National Welcomes Its First Texas Culture Reporter

Sasha von Oldershausen has ridden shotgun with the only hospice nurse in a Texas county bigger than Connecticut. She's watched a Texas film crew pour chocolate syrup all over an actor's head to stage the moment of striking oil. She knows it takes Amtrak's Sunset Limited the better part of 24 hours to cross the vast expanse of Texas - she's ridden it, in the sleeper car .

Over the course of 10 years covering Texas, Sasha has turned small moments like these into big stories that reveal something essential about what is an influential and endlessly interesting state.

Now, Sasha will bring that boundless curiosity and unlimited appetite for reporting from every corner of the state to The New York Times as our first Texas culture reporter. A key addition to our new Texas hub, Sasha will cover an expansive beat chronicling life in Texas - culture, food, the arts and anything else that enlivens the days and nights of Texans. She joins a terrific and growing team of journalists spread all across the state, covering everything that makes Texas tick.

Sasha's love affair with Texas began in 2014. Fresh out of journalism school, she took a job covering the border in the West Texas town of Presidio for The Big Bend Sentinel - a weekly paper an hour up the road in Marfa. For a while she was the only reporter in town. And she knew no one. So she learned it the slow way, by living there and sitting through county commission meetings until she could see what the small stories were really about. A three-part series she wrote on Mexico's Mennonite communities won first place for feature writing from the Texas Press Association.

She left The Sentinel, but she stayed in the desert. She freelanced out of a crumbling adobe house off a country highway. When Antonin Scalia died on a remote ranch, she was one of the first reporters to get there - hours before the national press could reach the scene, and she filed for The Times.

Her byline has turned up here in Culture, Styles and Metro while freelancing for the better part of a decade. Since 2023, Sasha has been a senior writer at Texas Monthly.

"Sasha was one of a handful of freelance writers who consistently provided smart, original features for Metropolitan during the coronavirus pandemic," said Hilary Howard, who was Sasha's former editor on Metropolitan at The Times. "From New York City's bicycle shop boom to its underground comedy scene , from Persian culture to a woman who returned an overdue book to a Queens library after 63 years , Sasha wrote lively stories that inspired hope during a challenging time."

A couple of things her clips won't tell you: Sasha studied Near Eastern studies in graduate school and speaks a little Persian. And she didn't learn to drive until she was 25, when Presidio left her no other way to get around (except, of course, the Sunset Limited train).

She starts in July. Please join us in welcoming her.

- Nestor and Fernando