No Promises
For eight years, I had a love affair with Houston. When the good times ended, we drifted apart. But while it lasted, we had the time of our lives.
Mimi Swartz, the author, with Sherron Watkins, of Power Failure, The Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron, is an executive editor of Texas Monthly. Previously, she was a staff writer at Talk, from April 1999 to April 2001, and a staff writer at the New Yorker from 1997 to 2001. Prior to joining the New Yorker, she worked at Texas Monthly for thirteen years. In 1996 Swartz was a finalist for two National Magazine Awards and won in the public interest category for “Not What the Doctor Ordered.” She was also a National Magazine Award finalist for her November 2005 issue story on tort reform, titled “Hurt? Injured? Need a Lawyer? Too Bad!” and won the 2006 John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest, Magazine Journalism, for the same story. In 2013 she won her second National Magazine Award (again in the category of public interest), for “Mothers, Sisters, Daughters, Wives,” a compelling look at the state of women's health care in Texas.
Over the years, Swartz’s work has appeared in Vanity Fair, Esquire, Slate, National Geographic, and the New York Times’ op-ed page and Sunday magazine. It has also been collected in Best American Political Writing 2006 and Best American Sportswriting 2007. She has been a member of the Texas Institute of Letters since 1994. Swartz grew up in San Antonio and graduated from Hampshire College, in Amherst, Massachusetts. She now lives in Houston with her husband, John Wilburn, and son, Sam.
For eight years, I had a love affair with Houston. When the good times ended, we drifted apart. But while it lasted, we had the time of our lives.
By Mimi Swartz
In the town George Parr once dominated, a nineteen-year-old mother was gang-raped by her neighbors. In the aftermath of the crime, the old horrors of San Diego have surfaced anew.
By Mimi Swartz
To understand Wanda Holloway’s dark and desperate story, you have to start with where she came from.
By Mimi Swartz
Work is tarring rooftops in the scorching Texas heat, home is a falling-down shanty visited by rats and roaches, supper is boiled potatoes and tortillas. It's the good life for two illegal Mexican immigrants trying to make it in America.
Anna Nicole Smith got her man: the full story on the big gal’s marriage to octogenarian oilman J. Howard Marshall.
By Mimi Swartz
When Houston’s Hermann Hospital sought a cure for its financial ills, it decided to perform major surgery on its agreement with the UT medical school next door.
By Tom Curtis
From invention to litigation, the breast implant has done more for Houston’s economy—and its psyche—than anything since oil.
By Mimi Swartz
Texas’ top drug lawyer helps dope dealers and cocaine kingpins beat their raps—and he’s proud of it.
By Mimi Swartz
The Houston-based energy giant put the pursuit of profits ahead of all other corporate goals, which fostered a climate of workaholism and paranoia. And that was only part of the problem.
By Mimi Swartz
What tort reform has done to Texans in need would be grounds for a lawsuit—if there still were any lawsuits.
By Mimi Swartz
In the right light, the ornery octogenarian oilman’s guilty plea can be seen as a victory: After all, he won’t spend the rest of his natural life in jail. But the fact is, he couldn’t beat the rap—and he knew it.
By Mimi Swartz
In 2011 the Legislature slashed family planning funds, passed a new sonogram law, and waged an all-out war on Planned Parenthood that has dramatically shifted the state’s public health priorities. In the eighteen months since then, the conflict has continued to simmer in the courts, on the campaign trail, and
By Mimi Swartz
After nine years of pursuing criminal fraud charges against the Texas attorney general, prosecutors now say that their case was weak.
By Mimi Swartz
Before Beth Dutton and Beyoncé, “rodeo wear” was just a style I had been taught all my life to avoid.
By Mimi Swartz
The Italian restaurant was the spot where the upper crust dined with regular folks. After it was bought by Tilman Fertitta and relocated, it lost some of its charm as well as its less-well-off regulars.
By Mimi Swartz
The impeachment trial of Ken Paxton delivered a steady stream of tantalizing entertainment. But the most consequential moments played out when few were watching.
By Mimi Swartz
The independent bookstores of sixties and seventies San Antonio, Houston, and Dallas created community and opened whole new worlds for Texans.
By Mimi Swartz
And on the eighth day, the defense rested.
By Mimi Swartz
Everything you need to know about the alleged adultery, bribery, and abuse of office. Plus: Big-time lawyers! Billionaire donors! And burner phones!
By Mimi Swartz
From his alleged dealings with Nate Paul to the attorney general’s seeming penchant for fast food, here’s what we learned from documents released late Thursday night.
By Mimi Swartz
When the go-go Houston corporation collapsed in spectacular fashion, it became a punch line across the nation. But some of the bad guys had the last laugh.
By Mimi Swartz
Threats from the AG’s supporters loom over the Republican state senators who will serve as the jurors in the impeachment trial.
By Mimi Swartz
As celebrity lawyers feud in the press, Republican groups have launched an influence campaign in the Texas Senate.
By Mimi Swartz
Six years ago, the mother of all storms arrived and brought home a lesson too many of us have refused to learn: our penchant for bravely adapting to circumstances has its limits.
By Mimi Swartz
John Nova Lomax, a former senior editor at Texas Monthly who died Monday, was a beautiful storyteller who struggled with his own story.
