Texas Observer readers,
As we were wrapping up edits on the stories in this issue, a few things happened in the nation’s politics. An incumbent president and presumptive nominee abandoned his reelection in the face of a historic pressure campaign. His party then rallied, with unexpected speed, around his vice president, a candidate who has a chance to break barriers so significant as to be cheapened by the cliché “glass ceilings.” And all this came, one could almost forget, just after the Republican presidential nominee was nearly killed by a gunman.
Yet you’ll find few references to those events, which could plausibly recast the trajectory of global history, in these pages. That’s because the longform stories in our magazine are created on a longer, slower timeline than the whirling news. They are edited, reedited, paired with art, fact-checked, copyedited, and proofread. (Unlike on the internet, a mistake in print lasts forever, and we act accordingly.) Even the short pieces you find here cannot hang on the latest sensation, because days or weeks pass between an issue leaving our hands for good and it arriving in your mailbox.
