Nine years ago, after he first set foot in Ames to survey the city’s retail climate, Bucky Wolford returned home satisfied. A year and a half later, the developer from Chattanooga, Tennessee, formally announced his desire to build a new mall here, setting into motion an impassioned – and often misunderstood – debate that continues [...]

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Leslie Hall answered the door in almost-complete costume. She invited us in and asked us to wait as she went upstairs to put the finishing touches on her outfit. Gavin and I had come to take a tour of the Mobile Museum of Gem Sweaters, which is parked in a barely used storage lot behind [...]

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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 Keen and the street before us. He’s in the driver’s seat, smoking weed out of a wooden pipe engraved with [...]

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The recent death of Norman Borlaug, the Nobel Prize-winning plant geneticist credited with starting the “Green Revolution,” led to the reiteration of many of the tributes he amassed during his lifetime: that he saved the lives of millions of people, laid Malthus’ ghost to rest, and invented the production model which would enable us to continue “feeding [...]

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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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Could Iowa become the 14th state to legalize medical marijuana?
In 1990, Carl Olsen tells me, he had an epiphany. It’s the year that he met George McMahon at a rally outside the state Capitol building, and McMahon was smoking pot. “I had never met a person that was legally smoking marijuana before,” Olsen recalls. “I [...]

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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 [...]

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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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On the last afternoon of June one year ago I sat at a table in Thumbs sipping a beer. A half-dozen or so regulars were gathered up front inside the popular West Street bar that day, drinking and smoking and talking to the bartender. One topic soon came to dominate all conversation: the next day, [...]

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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 name These [...]

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