Dear friends of The End of Austin project,

I’m excited to publish a powerful response to Lawrence Wright’s much-debated New Yorker article about Austin. The author is local writer Adam Schragin, a UT alum (English) who was the editor of the Austinist and has written for the Texas Observer, Rolling Stone and Tablet. His book of essays Chalk Diary is available at BookPeople and elsewhere.

In a piece called “Only Onward: Lawrence Wright’s Austin and the Politics of Nostalgia,” Adam has a lot to say about our city, its history, and the conventional approach to its challenges. As he puts it, “Austinites are becoming displaced economically. Wages are not rising enough to keep up with the cost of living, the dream of home ownership is now a mirage, and without a firm consensus of what to do — and the courage to turn those ideas into policy to advocate on behalf of people who work to survive — all we have are competing fantasies about what Austin was, is, and will be.”

I hope you will read and share Adam’s thoughtful engagement with Wright’s New Yorker essay---in small part because we’re hoping this piece will push us over an important milestone for a project I launched in 2013 with an amazing team of AMS grad students—we’re approaching 300,000 page views! Not bad for a project with no staff and no budget (well, we spend $99 a year on Wordpress).

Because we’ve been slowly building toward a special issue later in 2024, TEOA has been quiet in the past year, but we’re always happy to publish pieces that will spark a healthy conversation about the future of Austin. If you have something to say about urban nostalgia, gentrification, or anything else that colors our life under the violet crown, please let me know. 

Best,

Randy Lewis

Editor, The End of Austin

Professor/Chair

American Studies Dept.

UT Austin