Ames Progressive

Christopher Hitchens is a British-born author and journalist now residing in Washington, D.C., where he became a naturalized citizen on his 58th birthday on April 13 of this year. A former Trotskyist, Hitchens broke with the left as he grew increasingly concerned with the threat of Islamic terrorism and disenchanted with what he called the […]

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The now-closed Boheme, on the corner of West Street and Campus Avenue in Ames. (photo: Kim Smith)
Kate Kennedy: Is there any way to save the Boheme?
Pete Sherman: Well, the business and the philosophy are two different things. What you’re doing is the Boheme. So there’s the business of the Boheme, but […]

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It’s time I had some time alone
Welcome to the endgame
Welcome to the 23rd hour
Somewhere in the frozen dark
The bell tower waits for the moment
That time stands still
She brought me a candle
I’ll never forget the play of light
In her eyes and the room full of smoke and sound
Words and pictures hands and faces
Changing places
It’s time I […]

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Despite total immersion in Yankee lore over the past month, with frequent phone calls and e-mails to fellow baseball aficionados who respect the game like no other set of fans, I fully realize that a majority of sports enthusiasts gloated as the Indians bumped George Steinbrenner’s Billion Dollar Babies in the first round of […]

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Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul is a libertarian and member the House of Representatives from Texas. Known for frequently invoking the names of the nation’s founding fathers in his appeals for a limited and Constitutional federal government, Paul has been dubbed “Dr. No” for his refusal to vote for any legislation he considers to be […]

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East of town there are fields. And a tree, a lonely barn, two houses in the distance, and the sun changing from a dull glow to a bright pinwheel in the November sky. It’s eight AM on Friday morning and we haven’t yet slept.
“I hate seeing the sunrise before I go to bed,” […]

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I’ve never seen a more uninviting bed. The naked mattress looks like a drunk passed out with vomit all over his face, and the vomit is my pillows and blankets all crumpled up as if they are trying to do an impression of the big bang backwards, condensing into the corner of my wall. […]

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The last meals of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s executed inmates: 7 out of 17 death-row inmates who protested their innocence ordered no meals. 30 out of 33 inmates who admitted guilt ordered last meals.
Inmate #33, of the 33 who admitted guilt, was later found to be innocent. He didn’t order a last meal.
(Kitchen […]

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There once was a hand on an arm
on the shoulder of a man on a farm
that, milking an udder
for milk for butter,
made bread taste better when warm.
There was a thin woman who felt
that the face behind which she dwelt
was not her real face
and had it replaced
by the face of Somebody Else.
There once was a physical […]

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The record industry claimed its latest victim in its ongoing struggle against Internet music piracy on October 23. Interpol, working in tandem with the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and British Phonographic Industry (BPI), seized the domain of OiNK’s Pink Palace, the Web’s premiere private peer-to-peer BitTorrent tracker music filesharing site, and […]

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