You May Not Need It, But You Gotta Have It
Arresta is a toy store for grown-ups, where every item is selected to seduce the slavishly stylish.
Mimi Swartz, the author, with Sherron Watkins, of Power Failure, The Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron, is an executive editor of Texas Monthly. Previously, she was a staff writer at Talk, from April 1999 to April 2001, and a staff writer at the New Yorker from 1997 to 2001. Prior to joining the New Yorker, she worked at Texas Monthly for thirteen years. In 1996 Swartz was a finalist for two National Magazine Awards and won in the public interest category for “Not What the Doctor Ordered.” She was also a National Magazine Award finalist for her November 2005 issue story on tort reform, titled “Hurt? Injured? Need a Lawyer? Too Bad!” and won the 2006 John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest, Magazine Journalism, for the same story. In 2013 she won her second National Magazine Award (again in the category of public interest), for “Mothers, Sisters, Daughters, Wives,” a compelling look at the state of women's health care in Texas.
Over the years, Swartz’s work has appeared in Vanity Fair, Esquire, Slate, National Geographic, and the New York Times’ op-ed page and Sunday magazine. It has also been collected in Best American Political Writing 2006 and Best American Sportswriting 2007. She has been a member of the Texas Institute of Letters since 1994. Swartz grew up in San Antonio and graduated from Hampshire College, in Amherst, Massachusetts. She now lives in Houston with her husband, John Wilburn, and son, Sam.
Arresta is a toy store for grown-ups, where every item is selected to seduce the slavishly stylish.
By Mimi Swartz
For eight years, I had a love affair with Houston. When the good times ended, we drifted apart. But while it lasted, we had the time of our lives.
By Mimi Swartz
You can buy almost anything on shopper’s TV, if you have the patience to sit and watch it.
By Mimi Swartz
From goggle that let you see in the dark to voice changers that you sound like Daffy Duck, the Counter Spy Store is stocked for the age of paranoia.
By Mimi Swartz
Elliott’s is the Louvre of hardware stores—it’s got flyshooters, fan blades, and three aisles of screws. In other words, it’s heaven.
By Mimi Swartz
Sure, a bride needs a groom, but the most important part of any wedding is the dress.
By Mimi Swartz
True tales from the world of junking.
By Mimi Swartz
A Houston boutique enjoys the high cost of growing up.
By Mimi Swartz
Just how good were the good ol' days, when Louie Welch was mayor of Houston?
By Mimi Swartz
San Antonio city councilman Bernardo Eureste took a paltry arts budget and built it into a $3 million power base. Then he got mad and tore it all apart.
By Mimi Swartz
After encountering this small brown barb, the wise Texas child learns to pick and choose his fights with the landscape.
By Mimi Swartz
There are a hundred of them, and their job is invisibility. They come into giant office buildings after everyone has gone home and, if they do the job right, make the evidence of the day’s work disappear.
By Mimi Swartz
Houston’s career-oriented magnet schools are putting too much emphasis on work and too little on education.
By Mimi Swartz
In the sixties a small company in Medina produced a wooden box decorated with rhinestones. It became a Texas tradition.
By Mimi Swartz
Minor emergency centers are fine for those who don’t need much more than a Band-Aid, a throat culture, or a summer-camp physical.
By Mimi Swartz
China, crystal, waiters in tuxedos. That’s what we love about Tony’s.
By Mimi Swartz
From Requiem for a Margarita.1/2 ounce of Triple Sec (1 tablespoon)1 ounce of fresh lime juice 1 1/2 ounces of light tequilaMaking the best margarita in town—at home—is not a matter of money. It does not depend on buying the best tequila or substituting classy Cointreau for the cheaper
By Mimi Swartz
Tequila, tequila, everywhere, and not a drop in your margarita.
By Mimi Swartz
At last the truth about beauty salon make-overs: the new you may not be a change for the better.
By Mimi Swartz
Where to find the best food, crafts, and arts in the Alamo City.
By Mimi Swartz, Sue Z. Cooper and Ronnie Moore