Ben Hartman

Ann Richards wasn’t a lesbian, and Beto isn’t a senator (yet)

By / November 30, 2020

“Ann Richards is a lesbian!” The words were shouted at my mom by a frat boy in the bed of a pick-up truck in downtown Austin and it’s still one of the most bizarre and hilarious things I can remember. It was sometime in 1990, when Ann Richards was running for governor against central casting Texas rancher manchild Clayton Williams. My mom and brother and I were walking back from an event downtown (a political rally or the Pecan Street Festival? …

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After Pittsburgh, looking back at November 2016

By / December 1, 2020

An elderly Jewish man and a Jewish college professor almost got into a fistfight at a Kosher BBQ buffet dinner and I missed it. It was a few days after Trump was elected, and I was invited to attend a meeting of the “Jewish men’s club speakers’ series” held at the Austin JCC. After the meal, a Jewish history professor from UT gave a lecture on the “Rise and Decline of the American Presidency,” which had been planned months earlier, but …

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“The Talmud of Texas” – revisiting ‘Lonesome Dove’ 20 years later

By / November 30, 2020

In a dusty boomtown on the plains, not far from the train depot and a dry river bed, an old friend hid in plain sight. On that morning in Tel Aviv I strolled into a used book store near my work and out of only a handful of English books, the greatest of them all was on sale for 20 shekels. It’d been about 20 years since I’d first read ‘Lonesome Dove’, and almost 30 years since the TV miniseries aired, …

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My grandfather was a death row doctor – he tested LSD on Texas inmates

By / November 30, 2020

The following article was the result of several months of research and investigation in Huntsville, Houston, the Texas State Archives in Austin, and in a series of boxes of family keepsakes held by my aunts. The full article can be read here Eusebio Martinez was polite — even happy — as he entered the death chamber that August night in Huntsville in 1960. He may not have understood his time was up. A few years earlier, Martinez had been convicted of …

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From InfoWars to CustodyWars – Covering the Alex Jones Trial

By / November 30, 2020

“Which one of y’all tweeted about the cookies?” The attorney posing the question looked down the corridor where I was sitting on a bench at the Travis County Courthouse in Austin working on my laptop. I raised my hand and apologetically took credit for the tweet. Jury deliberations had stretched for hours and the legal teams had left for dinner. The legal team for Alex Jones’ ex-wife Kelly had left cookies and brownies in some Tupperware on a bench and I’d tweeted – …

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Longhorns, pass by

By / November 30, 2020

It was at a shitty pizza place in south Austin that I first realized sports dreams come true sometimes. I was 17 that afternoon in 1996, sitting at Double Dave’s on South Lamar with my best friend and his cousin, watching the unranked Longhorns beat #3 Nebraska in the first-ever Big XII championship. The 8-4 Horns were three touchdown underdogs against a Nebraska team that was undefeated in the peak of the Tom Osborne era, when they were every bit what …

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My Gaza War

By / November 30, 2020

I rear-ended some settlers in a mini-van in the West Bank that afternoon, just before pulling into the settlement of Talmon for the funeral. There was no damage and we parted ways with a smile, joining the convoy snaking up to the ceremony. Hundreds of people were waiting in Talmon to bury 16-year-old Gil-Ad Shaer, murdered 18 days earlier on June 12th along with teenagers Naftali Frenkel and Eyal Yifrah, after they were kidnapped at a hitchhiking post in the West …

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Frontline Reporting: My Coverage of the Eurovision 2016 Finals

By / November 30, 2020

One of Israel’s most famous haircuts – and also a singer – did not emerge victorious at the 2016 Eurovision contest in Sweden on Saturday night, but it wasn’t due to a lack of effort. Sparkling like he’d been attacked by a 12-year-old with a spray can of foam on Independence Day three nights earlier, he took to the stage with “Made of Stars,” a ballad that was either dark or uplifting, and packed with nonsense lines like “You ride a …

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Not your average Tel Aviv rally

By / November 30, 2020

In my experience, when people announce a protest against the IDF and the security establishment, it’s a small group of far leftists in Tel Aviv. They usually number in the dozens, maybe a bit more, and when the protest actually happens, it’s mostly the same faces from the time before. This week presented a much rarer spectacle though – a mass rally against the IDF, not organized by the far-left bloggers and activists of Tel Aviv, rather by uber-patriots, former MKs, …

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What’s heroism in the face of terror?

By / November 30, 2020

The quiet that Israel had experienced for over a week was shattered by an attack on Sunday that was more pathetic than terrifying. Video of the attack in Rosh Ayin shows a 23-year-old Arab woman from Kafr Qassem awkwardly flailing around with a knife in hand, trying to find a victim before she is overcome by a group of bystanders. She did manage to lightly wound a woman from Kfar Saba who she stabbed in the shoulder, but her victim was …

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