Patrick Michels

Sep 26, 2024 | texasmonthly.com | Patrick Michels

From the hillside villas of Acapulco to the beach clubs of Barcelona to, now, a potholed stretch of Industrial Boulevard south of downtown Austin, the ritzy, sweaty, buzzy sport of padel has arrived in Central Texas. Last weekend’s grand opening of Padel Club Austin showcased the facility’s nine gleaming, glass-walled courts, lined with pristine artificial turf for this fast-paced racket sport that looks like a mix between doubles tennis and squash.

Aug 27, 2024 | texasmonthly.com | Patrick Michels

Texans You Should Know is a series highlighting overlooked figures and events from Texas history. My distant cousin Doug Michels, a brash and enthusiastic futurist who, as a member of Ant Farm, helped create Amarillo’s iconic Cadillac Ranch fifty years ago, once wrote about the night that changed his life. Like his best tales, it was captivating, self-mythologizing, and hard to verify.

Apr 18, 2024 | texasmonthly.com | Patrick Michels |Rose Cahalan

In April of 1836, around the time of other well-memorialized events in Texas, a ship sailed through Sabine Pass in Port Arthur, at the state’s southeast tip. It carried a group of at least eight Black men, British subjects from Barbados who’d been granted freedom from slavery. Among them were William Gunsil, Edward Hicks, Samuel Redman, April Sashly, Henry Small, William Thomas, Edward Whittaker, and an unnamed man.

Jan 17, 2024 | texasmonthly.com | Patrick Michels

In a thirteenth-floor courtroom in downtown Dallas, Jackie Juarez took the witness stand to testify about years of mistreatment under the system that raised her. Now eighteen years old, she stood a little over four and a half feet tall, with dark curls that fell atop a long, cream-colored cardigan. She pulled the microphone close as she spoke. At eleven years old, she had been placed in the state’s custody, for reasons that remain confidential.