The King of the Con

Investigation

On the trail of Titanic Thompson

'In every bet there’s a fool and a thief'

Americans are the world’s greatest con men and biggest marks

The legendary American con man Titanic Thompson once said that “In every bet there’s a fool and thief.” Thompson’s refusal to be a fool, the role for which he had seemingly been destined from birth, helped make him one of America’s greatest heroes of the 1920s, the age when the American hero was born. As a thief, he rarely hurt anyone who didn’t deserve it. Often described as a “sportsman” by his biographers, Titanic Thompson was an expert golfer and poker player for whom the abstract pleasures of such pursuits came second to their utility in separating suckers from their money. Though he never learned to properly read or write, his most powerful tool was a mind that could spin rock candy mountains as high as the Alps whose appearance would first tantalize and then paralyze his marks. It helped that Thompson was a master of the American vernacular as accomplished as any novelist or playwright that the country has produced, a kind of homespun combination of Mark Twain and Elon Musk. …

Essay

The Turtle Boy of Austin

Testaceous land-waddlers incapable of generosity or gratitude

To live and die alone

Philosophical genius L. Wittgenstein sagely remarks: “If a lion could speak, we would not understand him.”

By Michael Lind

Turtle sex is as weird as you would expect it to be. In the case of the ornate box turtle, terrapene ornata, courtship begins with the male pursuing the female and bumping into her. When the male mounts his mate, he locks his legs into her shell. Several hours can pass before the male slides off or falls backwards and the pair go their separate ways. When I, at the age of nine or ten, caught a box turtle couple in our family’s backyard in Austin, Texas, in flagrante delicto, the mounted male was leaning backward like a water skier, while the bored female plodded along through the grass. I later witnessed the results of that or a similar encounter. Trimming a hedge in our backyard garden, my father found a hole where a female box turtle had laid her clutch of eggs. We checked them now and then and were rewarded one morning when we found a couple of hatchlings pushing themselves out of their leathery eggs, having cut them open with the help of “egg-teeth” on their beaks — small …

The King of the Con

The Turtle Boy of Austin

What I Learned in a Logging Camp