By Mimi Swartz
Dallas journalist Roxanna Asgarian’s new book, ‘We Were Once a Family,’ examines a murder-suicide that made national news—and finds that the story behind the story is even worse than we thought.
By Mimi Swartz
While extremely limited, avenues for abortion access exist in Texas. That’s where fear tactics from antiabortion activists come into play.
By Mimi Swartz
In the eighties, petroleum prices went through the roof, and Texans, flush with cash, went a little crazy—before it all came crashing down. Will we ever learn?
By Mimi Swartz
Matthew Kacsmaryk cut his teeth at First Liberty Institute, a “religious liberty” law firm with Texas roots—and a growing national reach.
By Mimi Swartz
The larger-than-life, redheaded émigré from Spur, Texas—who died at 95—seemed intent on making the town his own. And he did.
By Mimi Swartz
Decades before the recent police violence in Memphis, a brutally beaten Latino man was tossed by officers into a Houston bayou and drowned. The protests that followed continue to echo in the city to this day.
By Mimi Swartz
What seems like an outbreak of local skirmishes is part of a decades-long push to privatize the education system.
By Mimi Swartz
Fawcett set the standard in the 1970s—blond, thin, and smiling. Thankfully, that’s changed.
By Mimi Swartz
The names have changed over the decades, but through it all, Texas remains a place where money gets made—and spent.
By Tom Foster, Russell Gold, Jason Heid, Mimi Swartz and Texas Monthly
Its recent troubles notwithstanding, the Dallas-based brand remains a shrine to good taste.
By Mimi Swartz
For more than fifty years, the state I call home has repeatedly surprised me. The Texas of 2023? Well, it’s got me thinking a lot about how far we have, and haven’t, come.
By Mimi Swartz
When Texas Monthly covered Enron's fall in 2001, we wondered if the company was an outlier or the new normal. There's no longer any question.
By Mimi Swartz
Gregg Phillips, a former Texas official who claims that “2,000 mules” stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump, has raised millions of dollars to chase nonexistent fraudulent votes.
By Mimi Swartz
Friends and former colleagues share their memories of the legendary writer, editor, and mentor.
By Mimi Swartz
When a family doctor spoke out about insurance companies ruining his practice, few expected his appeal would still resonate 27 years later.
By Mimi Swartz
Fifteen years after the popular journalist’s death, we’re living in the world she saw coming—and struggling to follow her example of joyful opposition.
By Mimi Swartz
A conversation with Chris Cander, the author of ‘A Gracious Neighbor.’
By Mimi Swartz
Mimi Swartz reflects on her deep dive into Houston’s breast-implant boom and its larger-than-life profiteers.
By Mimi Swartz
Democrats are bracing for attacks on contraception, in vitro fertilization, and other reproductive and sexual rights.
By Mimi Swartz
No one had a deeper understanding of Texas power—its heroes and villains, its uses and abuses—than Paul.
By Mimi Swartz
The governor has long struggled with crisis management, in part because he always strives to avoid taking political risks.
By Mimi Swartz
Goodbye to one of Houston’s most colorful colorless characters.
By Mimi Swartz
Jonathan Mitchell, who cooked up the Texas “vigilante” law that effectively made abortion illegal in the state, argues the quiet parts of the majority opinion out loud.
By Mimi Swartz
After a quarter century in statewide office, Texas’s most popular politician remains an enigma—even to the folks who keep electing him. But the truth about the governor is hiding in plain sight.
By Mimi Swartz
A grassroots campaign—and a multibillion-dollar corporate real estate acquisition—kept the bulldozers away.
By Mimi Swartz
The attorney who successfully argued Roe v. Wade died Sunday at age 76, leaving behind a powerful legacy for Texas women.
By Mimi Swartz
When a grown-up son visits for the holiday, a mom takes what she can get.
By Mimi Swartz
In the two months since the virtual ban took effect, the number of abortions in the state has plummeted.
By Mimi Swartz
The gay, Black social media influencer and Houston Ballet soloist is shaking up the world of classical ballet.
By Mimi Swartz
The Houston social media influencer is a gay Black man with a gift for the absurd and a passion for platform heels. He’s also a star dancer in one of the world’s most rigid, gendered, and segregated art forms.
By Mimi Swartz
Ann Richards, Farrah Fawcett, Beyoncé. An excerpt from TM’s new book, ‘Being Texan,’ explores a strain of toughness in the iconography of the state’s females.
By Mimi Swartz
Any Texas woman who thought her right to a safe, legal abortion would last forever sorely underestimated the opposition. For decades.
By Mimi Swartz
Sissy Farenthold, who died Sunday, believed persistence and anger could change Texas.
By Mimi Swartz
Attorney and former Texas Solicitor General Jonathan F. Mitchell is known for his ability to identify legal loopholes where no one else does.
By Mimi Swartz
Charles Butt’s Holdsworth Center offers leadership training—and much-needed respect—for superintendents, principals, and teachers at Texas public schools.
By Mimi Swartz
Almost five decades after spurning the city—and following several deep losses—a long-lost San Antonian revisits her hometown.
By Mimi Swartz
Before a Democratic walkout blocked the passage of an "election integrity" bill in the Texas Lege, members of the partnership had split over how to respond to the legislation.
By Mimi Swartz