This article by Gail Collins is published by The New York Times. Here is an excerpt:

Decennial redistricting doesn’t dance off the tongue, but it is important, and this season, as usual, there’s plenty worth howling about.

It sometimes helps to give the most egregious examples funny names, just to get some attention. The Third Congressional District in Maryland was once known as the “broken-winged pterodactyl” because of the very peculiar way it was carved out. A writer described one proposed Texas district as looking “a bit like a gulper shark, with two dorsal fins protruding from its back.”

The problem here is gerrymandering. We all know — OK, some of us know — that the term came from the early-19th-century Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry, who happened to be in office when lawmakers drew up a map featuring one salamander-shaped district that critics referred to as a gerrymander.

Read the full article here.