A Whole 'Nother Country

Writing for Slate, Gail Collins offers an entertaining if somewhat frightening essay about my former home state. As she describes it, Texas is "a fast-growing, increasingly urban place whose citizens have nevertheless managed to maintain the conviction that they’re living in the wide open spaces."


In Everything's Bigger in Texas, she writes about the contradictions rampant in a state that is equally likely to draw the rest of the country into its orbit, or to cut ties and become its own country. Again. It is, after all, the only state to have had six national flags (those of Spain, France, Mexico, Texas, the United States, and the Confederacy).

Texas counties I have visited