What I Learned in a Logging Camp

Investigation

The King of the Con

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

By David Samuels

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 Mind of the South

Southern Man blames, embraces region’s ills

‘queer, feverish fits’

Made stupid by climate, rhetoric

Skulks, broods, rages

By Blake Smith

“You have to read this book to understand the South,” my freshman-year history teacher told me. In my adolescent mind, she was herself the South — a chubby cheerful busy spinster whose family had run a small town upstate a generation before and whose memory extended into countless other families’ intimate affairs. At fourteen I didn’t want to understand the South, just to escape it. But school seemed to be a means to that end, and I was enough of a teacher’s pet to fulfill what I took to be an assignment: To read W.J. Cash’s The Mind of the South, published six decades prior, on the double-eve of World War Two and the author’s suicide. The book shook me. Cash analyzed the Southern mind — that is, the mind of the white male Southerner, the mind of someone like himself, or, I worried, like me — as rather a refusal of thought. The South, as Cash saw it, was not congenial to thinking, or indeed to seeing, clearly. “There was in the Southern physical world,” the author observed, “a sort of …