I have, once or twice, been near enough to the inside of a newspaper story to get a sense of what happens when something that occurs with real humans is interpreted and reported on by other humans. It’s a game of telephone writ large – suddenly, certain elements get dropped, others become far more prominent than they might have been when the event happened in real time. This can be disorienting for the people inside of the event, who have so much context beyond […]

Do you think much about life in Iowa? I actually think I DO think about life in Iowa more than might be assumed – I don’t live that far from Iowa, and I used to do some pretty regular work traveling from St. Louis to Lincoln and Omaha and other small towns scattered around Nebraska. Sometimes, driving to Nebraska we’d get close to or even pass through Iowa for a brief period of time. Although these trips had very little to do with my day […]