Mimi Swartz

Nov 13, 2024 | texasmonthly.com | Mimi Swartz

If experts are to be believed, San Antonio is finally closing in on its moment. Henry Cisneros, who has written not one but two books about his hometown’s potential, told me so, celebrating the immense changes he has seen since he left the mayor’s office in 1989. “The city is booming,” he said, in the silky pitchman’s tone that he honed during decades as a public servant.

Nov 1, 2024 | texasmonthly.com | Mimi Swartz

People who were unfamiliar with the Japanese brand Uniqlo might have been taken aback by the delirium that struck various parts of Texas in October, when five stores—two in Houston area and three around Dallas—opened their doors to the devoted. The lines of shoppers trying to get into Houston’s Memorial City store on opening day snaked throughout that mall, with the patiently fervent, or fervently patient, rewarded with cans of jasmine green tea.

Oct 15, 2024 | texasmonthly.com | Mimi Swartz

This past July, cardiac surgeon O. H. “Bud” Frazier helped achieve the near culmination of his life’s work: the implantation in a patient’s chest of an artificial heart that, theoretically, will last decades. Now 84, Frazier, the codirector of the Center for Preclinical Surgical & Interventional Research at Houston’s Texas Heart Institute, has performed more than 1,200 transplant operations in his long career.

Sep 10, 2024 | texasmonthly.com | Mimi Swartz

“Don’t fix that fence till you cut down that tree,” our new best friend, an arborist from the Davey Tree Expert Company, warned us. My husband and I were like so many Houstonians recalibrating from two storms just several weeks apart: the derecho of May 16 and Hurricane Beryl, which hit July 8, both of which brought black skies and drenching rain and upended Houston’s luxurious tree canopy like nothing we’d seen in our decades in the city.

Jul 24, 2024 | texasmonthly.com | Mimi Swartz

Sometimes, when I was watching various artificial heart experiments in the basement of the Texas Heart Institute, I wondered if I was experiencing something akin to Thomas Edison’s housekeeper. That is, someone with only a tenuous reason to be in a place where history was being made—or was made today, when it was announced by the Texas Heart Institute that a new total artificial heart, the BiVacor TAH, had kept a Houston man alive for several days.