Michael Lind

“Down in Starr County, we throw out every third Republican vote.” The time was the 1970s, and the speaker was a slight acquaintance of my father who at the time was an assistant attorney general assigned to the state highway department. The visitor to our house in Austin laughed as he recounted how … Continue Reading

The first and only time I ever saw a squirrel without a tail was at the home of Edmond Decatur Harrison, the county judge of Blanco County, Texas. In the 1950s, before my brother and I were born, my father, fresh out of law school, had been elected county attorney in the thinly populated hills west … Continue Reading

Mount Monadnock is the highest peak in southern New Hampshire. It is also the occasion of a poem by the greatest New England intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson. In “Monadnoc,” the genteel Boston Brahmin explains that he expected to find heroic patriots among the mountaineers of the neighborhood. … Continue Reading

I nearly drove the car off Interstate Highway 35 when my grandfather told me, “I have discovered that our family might be related to Jesus of Nazareth.” I had been paying little attention to what Granddaddy had been saying, up to that point. We were nearing Selma, a tiny jurisdiction and notorious … Continue Reading

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 … Continue Reading