Beaming with enlightenment.

Lama Lobtsul, the Tibetan Buddhist, tends to a rare and powerful statue at a dharma center in Austin.

Bird of a different feather.

For the new Shearwater album, Animal Joy, frontman Jonathan Meiburg entered a crummy practice space, turned his guitar up really loud, and set about writing songs that conveyed times in his life when his blood was running close to the surface.

Strad Men.

Michael Shih and Swang Lin went to the same elementary school in Taiwan but didn’t form a friendship until decades later, when they arrived in Texas, where they both play multi-million-dollar Stradivarius violins for the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra.

I am NOT contrarian.

Do not get in a beer-soaked conversation about music with Chuck Eddy. You will feel stupid.

Prince of darkness

The $36 million Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment at the McDonald Observatory, in Fort Davis, could reinterpret the time-honored laws of gravity.

Fire on the mountain

Marfa Public Radio saved lives with its coverage of the Rock House Fire, the largest wildfire in Texas history, yet the West Texas town’s Congressman wants to strip its funding.

Billy prefers duking it out

Here is the only interview Billy Joe Shaver has done since going on trial for shooting a man in the face outside a bar in Waco. Did Billy really tell the guy on the other end of the bullet, “Where do you want it?”

The couple, through the lens of Todd V. Wolfson

I got my “relationship” reporting career off to a promising start with the tale of the psychedelic union of a guitar-slinging songstress of the blues persuasion and a Saturday Night Live alum, whose marriage was officiated by a Monkee.

Hair as headstone as dipped cone

If Dairy Queen was smart, they’d strike a deal with Ann Richards’s family to use their mom’s name for a limited edition dipped cone.