Last week, the photographer Matt Eich took The New Yorker’s Instagram feed with him to Sweetwater, Texas, for the Sweetwater Rattlesnake Roundup. At the roundup, held each year since 1958, thousands of wild rattlesnakes are captured, sold, displayed, and, often, killed as part of the week’s events. “The idea of being around thousands of snakes wasn’t high on my bucket list.” Eich told me. “Still, I decided it would be worth seeing and experiencing, so I marked the event on my calendar nearly a year out.”

Click-through for a slideshow of Eich’s photos, and for more from Maria Lokke on his experience: http://nyr.kr/WONILl

(Source: newyorker.com)

Country musicians Buddy Miller (who works on the music for ABC’s Nashville) and Jim Lauderdale revisit Manhattan: http://nyr.kr/VTcckR

Photograph by Ed Rode/Getty.

In this week’s issue, Ryan Lizza examines the Republican Party’s problem attracting minority voters, specifically Hispanics, through the efforts and concerns of the G.O.P. in Texas, “the largest and most important state in the Republican firmament.” Lizza talks to Ted Cruz, the Hispanic senator-elect from Texas, about the future of his party in the state, and, ultimately, the nation. “If Republicans do not do better in the Hispanic community, in a few short years Republicans will no longer be the majority party in our state,” Cruz tells Lizza. And, “in not too many years, Texas could switch from being all Republican to all Democrat. If that happens, no Republican will ever again win the White House … If Texas is bright blue, you can’t get to two-seventy electoral votes. The Republican Party would cease to exist.” 

Continue reading.

“Yes, Texas is Different.” Hendrik Hertzberg on The Bob Bullock Museum of Texas State History and other “only-in-Texas institutions”: http://nyr.kr/S2x3BW

“It was a fine speech, but at least for me, a fairly forgettable one.”

- Ryan Lizza on Julian Castro’s impossible task: why Castro’s convention keynote didn’t match President Obama’s from 2004: http://nyr.kr/NLnS7W

Photograph by J. Scott Applewhite/Getty Images.

Depending on what happens in November, the nomination of Mitt Romney will be widely regarded as a safe and therefore wise choice, or else as a historic blunder. Either way, his nomination is bound to be seen as a fluke: after a years-long conservative insurgency, Republicans somehow selected a candidate who can’t plausibly present himself as one of the insurgents—most days, Romney campaigns as if the Tea Party doesn’t exist.

But away from the Presidential campaign, the insurgency has continued; plenty of conservatives, returning the favor, are campaigning as if Mitt Romney doesn’t exist. …right now, in Texas, David Dewhurst, the Republican Lieutenant Governor, who once seemed like a prohibitive favorite, seems to be trailing his insurgent opponent, Ted Cruz, in the Republican primary for the state’s open Senate seat.

Happy Independence Day! In honor of the holiday and the celebratory barbecues it often invites, here’s a look back at Calvin Trillin’s 2008 piece on then-ranked best Texas BBQ in the world: http://nyr.kr/mGsC

In discussions of Texas barbecue, the equivalent of Matt Damon and George Clooney and Brad Pitt would be establishments like Kreuz Market and Smitty’s Market, in Lockhart; City Market, in Luling; and Louie Mueller Barbecue, in Taylor—places that reflect the barbecue tradition that developed during the nineteenth century out of German and Czech meat markets in the Hill Country of central Texas. (In fact, the title of Texas Monthly’s first article on barbecue—it was published in 1973, shortly after the magazine’s founding—was “The World’s Best Barbecue Is in Taylor, Texas. Or Is It Lockhart?”) Those restaurants, all of which had been in the top tier in 2003, were indeed there again in this summer’s survey. For the first time, though, a No. 1 had been named, and it was not one of the old familiars. “The best barbecue in Texas,” the article said, “is currently being served at Snow’s BBQ, in Lexington.”

Lawrence v. Texas: How Laws Against Sodomy Became Unconstitutional

The story told in Lawrence v. Texas was a story of sexual privacy, personal dignity, intimate relationships, and shifting notions of family in America. By the time the tale poured from Justice Anthony Kennedy’s pen, in his decisive majority opinion, it was even about the physical dimension of love: “When sexuality finds overt expression in intimate conduct with another person, the conduct can be but one element in a personal bond that is more enduring.” The opinion used the word “relationship” eleven times.

That is the story that Dale Carpenter, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, seeks to untell in his important new book, “Flagrant Conduct” (Norton), a chronicle that peels the Lawrence case back through layers of carefully choreographed litigation and tactical appeals, back to the human protagonists we never really got to know, and back again through centuries of laws criminalizing “unnatural” sexual activity. What if, Carpenter asks, this weren’t a story about love, or even sex? What if, in the end, Lawrence v. Texas was less a whodunnit than a who didn’t? And, if there was no sex, let alone an intimate relationship, in John Lawrence’s apartment that night, how did the case come to be about both?

A Sunday morning cartoon. For more cartoons from this week’s issue: http://nyr.kr/zJtCnC

(Source: newyorker.com)