Posted December 03, 2025in Political Mercury
I’ve covered a lot of traffic-crash deaths. “Walking down the track, picking up body parts gives you an appreciation for the power of a train,” an Ames police sergeant told me in the early 1990s in the hours after a collision, just along the Union Pacific Railroad line, in the
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Posted November 05, 2025in Political Mercury
With a rare sense of place, a know-it-when-you-see-it Iowa-ness, Art Cullen’s roaring new book is nothing short of an unsparing mirror for 3.3 million of us in the state. With still-night whispers of truth and bar-fight ferocity, this western Iowa newspaperman reveals the masquerade-ball leadership that’s turned so many of
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Posted October 01, 2025in Political Mercury
He is a United States senator. Ankit Jain ran for election in 2024 and won — and he represents 702,000 people as one of two Washington, D.C. “shadow” senators. But this senator can’t vote in the Senate — and he doesn’t get paid. Jain’s office isn’t on the capitol grounds but
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Posted September 03, 2025in Political Mercury
Pie is a stand-in for Iowa itself in many ways in a feature-length documentary from director Beth M. Howard, an Iowa filmmaker who is now on a national tour with “Pieowa: A Piece Of America” The film shows one of the iconic Iowa restaurants that serves pie — The Canteen
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Posted August 06, 2025in Political Mercury
A Capitol Police officer who stood the ground between hundreds of members of Congress and insurrectionists during the Jan. 6 attack says he thinks often about that day — a day that could have been his last. Harry Dunn, a now-departed United States Capitol Police officer who testified before Congress
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Posted July 02, 2025in Political Mercury
The opening line of AI 2027, a forecast about the exponential explosion of artificial intelligence, is jaw-dropping. “We predict the impact of superhuman AI over the next decade will be enormous, exceeding that of the industrial revolution.” But as the forecast from insiders in the artificial intelligence industry continues, that
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Posted June 04, 2025in Political Mercury
Rob Sand knows the outcome at the polls next year depends not just on how Iowans respond to him, the gubernatorial candidate atop his ticket, but Democrat voters themselves. Do voters see everyday Democrats down the street as kind, reasonable and approachable, or hostile and impossibly entrenched? In one of
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Posted April 30, 2025in Political Mercury
Many politicians can persuade you to believe in them. That’s a commonly reached feat. But the defining leaders, elected officials like Tom Harkin, Robert Ray, Henry Wallace and Harold Hughes, are able to summon the inspiration to get Iowans believing in themselves, their own worth and futures. More than any
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Posted April 02, 2025in Political Mercury
Any conflicted pregnant woman who watched the just-concluded Paramount series sensation “Yellowstone” likely scheduled an abortion before the final cowboy deserted Kevin Coster and Taylor Sheridan’s fictional Montana ranch. Costner should reimburse them. “Yellowstone,” a wildly popular and exceedingly entertaining show, sent strong signals about blood and bloodlines, legacy and lore, and
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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 Strange Science of Immortality,” the one that rushes to the fore for me is compound interest. And civil war. In
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