Read Part I of “Midway” online here and Part II here. The shock of finding over a hundred thousand dollars hidden in the bedroom ceiling temporarily got me out of the stupor I’d been in. I got an old army surplus duffel bag out of the cabinet under the bed and Shaun and I shoveled [...]

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Part I of “Midway” was published in last month’s issue of the Ames Progressive. Read it online here. Kate came home at five. I was dozing at the table, torn between passing out or nursing my anger and what was left of the bourbon a little while longer. I watched Kate step out of her [...]

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The House of Freaks was quite a letdown, let me tell you. The exterior was a big mural featuring all sorts of fantastical freaks, like a bearded lady who looked to weigh about 400 pounds and a lizard-headed man lifting a giant barbell with his forked tongue. The other three walls were unpainted plywood, held [...]

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We were halfway between Des Moines and St Louis, low on gas, out of smokes, far into the pangs of delirium tremens, hopped up on powders that give nose bleeds, cringing at every ray of sunlight and birdsong, sucking down carbonated, caffeinated beverages in order to prop open those heavy eyelids when I noticed that [...]

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The following is the full text of Nick Lindsley’s three-part interview with Bill Ayers. Ayers is a former member of the Weather Underground, a radical leftist organization active in the ’70s. Today, Ayers is a Professor at the University of Illinois. The interviews originally appeared in Volume 1, Issues 2, 3 and 6 of the [...]

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I once read a quote that said if you wanted to avoid a nuclear catastrophe during the Cold War, then you should move to Bolivia. Indeed, this quiet Andean nation has been historically associated with little excitement beyond its coca production, its concentration of indigenous peoples, and its unpredictable politics. As Howard Zinn notes in [...]

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From the Boheme (R.I.P.) to the M-Shop and the Practice Space, some of the best music in Ames is contained within divers and sundry living rooms, and I will be bold and state that there is another to add to that esteemed list: the Ames Progressive office. The shows there, which occur every Tuesday at [...]

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“Let’s get the journalist up here!” The girls giggle as I climb onto the quiet stage. Of course, I’m wearing my reindeer sweater and argyle socks. It soon becomes apparent that pole dancing isn’t my forte. As instructed by the platinum blonde manager, Alex*, I wrap my right leg around the pole and brace myself [...]

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Ricky Fields served a week in the Story County Jail from December 14 to 21. He is a graduate of Ames High School and a student at Iowa State University. He wrote the following testimonial on the back of two sheets of paper he found in the complex. “It was dark enough that I couldn’t [...]

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Christopher Hitchens is a British-born author and journalist now residing in Washington, D.C., where he became a naturalized citizen on his 58th birthday on April 13 of this year. A former Trotskyist, Hitchens broke with the left as he grew increasingly concerned with the threat of Islamic terrorism and disenchanted with what he called the [...]

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