The paths in Hickory Hill Park were covered in leaves, and Oakland Cemetery was full of deer — whole families, plodding in the grass, lying down — when my wife and I began our search. We’ve walked through there so many times, but coming with a mission, it seemed that we’d hardly seen any of […]
Community/News
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Pulitzer-winning novelist Edna Ferber’s painful time in Ottumwa shaped her as an artist and ‘a human being’
“Life can’t ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer’s lover until death — fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant; the more varied the moods, the richer the experience. I’ve learned to value every stab of pain and disappointment.” —Edna Ferber Edna Ferber (1885-1968) was […]
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The Iowa Gambling Task: A 1994 decision-making experiment at UI has been revisited countless times since
You’ve heard of the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Now meet its strung-out cousin, the Iowa Gambling Task. IGT, also called the Iowa Gambling Task Experiment, is considered the gold standard for measuring cognitive decision-making. Thirty years after its debut, scientists (along with pop-science writers, podcasters and YouTubers) still continue to discuss it. In fact, […]
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Your Village: Why is there a truck driving around with a big image of Rep. Miller-Meeks as the Grinch?
Last night I saw a truck with a light-up display of Mariannette Miller-Meeks as a green-faced Grinch. Who did that? –RB, Iowa City The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) did that. The DCCC — pronounced “D triple-C” by political types — announced in an email on Wednesday that it was “launching a new billboard campaign […]
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Class-action lawsuit seeks to collect unpaid wages for airport restaurant workers in Iowa
A Linn County woman representing workers at airport eateries throughout Iowa has filed a potential class action lawsuit against her employer alleging violations of state and federal wage-and-hour laws. Tara Hill is suing SSP America CID, a limited liability corporation that does business in Iowa as part of SSP America Inc., the American division of […]
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For the sake of science, NASA gave away hundreds of moon rocks. Iowa keeps its allotment under lock and key.
Is this heaven? No, but there are pieces of the heavens in Iowa — and 135 countries, all U.S. states and the United Nations. Specifically, four rice-grain-sized pieces of moon rock from the Apollo 11 mission, the first to land on the Moon. In total, the mission returned to Earth with 47.5 pounds of lunar […]
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Mariannette Miller-Meeks is no longer claiming to be a resident of the district she represents in Congress
Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks is no longer claiming to be a resident of the congressional district she represents in the U.S. House of Representatives. The Republican incumbent, now in her third term, has never been a resident, as that term is commonly understood, of Iowa’s 1st Congressional District. When not in Washington D.C., Miller-Meeks lives in […]
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A cult in Iowa helped hide Yoko Ono’s daughter from her for years: ‘We never talked about my mom and John’
For a pair of prominent anti-war activists, John Lennon and Yoko Ono had many battles to fight in 1971. Upon their move to America, they faced the ire of bitter (and often racist and misogynistic) Beatles fans, investigations by the FBI, deportation attempts by the Nixon administration and pressure to either manifest or temper the […]
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Border collies tap into the herding mentality at national cattledog competition
Standing on a hill overlooking a green pasture, Rachel Ritland and I watched a group of cattle at the bottom of the valley. I pulled my jacket tight against the frigid wind, but Ritland, co-director of 3rd District of the United States Border Collie Handlers’ Association (USBCHA), didn’t seem to mind. She focused intently on […]
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Woodbury County inmate facing a year of detention sues Homeland Security
A Woodbury County jail inmate is suing the federal government, alleging she’s being unlawfully detained by ICE and faces a year of confinement while being denied her due process rights. The case is one of hundreds of similar lawsuits filed around that nation against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and […]
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‘The American people must have more than a choice between evils’: Iowan Henry A. Wallace, FDR’s vice president, was an ag innovator and fierce antifascist
“The Cornfield Prophet” Henry A . Wallace, known for his pioneering work in agriculture, was a progressive statesman who championed the “Century of the Common Man.” A heartbeat away from the presidency for four years as FDR’s vice president, his supporters viewed him as the torchbearer for the New Deal, while opponents dismissed him as […]
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The infamous Epstein birthday book includes a cringeworthy Iowa anecdote from 1988
In some cases, the truism “there’s always an Iowa connection” becomes a threat. The Jeffrey Epstein “birthday book,” revealed this summer, is one such case. Amid 238 pages of fawning, friendly and conspiratorial birthday messages to the billionaire rapist and child trafficker written by his rich, powerful cohorts and gathered by Ghislaine Maxwell in 2003 […]
