Michael Agresta – words & ideas

I write about art, ideas, culture, and

Portfolio

No Gogh!

Dario Robleto artist profile

Cult or Cure? (MDMA and PTSD)

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

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

What Will Become of the Library?

Giant Steps

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

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

Thinking Outside the Ballot Box

Forgetting How to Read? Stop Reading Online.

Vincent Valdez: The Big Picture

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

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

The Redemption of Sinead O’Connor

How Texas Women Delivered the Nineteenth Amendment

Trenton Doyle Hancock: His Pet Monsters

Welcome to Texas, Elon

The Image in the 21st Century

Will the Next Election Be Hacked?

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

A Bigger Canvas (Houston Feature)

Travel & Leisure

The Great Texas Novel about the Spanish Flu

No, Austin Won’t Become Silicon Valley 2.0

The Last Book Sale

What Will Become of the Paper Book?

Lives in Limbo

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

Life During Wartime (book review)

LA Review of Books

Wall Flowers

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

Robert Pruitt: Wards Matter

The Clothes that Make the Man

What Is the Greatest Artwork in Texas?

Can Hackers Mess With Texas’s Elections?

The Catastrophe Guru

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

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

Adios Utopia, Hello Texas

“Trapped” in the Limelight

How the Western Was Lost, and Why It Matters

The Fantastic World of Cande Aguilar

Cody Wilson, Austin’s Edgelord Prince

Robert Irwin in Marfa

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

Illustrating Border Life for the Next Generation

Mark Rothko, Houston’s Absent Son

Marfa, Texas Is Getting Its Own Solar-Powered Stonehenge

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

Bonnie and Clyde at 50

The Steve Jobs of West Texas

100 Ways to Draw a Line (Transborder Biennial)

What We Talk About When We Talk About Cults

Pacific Standard

The Great Mellowing

Unveiling “Austin”

At Age 86, Painter Roger Winter Is Still Reinventing Himself

A Tree Grows in San Antonio (Margarita Cabrera)

The Wonderful World of Bluth