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Monday, Nov. 9
Non-Iowans across social media seem fascinated to discover aspects of Governor-elect Rob Sand’s biography that many of his voters were already aware of, especially his modeling career in the early aughts. Another Sand rabbit hole: the Hot Lotto fraud scandal of the 2010s, which he helped investigate as deputy state auditor. A pair of brothers ultimately confessed to rigging lottery outcomes in five states over a decade.
In 2021, Sand went on the Criminal podcast to discuss the case.
“When you talk to me about financial crime, what I hear is someone who is greedy, whose crimes are crimes of selfishness … and frankly who thinks they’re smart enough to get away with it,” he told host Phoebe Judge.
The scheme culminated in a $16.5 million-winning Hot Lotto ticket sold to a customer at a Quik Trip in northeast Des Moines on Dec. 29, 2010. For nearly a year, no one stepped up to claim the prize. When a man finally did present the Iowa Lottery with the winning serial number, things went “from weird to double weird,” Sand recalled.
You can listen to the episode or read the transcript online for free.
Tuesday, Nov. 10
How many people does it take to physically scoot the Bean a little bit? We still don’t know, even after hundreds of people gathered in Chicago’s Millennium Park on Sunday to make an attempt. The crowd was responding to an anonymous flyer soliciting help in pushing the stainless steel sculpture “7 inches to the left” on Nov. 8. The “first push” was scheduled for exactly 12:47 p.m.
Right on time, an estimated 250 people surrounded the Bean — officially titled Cloud Gate by artist Anish Kapoor, unveiled 20 years ago this May — and pushed. While the crowd was enthusiastic, the effort was for naught. Maybe it was the Bean’s 110-ton weight. Or the fact it’s installed directly into the pavement. In any case, it wouldn’t be moved left. “The bean is Chuck Schumer,” one Chicago journalist quipped.
It was far from the first Bean-related meme to manifest in an IRL gathering, from a 2017 campaign to “Windex the Bean” to demonstrations last year calling on the city to free a man allegedly trapped inside. Perhaps they’d have better luck scooting the 19-ton Brain in Iowa City. It took a crane to relocate the stone sculpture from the T. Anne Cleary Walkway west across the river to the health sciences campus in July 2025.
Wednesday, Nov. 11
Happy Veteran’s Day, especially to this serviceman in particular.
On Tuesday, Republicans in the U.S. House united around the Trump administration and voted not to advance articles of impeachment against Sec. Pete Hegseth. For now, an Iowan remains the only U.S. Secretary of War to be impeached. In 2022, Little Village explored the story of William W. Belknap, a former captain of the Keokuk Rifles militia turned Civil War hero turned disgraced politician.
Thursday, Nov. 12
The Senate race in Mississippi — which came down to less than 5,000 votes — was finally called on Wednesday for Scott Colom. He steps into history as the state’s first Democratic U.S. senator since segregationist John C. Stennis retired in 1989, and its first Black senator in 146 years, since Blanche K. Bruce and Hiram Revels served during Reconstruction.
Colom’s most viral campaign moment was a head-turning ad. It begins with a clip of GOP incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith telling a local news anchor that constituents worried about high beef prices “have so many proteins to choose from.”
Cut to a tall white man grilling burgers in his backyard. “Pick another protein?” he drawls. “Shiiiii— I’d rather pick another senator instead.”
“Pick another protein?” says a Black woman eating fried fish in a restaurant. “She done lost her damn mind. I’d rather pick another senator.”
An older white woman in a grocery store chimes in, “What the f—” before the ad cuts to Collom, who chuckles and says, “Pick another senator instead.”
For veterans of the “war on meat,” a culture-war campaign waged by the likes of Sen. Joni Ernst and Gov. Kim Reynolds in the wake of the 2020 election, there’s a delicious irony in Colom’s win. Republicans framed progressive critiques of the corporate beef and pork industry as attacks on farmers and attempts to snatch meat off dinner tables; Colom earned voters’ trust, in part, by pointing out that Republican policies have made it harder for Americans to bring home the bacon.
Friday, Nov. 13
Tomorrow marks 175 years since the publication of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, that book you technically read in school even if you skimmed a few (dozen) chapters. Pulitzer-winning novelist and retired University of Iowa professor Marilynne Robinson taught classes on Moby Dick during her 25 years at UI, and named it as one of her top three works of American fiction in a 2012 interview with Little Village.
“It is the most spectacular exploration of the metaphorical acts of consciousness — the hypothetical constructions of the world that consciousness creates and explores,” she said of Melville’s 1851 epic. “I think that the most beautiful language is recruited to the purposes of the most beautiful thought, and Moby Dick is an exemplar of that, certainly in Western letters. Every time I read it I feel as if my mind is larger.”
Fortunately, the barbaric whaling industry depicted by Melville wound down amid the Civil War, and as kerosene and electric lightbulbs replaced whale oil and spermaceti in American lamps. Regulations protecting marine animals and their habitats, while still inadequate, have no doubt prevented countless vengeful Ahabs and Mobys from spawning in the high seas. Folks in New York City were even treated to a visit from humpback whales yesterday, which Mayor Mamdani celebrated as a sign “nature is healing” 50 years after the city government started taking water pollution seriously.
