Texas news with national signal.
Texas Standard is a public-media news magazine built around the idea that Texas rarely stays local. Its episodes move quickly from state politics and public policy to music, film, technology, history, and environmental pressure points.
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Texas Standard is a brisk public-media news magazine that treats Texas as a daily pressure gauge for politics, culture, infrastructure, and national change. It is rooted in the state, but rarely provincial. A segment about Corpus Christi’s water emergency becomes a way to understand statewide demand, planning costs, restrictions, and the possibility of state intervention. A story about Houston police policy opens into the governor’s pressure campaign over cooperation with ICE agents. School takeovers, SNAP limits, hemp-derived product lawsuits, redistricting penalties, and congressional retirements all appear as pieces of a larger civic picture. The show also makes room for the life around the news. Recent episodes move from Camp Mystic flood accountability to computer memory prices, from Artemis moon missions to an Ice Age discovery in a Central Texas cave. Its arts coverage is serious without becoming precious. Larry McMurtry is discussed through Lonesome Dove, The Last Picture Show, small-town Texas, and the long shadow of Western myth. Bob Odenkirk talks about action films, humor, Jackie Chan, and Texas barbecue. Buck Meek’s Texas roots sit alongside reporting on water, elections, and the economics of public life. The format feels broadcast-clean: clear headlines, concise framing, expert voices, reported explainers, and quick transitions. It has a strong sense of place, naming cities, institutions, and policy fights without turning the show into inside baseball. The result is a useful daily scan for people who need to understand Texas as a state where national issues often arrive early, louder, or in sharper relief. It is measured, wide-ranging, and alert to how law, weather, money, memory, culture, and power collide in ordinary public life.
Made for: For listeners who follow Texas politics, public policy, culture, and civic life, especially those who want state stories placed in a wider national frame.
What sets it apart: Texas Standard combines hard-news pacing with a unusually wide Texas brief: water systems, elections, schools, science, music, film, and local history all share the same editorial table.
Coverage of politics, lifestyle, environment, technology, innovation and money matters from a uniquely Texas perspective.
Based on 4 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Texas Standard connects screen performance and production policy to Texas through interviews that give artists room to explain how their choices work.
Texas Standard works like a broad public-radio magazine: David Brown moves through state politics, public health, science and local reporting, while correspondents bring in dispatches from across Texas. Its screen coverage arrives inside that larger civic frame.
This is your news desk when smokable hemp and lion-sized armadillos both demand a briefing.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A Central Texas cave find shares the hour with state headlines and space news.
David Brown opens this Texas Standard episode with a hard image to shake: remains found in a Central Texas cave that look like an armadillo the size of a lion. The show says the find could change long-held ideas about Ice Age Texas.
Odenkirk explains why his action heroes need an audience's affection before the fighting starts.
Bob Odenkirk talks about Normal and his move from comedy into action roles. He wants audiences to understand and like the person in the fight before the violence starts. That sets his approach apart from action stars whose appeal rests on watching them fight.
A smokable hemp lawsuit leads a Texas news roundup with a personal report from Dallas.
A lawsuit over Texas's statewide ban on smokable hemp opens this edition of Texas Standard. The program also previews turnover on Capitol Hill, a nursing training opportunity in Abilene and a PBS series about endangered Texas landscapes.
Corpus Christi's water concerns lead a Texas Standard broadcast that also hears from Dallas students.
Corpus Christi is racing to avoid running out of water, and a petition to recall its mayor adds another complication. Texas Standard opens there before moving to plans to reopen Camp Mystic after last year's deadly floods.
Corey delivers two-minute daily Minneapolis news briefs, from school budget cuts to fraud cases.
A daily five-minute anchor-read roundup of Fox Cities crime, schools, and local government news.
A news roundup covering a protest at the Dilley ICE detention facility, a military buildup near Iran, and new census data for Texas.
This episode of Texas Standard covers the aftermath of a winter storm, a U.S.
Laura Rice interviews David Streitfeld about his biography of Larry McMurtry, focusing on 'Lonesome Dove' and McMurtry's complex relationship with Texas.
Texas Standard includes Megan Kimball's report on a draft Texas water plan priced at $174 billion over 50 years, up from $80 billion.
This episode of Texas Standard covers a threat to cut Houston police funding over immigration policy, the Camp Mystic flood damage hearing, and other Texas news.
The episode discusses why Bexar County says the San Antonio Spurs' parent company owes millions after a failed MLS bid.
This episode of Texas Standard covers the state takeover of failing school districts, along with other Texas news including a congressman's retirement, the attorney general's role, SNAP benefit changes, and a disability-inclusive gym.
John Moretti, a University of Texas paleontologist, snorkeled a Comal County cave and found fossils in a flowing underground stream tied to the Guadalupe River system.
Bob Odenkirk talks with Laura Rice on Texas Standard about Normal, his Austin South by Southwest premiere, and why the film is being shown on 35mm in five cities.
Texas Standard centers on a lawsuit from hemp businesses, including the Texas Hemp Business Council, after Texas health agencies and the Attorney General adopted a new consumable-hemp rule.
Corpus Christi is facing a water crisis with main reservoirs below 10 percent, and Kirsten Crow says the city could reach a water emergency within months while a recall petition adds pressure on the mayor.
An extended interview with director Sam Furstenberg and film restoration pioneer Michael J.
The episode discusses the controversy surrounding James Tallarico's pulled interview on Stephen Colbert and its impact on the Texas Senate race.