To talk honestly about race is such a difficult thing to do. Even in the age of Barack Obama, the first black president, we find ourselves tiptoeing gingerly around the explosive and sensitive issue of...

Coffee used to be about consumption. It wasn’t supposed to taste very good and was often freeze-dried. I remember my introduction to the beverage that would become my livelihood: My parents laughed as...

Baseball rivalries, family vacations, midday tanning. Late July is surely upon us. But in Iowa City, furniture lining the avenues is the biggest giveaway that school is less than a month away. This week...

I have a terrible phobia of spiders, crippling, a sort of instinctual dread deep enough to outplumb rationalization. In the winter, they go back to the attics and basements, or underground, or back to...

There’s the real world and Bizarro World, there’s matter and antimatter, and then there’s Sarah Palin and Joe Biden. Both the would-be vice president and the actual one have a history of making foolish...

Shortly after 8 p.m. on May 4, American B-1 bombers began pounding the Afghan village of Granai in an effort to protect a group of Afghan soldiers who had come under fire. When the air strikes ended seven...

If you go to a NFL or MLB game, you’re almost sure to find yourself in a stadium named after a huge corporation. Citi Field in New York City hosts the Mets. The world champion LA Lakers hold their games...

This weekend’s shooting happened on the night of July 24, but by the morning of July 25, buzz was already swirling around the area. It’s easy to be get caught up in discussion over the violent fiasco;...

Iowa City is a serene Eden of learning, originality, and small-town charm, and I have never been so relieved to leave a place. The strange thing is that this seems to be a fairly common contradiction. At...

This is what is likely to come of the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. at his home by a white police officer: nothing. The July 16 arrest of the African American scholar by a Cambridge, Mass., police officer...

Wide-spread layoffs, pay cuts, and defunct publications. Recently graduated journalism friends have told me they literally have nightmares about those things. But step back an age group to the high-school...