Spring has come around again! That can mean different things to different people; for me, spring signals the return of Renaissance faire season. I have been a member of Pass Four Productions since 2014. We are a troupe of actors […]
The Iowa Dispatch features the voices of Iowans scattered around the country and the world, offering a local perspective on national and international issues. The Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021 and the two weeks of intense security in the […]
“Be careful, and stay safe.” As I sat on my 42-minute flight from the Eastern Iowa Airport to Minneapolis-St. Paul, I replayed these words said in the days leading up to my trip. Everyone from my parents to the Little […]
In Washington D.C., no one ever invites me to dinner parties. Of course, no one has dinner parties to invite me to; it’s all about happy hour, a recreation in which I rarely take part. My colleagues in the gender-based violence field and I joke that no one wants to talk to us at social gatherings, because we’re downers. We are stuffed to the gills with […]
My name is Sergio Flores. I am a documentary photographer and freelance photojournalist currently based in Austin, Texas. Being Mexican-American, it was really important to me to contribute to the conversations around issues that relate to people like me, or people who look like me … to look for moments that contain humanity. Here are two photos that tell two of those stories. […]
I had passed by this quaint block countless times before on my bike commute to and from work, but this time it felt macabre as a horror story coalesced around me. The dissonance between the crime scenes I’d read about and their plain existence made my head swim. Seeing this unremarkable block through new eyes, I was struck by how normal
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In any given city, I am in search of two things: good food and good bookstores. Independent institutions of books and food indicate to me that someone has cared enough about their community to invest in it and contribute to […]
On Nov. 26, 2017, the Hawai’ian government reinstated the “attack warning” siren amidst growing fears of a possible missile attack from North Korea. My wife, Julia, and I were living in Wailuku, a town on the island of Maui. Along with the rest of the citizens of Hawai’i, we had watched with growing apprehension as Trump and Kim Jong Un began their volley of insults and threats with our islands stuck in between. […]
The daily summer temperature in the Chihuahuan Desert, the land that stretches from the middle of New Mexico and southeast through Texas and Mexico toward the Gulf, frequently surges above 100 degrees. The desert itself receives about 9 inches of rain a year, and very little of that during the summer months. Mix in devastating dust storms that often darken the sky and choke people to death in 70-plus mile-per-hour winds, and you have one of the most inhospitable places in the country. […]
