I met former State Rep. Ed Fallon in Des Moines coffee house Ritual Café, with his friend and fellow Occupy organizer Gabriel De La Cerda, on November 18. Nursing serious colds with organic herbal teas, we talked for about an hour about Occupy Des Moines, his thoughts on Gov. Terry Branstad, and the 2012 elections, [...]

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Eric Cooper is the Libertarian Party’s candidate for governor in Iowa’s November 2 election. Could you tell the readers of the Progressive a little about your background? I was born in Iowa City, but I actually grew up in Topeka, Kansas. And I came to Ames when I got the job at Iowa State as [...]

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Jonathan Narcisse is a former Des Moines School Board member known for his outspoken and oftentimes controversial nature. He is an independent candidate for governor and will appear on the November 2 ballot with his self-started Iowa Party. You have a rather eclectic background in Iowa politics. You co-chaired the Polk County Democratic Party in [...]

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Jordan Zantow is a painter, cartoonist, and musician who grew up in Boone and currently lives in Ames. He has a distinct visual style that is characterized by an eye-popping barrage of colors and shapes that are loosely arranged around psychedelic cartoon characters. His work has been on display at Stomping Grounds in Campustown for [...]

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Rick Lem is a cartoonist who lives in Kelley, Iowa. He founded his weekly publication Toons in 1987, which is distributed in and around Ames bearing his “Lemco Productions” business name. Since Toons began, Lem and his publication have become an important and well-recognized part of the Ames community. The Ames Progressive recently sat down [...]

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Lieutenant Daniel Choi is a member of the New York National Guard who previously served as an infantry officer in Iraq in 2006 and 2007 and before that graduated from West Point with a degree in Arabic. This March, Choi came out on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show and was subsequently served a letter of [...]

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Francis Thicke is the first and, so far, only announced Democratic secretary of agriculture candidate for the 2010 election cycle. He presently operates an organic dairy farm with his wife near Fairfield, Iowa. In the past he has worked for the United States Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C., and was appointed by state governors [...]

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Jordan Mayland is one of the most active musicians and recording artists in Ames. In the past decade, he has played in a number of popular Ames bands, including Keepers of the Carpet, Nuclear Rodeo, Electronidoll, The Thermal Detonators, and Organ Donor, and this year Mayland has launched a new project called Volcano Boys. Both [...]

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It was with good cause that The New Yorker once referred to Peter Singer as “the world’s most influential living philosopher.” The Australian ethicist has been instrumental in raising public consciousness of the inhumane treatment of animals and, more recently, of the burgeoning field of bioethics. Singer has also distinguished himself as an advocate for [...]

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Nate Silver is a statistician originally known for creating the Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm (PECOTA), a system of prediction for Major League Baseball players’ future achievements. More recently, he started the website FiveThirtyEight.com – a reference to the 538 electors in the electoral college – where he successfully predicted the winners of [...]

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