Dear readers, It is with no small amount of regret that I announce that this will be the last ever Brock About Town column. I’ll be leaving Iowa City soon, and while I would love to keep this column running […]
I don’t talk about kids very often in this column, because I don’t have any and I don’t know anybody who has any and I have so little maternal instinct that when I was in high school and our next-door […]
Summer is drawing to its close. The students have returned, shattering the temporary illusion of peace and quiet, and the very first signs of fall have appeared in the form of days with a humidity index below 80 percent. That […]
One thing that I think is really funny about kids is how little they care about dying. I have a younger brother who, when cautioned not to drive to the gym in the middle of a historically unprecedented blizzard because […]
Hello readers! This week’s Brock About Town comes to you from New York City. That’s right, kids, for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic, I have left the Shire. I’ll be back at the end of the […]
Last night, I woke up in a cold sweat at precisely 3:42 a.m. The cause? Not a nightmare, or the debilitating existential dread that I used to regard as a symptom of an impending depressive episode, or perhaps some kind […]
One of the things I love about living in Iowa City is its commitment to reducing, reusing and recycling. Most American towns this size don’t have electric buses, multiple vegan restaurants or such a strong cultural predilection toward preserving the […]
While I’m sure some of you imagine me as a Baba Yaga-type figure that sits in a tree on College Street, judging people and collecting Natty Light cans for the five-cent redemption fee, I actually do have a day job. […]
Hello, dear readers, and welcome to the weather issue. An apt theme, I think, as we barrel into what we here in Iowa very generously refer to as spring. In reality, it’s two months of light snow showers, punctuated with […]
This month I, along with millions of other directionless 20-somethings with liberal arts degrees our stepdads warned us against getting, am applying to grad schools. (Third degree’s a charm, Dad!) It’s a demoralizing process that makes you question everything you […]
I’ve mentioned before that I simply don’t approve of the whole “New Year’s resolution” concept. In my opinion, it’s unnecessarily cruel. It’s freezing cold; we get, like, 45 minutes of sun exposure per day; I just blew all my money […]
The holiday season is upon us once more, and for the very first time in my life, I spent it at my boyfriend’s parents’ house. I won’t lie, I was a little nervous at first. These are people who make […]
