He helped reopen the Gobi to Westerners after Communist rule ended, in the early nineteen-nineties, and since then has dug there at least twenty-two times.

NEWYORKER: Bones of Contention

In the seventies and eighties, the annual average rose to about a dozen. (Frustration with this increase led the Senate, in 1975, to lower the threshold for cloture to sixty votes.) In the nineties and early aughts, the average went up to twenty-five or thirty a year, as both parties escalated their use of the filibuster when they found themselves in the minority.

NEWYORKER: The Empty Chamber