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Virtual Fitness May Be Here to Stay
By day, Michael Frazier is a florist. By later in the day, he is an aerobic demon. I was only halfway through the online dance-cardio routine he’d choreographed to Britney Spears’s “Hold It Against Me”...
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Nobody Likes a Tattletale—Except in a Pandemic
For the most part, the University of Texas students in my neighborhood in Austin seem to be avoiding COVID-19 even more diligently than the rest of us. They wear masks at the store. They limit the size...
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How Texas Beeworks’s Erika Thompson Became the Queen Bee of Pastoral TikTok
A few years ago, when Erika Thompson was living in Austin, she came across a dove languishing on the sidewalk. She scooped the dove up, took him home, and nursed him back to health. Thompson hoped to...
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13 Curses to Mutter Against Ted Cruz While You Boil Snow to Drink
This week, as millions of Texans were left without power and water as temperatures dropped to record lows, one man said no—not me. Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night would keep Ted Cruz...
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Sometimes It’s Hard to Be a Garden
For most of the pandemic, it was possible to stroll around outside and forget how terrible everything was for half an hour—for a whole hour, even, if you didn’t check Twitter. On a sunny Friday in...
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If You Can’t Be a Vegetarian, You Can Still Be a Texatarian
I had a carnivorous upbringing full of hot dogs and Happy Meals. Until I was thirty, I held fast to a perception of vegetarians as self-righteous dorks.Then, about a year ago, for reasons...
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Your Pets Have Been Getting COVID-19 Too. Here’s Why That Matters.
Brushing a dog’s teeth is hard enough. The dog looks at you plaintively, eyes wide with betrayal, as you insert the toothbrush and perform a quick pantomime of a tooth cleaning in the seconds before it...
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A Massage Addict Embraces Touchless Treatments
Three weeks after the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation shut down spas during the rigid COVID-19 lockdowns of March 2020, the agency received a call from Beata Huzarska Hatley. She designed,...
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Welcome to Party Island on Lady Bird Lake
The best thing about good-looking people is that they tend to draw even more good-looking people. So it is with Party Island, a gathering of hundreds in the middle of Austin’s Lady Bird Lake. On a...
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The Real Dill: Powerful Texans Are Betting on Pickleball
Many pickleball devotees first take up the paddle at the urging of a friend. For a disproportionate number of players, that friend is billionaire Steve Kuhn. A financial executive turned...
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Miniature Cattle Have Ambled Into Our Hearts and Onto Our Modest Acreages
My fantasies of miniature cattle ownership are simple and pure: taking my cow to the grocery store on a harness so she can peruse the low-hanging greens; going to the dog park and pretending I don’t...
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Did Your Wedding Even Count if There Were No Goats?
The first goat crash was unintentional, the goats’ caretakers tell me. Jester King, the oft-Instagrammed Hill Country brewery, farm, and event space thirty minutes west of Austin, maintains a herd of...
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Apocalypse Sow: Can Anything Stop the Feral Hog Invasion?
Even in our carefully ordered world, there remain avenues for chaos to thrive in its purest form: the wild pig. Groups of them, called sounders, cavort across golf courses at night like drunken...
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Ryan Holiday, the Stoic King of Bastrop County, Is the Man of the Moment
The couple staking out the Painted Porch Bookshop on a gloomy February morning are out of luck. They appear to have come to Bastrop, about thirty miles southeast of Austin, expressly to meet its owner,...
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Don’t Napa My 290
The resident wino is unbothered by the audience gathered around him. He is lying in the grass, pressed up to a fence. His name is Blake, and he is a four-year-old white rhinoceros who lives in a large...
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In the Misinformation Age, Believing In Bigfoot Is Harder Than Ever
The town of Jefferson, a twenty-minute drive from Caddo Lake, in East Texas, is the creepy-cute love child of Gilmore Girls’ Stars Hollow and True Blood’s Bon Temps. At first glance, Jefferson seems...
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The G.O.A.T. of Landscape Management? Goats.
Romeo approaches the electrified fence, lovestruck. What light through yonder fence breaks? It is the east, and Carolyn and Kyle Carr are the sun. The Carrs own Rent-a-Ruminant Texas, a grazing...
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