Something is killing Andy Timmons’s grapevines. On a cool Thursday morning in August, the 53-year-old farmer was walking me through one of his vineyards just west of Lubbock. “You see how these leaves are shriveled up?” he said, grabbing one of the chest-high branches and pulling it away from the trellis. Some of the leaves in the cluster were the size of my hand, while others were stunted and had curled back on themselves, as if in physical pain. “That’s called cupping.”

On a recent Friday afternoon, the Blue Cat Café, in East Austin, hummed pleasantly with activity. Patrons lounged on couches or sat pecking away at their MacBooks as half a dozen cats roamed freely over and around them. A server went from table to table with an iPad, taking orders for whimsically named vegan dishes like Alley Cat Tacos and BBQ Briscat. Apart from the cats and the feline-themed decor, the cafe seemed like just another shabby-chic hipster hangout. Anyone willing to pay a $5 “kitty cover” could come inside, order a coffee, and play with the adoptable cats. The cozy atmosphere made it easy to forget that the cafe is ground zero for an intense public debate over gentrification, a flash point for long-standing tensions between the majority-Hispanic neighborhood and wealthier, whiter developers.

On the morning of September 5, just over a week after Harvey made landfall, a convoy of four trucks rumbled into a parking lot outside the small, orange-roofed Buddhist temple. Out stepped 12 people, all but two of them men, from a coalition of far-right groups, including the American Freedom Keepers, the Confederate Riders of America and the New York Light Foot Militia. The groups had been helping with Harvey relief in nearby Alvin when Francis Marion, the Freedom Keepers’ heavily bearded leader, learned about the community. As the convoy drove down gravel roads lined with discarded furniture, Marion could smell mildew and the rotting carcasses of drowned dogs. Set back from the road were rows of crumbling houses and sagging double-wides.

Tilman Fertitta first learned that the Houston Rockets were for sale, appropriately enough, from the team’s public address announcer. It was the afternoon of July 17, and Fertitta, the billionaire owner and CEO of the Landry’s restaurant group, was in New York on business when he received a text message from Matt Thomas, the man whose solemn duty it is to intone, before each home game at the Toyota Center, the requisite liturgy: “Red Nation! It’s time to run as one for your Houston Rockets!”

Houston should not exist. In August 1836, just a few months after Texas won its independence from Mexico at the Battle of San Jacinto, three New York real estate speculators purchased 9,000 acres of swampland at the junction of Buffalo and White Oak bayous, drew up a city map and began advertising their uninhabited bog in American and European newspapers as “the great interior commercial emporium of Texas … handsome and beautifully elevated, salubrious and well-watered.” An illustration depicted a quaint village nestled among rolling hills.

They don’t make Texans like John Sharp anymore. The 67-year-old chancellor of the Texas A&M University System drives around College Station in a beat-up King Ranch Edition Ford F-150, often with animal traps in the bed, a .44 caliber hunting rifle leaning against the passenger seat, and a plug of tobacco under his lip. Calling his expletive-laced conversation salty would be an insult to salt. He owns a 1,600-acre ranch thirty minutes from campus, where he raises two hundred head of Corriente cattle and several dozen goats, the investment value of which he will expound on at length to anyone willing to listen. (“The future is goats,” he likes to say.)

Forty-three years ago, Hunter S. Thompson traveled to Houston to cover Super Bowl VIII, which pitted the Miami Dolphins against the Minnesota Vikings. Thompson spent a week searching for cocaine, hanging out at a “sporadically violent strip joint” called the Blue Fox and screaming fiery predawn sermons from a balcony at downtown’s Hyatt Regency. The gonzo-journalism pioneer later described the city as “a cruel, crazy town on a filthy river in East Texas with no zoning laws and a culture of sex, money and violence…a shabby, sprawling metropolis ruled by brazen women, crooked cops and super-rich pansexual cowboys.”

Houston hosts the Super Bowl again on February 5. Thompson is no longer alive, but the cruel, crazy town he described most certainly is.

Driving through Sugar Land, the suburb of 90,000 half an hour southwest of Houston, you can see the signs of growth everywhere. There’s the Smart Financial Centre, a $90 million, 6,400-seat concert venue that will celebrate its grand opening this month with a stand-up set by Jerry Seinfeld. Next door is the University of Houston’s Sugar Land campus, which will soon break ground on a 150,000-square-foot classroom building. The past decade has brought a new terminal for the city’s regional airport, a $37 million stadium for the city’s Minor League Baseball team, and an outpost of the Houston Museum of Natural Science, complete with its own T. rex. In 2014 Money magazine named Sugar Land the best small city in America to find a job, noting the number of Fortune 500 companies with a major presence there. But hidden amid this prosperity is a reminder of a forgotten past.

Over the past decade, American universities have gone on a worldwide building spree, opening branch campuses everywhere from Accra (Webster University) to Dubai (Rochester Institute of Technology) to Seoul (George Mason University). New York University has been the most aggressive, establishing degree—granting outposts in Abu Dhabi and Shanghai as part of its strategy to become the first “global network university.” Such empire building has drawn protests from faculty and students, who object to diverted resources at home and unfair labor practices abroad.

But private universities aren’t the only ones trying to set up classrooms overseas.

Early on a gray morning in April, dozens of elite athletes—rangy pole vaulters, wrestlers with bulbous ears, beach volleyball players with baked-in tans—hugged themselves for warmth on the windswept plaza outside the Today Show studio, in New York’s Rockefeller Center. In exactly a hundred days, they would march into Rio de Janeiro’s Maracanã Stadium as part of the opening ceremony of the 2016 Summer Olympics. But on this chilly morning, as they waited to appear on live television, the beaches of Brazil seemed a long way off.

On the morning of January 8, 2009, Lasantha Wickrematunge was driving to work in a suburb of the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo when his Toyota Corolla was blocked by four motorcycles. The masked riders smashed the car’s windows and dragged Lasantha into the street, where one of the assailants punched a hole in his skull with a captive bolt pistol, the kind used to slaughter livestock. According to eyewitnesses, the motorcyclists then sped off in the direction of a nearby military checkpoint, leaving Lasantha dead in the middle of a crowded intersection.