After graduating with a philosophy degree from Iowa State University, Servo Jefferson moved to Japan in the fall of 2006. There, he taught English with the dysfunctional and profit-hungry Nova Group before the school’s bankruptcy the following year. The following is an excerpt from the zine he wrote about his experiences. Its title, Shoganai, roughly [...]

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Every few days, Ben Hull descends the stairs at 303 Kellogg Avenue to toil amid sheets of drywall and piles of sawdust, renovating a tiny suite of basement rooms. Hull’s no stranger to this kind of work. He’s been a construction worker of one stripe or another for the past decade. But come April 2010, [...]

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I only met him five minutes ago, but I’m already wondering if Darren Keen is going to get me arrested. As I sit beside him in his dad’s turquoise Dodge Caravan, my eyes flit between him and the street before us. He’s in the driver’s seat, smoking weed out of a wooden pipe engraved with a [...]

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Fighting in the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has resulted in more deaths than any conflict since World War II. According to the International Rescue Committee, more than 5.4 million people have been killed in the DRC since 1998 by war and the ills that have accompanied it: massive displacement, [...]

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Ames martial arts instructor Jack Shilkaitis has taken thousands of punches over the past decade, but he remembers none more fondly than the one he took from Vladimir Vasiliev. Vasiliev delivered the blow over four years ago, as part of a demonstration at a seminar in Chicago, but when Shilkaitis told me about it this [...]

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I’m sitting in a third-class train compartment. This is a situation I’ve been in a few times before. Old women hawking iced tea and mango slices traipse up and down the car, while a 12-year-old with a Dragon Ball Z backpack stares out the window. Across the aisle, a few school kids are giggling at [...]

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Hours before he took the stage with his band, Ian Anderson sounded uncharacteristically cautious. “I’m gonna try to keep this a little more family-oriented,” he said, stroking his beard. “This might be the first show where I keep my clothes on.” Anderson, DJ Logan Jaynes, and guitarist Chase Risinger play together under the willfully ungrammatical [...]

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Wedged between two loud rock bands, and crammed into a small room overflowing with people, Patrick Tape Fleming played a solo Poison Control Center show at the Ames Progressive Office on March 27. Without any amplification or microphone, Patrick took his acoustic guitar on a stroll around the room as he played a set of [...]

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No one wanted to hire Daniel Brown. The 24-year-old Wisconsin native had begun looking for work in August of 2008, shortly after graduating from Iowa State University. After a four-month-long search, he decided to stop looking. Instead, Brown persuaded his parents to co-sign a $10,000 small-business loan, which he used to lease a small space [...]

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When Barack Obama first announced his candidacy for president in February 2007, his potential for superstardom – evidenced by his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention and subsequent election to the United States Senate – may have been swiftly realized, but he still faced an uphill primary battle against New York Senator Hillary [...]

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