
Texas Takes
Talk of the primaries is inescapable right now in Texas (and so are the Michael Bloomberg ads). Ahead of Super Tuesday, I wrote about how the Sanders campaign has done more than any other to reach out to Muslim American voters. Imam Omar Suleiman, one of the most prominent Muslim community leaders in the state, told me that the Sanders campaign has finally elevated the community past the point of tokenization. But it’s not just Sanders’ views on foreign policy which are attracting Muslims to the campaign. In the words of Suleiman again: “Issues like poverty, health care, domestic racism, and global militarism are issues that cut across identity.” But will the energy translate to votes? While voter registration in the rapidly growing Muslim community is up, turnout has historically been lower than any other faith group.
A few weekends ago, I had the chance to talk with George Keaton, a local Dallas historian who’s been trying to preserve the city’s Black history when so few people in the city want to reckon with the harsh truths of the past. The city’s history, and that of the first Black people brought to Dallas as slaves, starts with the Trinity River. After the Civil War, Freedmen’s towns were often built on land that flooded when the Trinity did. A century later, those same communities became ground zero for gentrification, and today very little of Dallas’ Black history remains in the city’s physical or cultural landscape. — Amal
Spring is still a few weeks away, though you wouldn’t know it if you’ve been outside lately. We should be really concerned that bluebonnets are making an appearance in February. We’re now seeing what one scientist told KUT is a “mismatch” between the migratory patterns of plants, their pollinators, and predators.
When John Holmes Jenkins turned up dead in the Colorado River in 1989, he left behind a crumbling rare books empire, millions of dollars in debt and rumors that he might have pulled off the final get-rich-quick scheme. In Texas Monthly’s March issue, Chris O’Connell traces the life and death of one of the most notorious book dealers the state had ever seen.
Sul Ross University’s satellite campuses in West Texas serve an area the size of West Virginia—yet they lack the hallmarks of a college campus, sometimes including Wi-Fi. Sul Ross is one of the top Hispanic-serving institutions in the state, Shannon Najmabadi reports for the Texas Tribune, but the distance between the satellite campuses and the main campus in Alpine has lead to headaches for students who can’t always line up financial aid and graduation requirements with administrators hundreds of miles away.
Around Arkansas
The Arkansas primary is on Super Tuesday in just a few days, and Michael Bloomberg has been all over the place, including in Bentonville—just a few minutes away from Walmart’s corporate headquarters—on Thursday. I wrote about his strategy to win the Southern primaries a few months ago, and he’s only doubled down since then, hiring nearly 700 field staff in the South and spending an ungodly amount of money on ads. Bloomberg has the biggest field operation in Arkansas by far, but he’s not the only candidate who’s shown up in the state: Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar have both dropped by as well.
If you grew up around farming communities like I did, you know that farming is a team effort. There’s rarely just one member of the family who does all the work—instead, you divvy up all the necessary chores to make it manageable. But for many decades, the United States Agriculture Census didn’t count the women who worked the farm with their husbands as “farmers” — meaning that until very recently, we haven’t known just how many women actually farm. For HuffPost, I wrote about the complex questions of identity and discrimination that face women in the agriculture industry, and how their recognition might be too little too late. If you’re a woman who farms, or a woman retired from a farm, I would love to hear about your experience. —Olivia
Arkansas was one of the first states to implement work requirements for people receiving Medicaid. The requirements, and the mandate that people report their work hours online even though many rural Arkansans lack internet access, resulted in more than 18,000 Arkansans losing health coverage in just nine months. But this month, a federal appeals court unanimously affirmed a federal judge’s earlier decision to strike down the work requirements, dealing a potentially fatal blow to work requirements in the state and making arguments for Medicaid work requirements in other states that much more difficult.
The great Arkansas writer Charles Portis passed away a few weeks ago. You might not know his name, but you almost certainly know his stories — True Grit, Dog of the South, Norwood. Portis got his start in Northwest Arkansas, writing for the Arkansas Traveler and the late Northwest Arkansas Times, before moving to New York, working for the New York Herald Tribune, becoming their London bureau chief, getting homesick, giving up journalism, and coming back to Arkansas. It’s a life trajectory after my own heart. After returning to Little Rock, he wrote several award-winning novels and spent his evenings drinking anonymously at a local bar. There are many beautiful obituaries floating around the internet, but here are my favorites, from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Slate, and Oxford American.
“A lot of people leave Arkansas and most of them come back sooner or later. They can't quite achieve escape velocity.” — Charles Portis, Dog of the South
A meditation on processed cheese
I spent last weekend at the opening of The Momentary, the new contemporary art space funded by the Walton grandkids (Steuart, Tom, and Olivia— no relation.) in Northwest Arkansas. It exceeded all my expectations, to be completely honest—it felt true and authentic to the history of the region, the land, and the community, a testament to its directors and curators. Look out for a story on this soon, but for now I’ll leave you with this: the museum is in a building whose original purpose was a Kraft cheese factory that made what else but Velveeta. In fact, there was an entire, mesmerizing live show about Velveeta. So when I got back to Durham, you know what I had for dinner? Velveeta dip. And not just cause that’s the only thing I had left in my fridge, I promise. —Olivia
Not everything is about TX/AR.
Reads from the rest of the world:
Alabama blocked a man from voting because he owed $4 // Sam Levine, The Guardian: Before his conviction, Tucker had never voted. But in prison, Tucker had read about Medgar Evers, who fought for equal citizenship and was assassinated in Mississippi in 1963. When he got out, he started regularly voting in elections...In 2013, Tucker got a letter from his state officials saying he could no longer vote.
Gentefied: the show grappling with gentrification in Latinx LA // Paola de Varona, The Face: “Gentefied encapsulates the way Latinxs are forced into survival mode – rarely finding space to chase their passions while also doing right by their community and staying true to their roots. Still there are pockets of hope.”
What happened when Tulsa paid people to work remotely // Sarah Holder, CityLab:There’s disagreement over what kind of transformative impact any small group of out-of-towners can — or should — have on a community with an identity of its own. “Tulsa Remote isn’t the ‘hail Mecca’ of people coming in and saying, ‘Let me fix this city,’” said Wilson. “Tulsa is not that broken.”
Thanks for reading! We’ll see ya soon. Please contact us with any comments, compliments, or suggestions. (We’re not taking complaints at this time.)
Disclaimer: not affiliated with either city named Texarkana.