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 [...]

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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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Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate and political activist, is running for president as an independent with running mate Matt Gonzalez. He has secured a place on the November ballot in Iowa with the Peace and Freedom Party. Nader delivered a campaign speech at Iowa State University on October 10, 2008. After his speech, Nader sat [...]

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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 ’60s. 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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In a sea of polo-clad Midwestern boys and carefully made-up sorority girls, Troy Cairo isn’t hard to miss. A brooding artist attached to his iPod by day and a pink sunglasses and white suit clad DJ by night, Cairo, better known as DJ Kinky Kyro, is a regular fixture at the Bali Satay House on [...]

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Selden Spencer is a Democrat and neurologist from Huxley who practices at Ames’ McFarland Clinic. In 2006, he challenged 4th district Republican Representative Tom Latham, receiving 43 percent of the vote. He decided not to run again this year over concerns that he would be unable to run a competitive race.
Spencer first spoke with the [...]

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Fourth district congressional candidate Becky Greenwald speaks to voters at a house party in Ames on April 30. (photo: Gavin Aronsen/The Progressive)
Update: On June 3, Greenwald won the 4th district Democratic primary with 51 percent of the vote. In November, she will compete for Tom Latham’s seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. William [...]

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