The Varsity Theatre wasn’t the first business I saw close in Campustown. Stay around Ames for a few years and you can challenge your friends in the chronology of a location – Oleke Te, Maid-Rite, Angie’s Kitchen. . . or was it Santa Fe Café? Somehow though, when I saw the dumpster outside the Varsity [...]

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On Christmas Day 2009, a flight carrying nearly 300 people prepared to land in Detroit while a Nigerian boy, Umar Abdulmutallab, tried to ignite a small bomb on board. Jasper Schuringa noticed him and leaped over four seats to tackle and subdue the boy, saving everyone on board.
When the Twin Towers fell on September 11, [...]

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For the record, I am a liberal: someone who loves Bernie Sanders and the late Paul Wellstone. However, I am convinced that many who share my ideals and convictions are unhappy with Obama. If you fall under this category, I hate to say it, but I do not think you fully understand what Obama was [...]

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I, like many of my peers, have spent the better part of the last three weeks listening to a steady stream of news and music of, about, and by Michael Jackson. For this reason, I, like many of my peers, am just now appreciating what a marvel and meteoric phenomenon he was, and just how [...]

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Michael Jackson’s sudden death set off such an overwhelming overflow of national emotion and pride that the planners of the Iowa State Fair were moved to commission a butter sculpture of the pop icon. The planners cited Jackson’s contributions to music and dance, as well as his mid-seventies performance at the state fair, as the [...]

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“Do we participate in a politics of cynicism, or do we participate in a politics of hope? … Hope in the face of difficulty, hope in the face of uncertainty, the audacity of hope: in the end, that is God’s greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation, a belief in things not [...]

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Frederick Kirschenmann is a distinguished fellow at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University. He is listed as one of the “Sustainable Dozen” by Food Democracy Now, an online petition to bring leaders in the sustainable agriculture movement into the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Given the smooth Senate Confirmation hearing for Tom Vilsack [...]

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The auction for 22-year-old Natalie Dylan’s virginity has been open for almost five months now.
Dylan (not her real name) hails from San Diego. She already holds a bachelor’s degree in women’s studies from Sacramento State but doesn’t have the money for grad school, so she has decided to prostitute herself in. According to Dylan, selling [...]

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Reformers and concerned citizens periodically draw attention to the miserable state of K-12 education. The numbers continue to be dismal: in most of the 50 largest school districts, dropout rates exceed 40 percent. There are many who refuse to give up on schools, citing studies that consistently show that the problem is poor teaching and [...]

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[Expanded with the original ending for the web.]
Modern industry thrives on the perception that consumers have a wide variety of choices. As we walk down the aisles of large grocery stores, we experience an apparently unending variety of products to choose from. Yet, as any customer who wants organic and local food will tell you, [...]

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