The New Yorker’s Lawrence Wright on Texas Oil
We recommend this gripping piece on the boom-and-bust cycle for your weekend longread.
If you’re seeking a longread about Texas oil to curl up with over the long New Year’s weekend, look no further than Lawrence Wright’s latest 8,000-word opus in the January 1, 2018, issue of New Yorker. Titled “The Dark Bounty of Texas Oil,” the piece by the Austin resident and Texas Monthly alumnus surveys the history of the black gold in the state, a natural resource that “has been both a gift and a trap” for the state, Wright opines.
The sprawling piece covers the industry in the state from its inception at Spindletop to the modern fracking boom, ushered in by George Mitchell, “one of Texas’s greatest wildcatters.” Wright takes us from East Texas at the Daisy Bradford No. 3, where when oil was struck in October 1930, “people danced in the black rain, and children painted their faces with oil” to the Permian Basin, with a landscape so dotted with wells that it “looks like graph paper” from the air, to the Barnett Shale, where he witnessed the “dark bounty” of the fracking boom, writing, “It has created enormous wealth for some, and the flood of natural gas has lowered energy costs for many, but it has also despoiled communities and created enduring environmental hazards.”...MORE
