One afternoon in August 2016, an everyday suburban mom, her hair pulled back, wearing a conservative sweater, approached the microphone at a Pearland ISD school-board meeting. Her voice quavered a bit as she read from her prepared statement. “I am an ordained minister, and I am the parent of a transgender child at PISD,” began […]
Archive | LONGFORM
Freedom Place: Once a Summer Camp, Now a Home for Healing
THE RANCH SITS JUST OUTSIDE HOUSTON, down a farm-to-market road and off a winding path. Like most ranches, the entrance is guarded by an unmarked gate. You press a button, explain your business, and the gate opens onto a narrow road flanked by horses munching on grass. Birds chirp as they wind among the loblolly […]
In the City with the World’s Largest Medical Center, There’s Still No Biotech—Yet
REYNOLDS DELGADO DOESN’T REMEMBER EXACTLY when the idea came to him. There was no eureka moment. But after working with thousands of heart-failure patients, watching most of them die, he knew there had to be a better way to treat more patients, earlier, to alleviate their suffering. When your heart begins to fail, you might […]
In the Fight for Abortion Access, a Houston Nonprofit Offers a Helping Hand—and a Passenger Seat
The rain comes down in sheets as Angie Hayes sits in her idling two-door Honda Civic, waiting. A man in a rain slicker and galoshes approaches her driver’s side window, and she rolls it down a crack to receive instructions. “Who are you here for ?” he asks, leaning his umbrella into the gap between […]
The Way Home: What Happens After a Life Spent in the Texas Foster Care System?
It was early July 2001, and Trish Virgil was going to make a lemon meringue pie. “In our family, 12 years old meant that you get to finally learn how to make homemade pies,” she says now, smiling. But, Virgil says, when she got home from the store with her mother, police had surrounded their […]
Far from the Turmoil of Home, Six Houston Artists Pursue Their Creative Dreams
Ammar Alobaidi knows what it’s like to arrive in a new country and have to learn everything all over again. Born in Baghdad, Iraq, he lived in Libya and Jordan before coming to Houston, in 2014, as a refugee. How would he get a driver’s license in this strange new place, 7,000 miles away from […]
Meet the Harris County Judge Who Wants to Abolish Our Cash-Bail System
“All rise,” the bailiff calls, and the people packing the rows of Court 16 at the Harris County Criminal Court shuffle to their feet. Judge Darrell Jordan strides in, a 41-year-old man in black-framed glasses, his robes fluttering behind him before he stops abruptly in front of an American flag and begins to recite the […]
A Rigged System
Originally appeared in Bitch Magazine.