Posted March 05, 2025in Political Mercury
Compound interest. Of all the strands of imagination and provocations and fear and excitement that engage one during Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jonathan Weiner’s terrific book, “Long For This World: The [...]
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Posted February 05, 2025in Political Mercury
The conversation came rushing back to me sometime between the Carter grandchildren’s heart-tugging memories and Andrew Young’s magisterial closing eulogy during the funeral for President Jimmy Carter. As a 10-year-old boy, I thrilled [...]
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Posted January 01, 2025in Political Mercury
In reading the-then (and now-again) publishing sensation “Hillbilly Elegy” eight years ago as it announced a culture-crashing new voice, I found myself stopping at points in the book, both angry and doubtful [...]
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Posted December 04, 2024in Political Mercury
I am Dave. If you are online at all, you are Dave. We all are. Human editors, real ones, survive at near-extinction levels. Seeing one at work these days is [...]
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Posted November 06, 2024in Political Mercury
(Editor’s note: Doug Burns is a producer of this documentary.) The a-ha moment struck like spring lightning on the groovy 1970s couch, just a hop, skip and a few [...]
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Posted September 10, 2024in Political Mercury
Tom and Ruth Harkin leaned forward in their Fleur Cinema seats in Des Moines in the early evening of July 17 as a film chronicling the civil rights journey of [...]
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Posted September 04, 2024in Political Mercury
A modern political Mason-Dixon line appears to be taking form north of Mason City and south of Albert Lea — somewhere around the Minnesota-Iowa border. The crash of cultures is [...]
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Posted July 31, 2024in Political Mercury
The conservative master blueprint Project 2025 will start the next civil war. Just not in the ways you think. In a crammed catalog of things I just don’t want to think about [...]
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Posted July 03, 2024in Political Mercury
After the rains, or in the routines of daily life, in one of the more war-ravaged reaches of the globe, residents would spot the signs of unexploded munitions, mortars and [...]
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Posted June 05, 2024in Political Mercury
Harold Beach, a northeast Missouri farmer who runs a row-crop operation and raises hogs and cattle, traveled to central Iowa recently to urge one of the nation’s top regulators to [...]
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