I’m a versatile writer and editor who began my media career as a copy editor at the San Angelo Standard-Times. (Remarkably, the Standard-Times hired me after I walked in off the streets and asked for a job.) I later joined the Austin American-Statesman, where I most recently was an editorial writer and columnist. Between my newspaper careers, I supervised the production schedule of a monthly, peer-reviewed research journal of the American Physiological Society, based in Bethesda, Maryland.

My interests are wide-ranging — Texas and national politics, foreign affairs, history, the economy, criminal justice, constitutional law, science, religion, books, film and pop culture. I am a tough-to-beat trivia player, if nothing else.

I am a distance runner, history buff and Beatles geek. Edmund Burke and Alexander Hamilton are political influences. Herman Melville and Thomas Hardy are at or near the top of a long list of favorite writers. I love coffee. I like beer. Mostly, I’m a water man. Make of that what you will.

I’m a multi-generational Texan (on all branches of the family tree) from Abilene, the West Texas city between Austin and Lubbock that’s been ranked in recent years by those who study voting patterns as one of the most conservative cities in the nation.

My dad grew up in Buffalo Gap, just south of Abilene. My mom lived on a ranch nearby. Her father — my maternal grandfather, of course — made a name for himself raising champion show steers. I showed a few of those champion steers in the 1970s. That might be the least-known fact about me.