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Iowa Bluffs

Jarrod Shanahan

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“Indeed, we are all implicated in Iowa.”ย ย  โ€“Heather Anne Swanson, โ€œThe Banality of the Anthropoceneโ€ Crossing the Mississippi River from Illinois into Iowa by car is an almost effortless glide, eliding entirely the forceful pull of ...

How Did I Get Here?, part 3: Iowa City Activism in the 1970s

David Ranney

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The following is the third in a series of three excerpts from David Ranney’s longer piece “Reflections: Well, How Did I Get Here?” After leaving graduate school in 1966, I entered what I have called my ...

How Did I Get Here?, part 2: Rudy

David Ranney

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The following is the second in a series of three excerpts from David Ranney’s longer piece “Reflections: Well, How Did I Get Here?” Prior to going away to college, my interaction with Black people had been ...

How Did I Get Here?, part 1: On My Futile Attempt to Become a High School Athlete

David Ranney

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What follows is an excerpt from a longer piece that explores how a red, white and blue diaper baby, raised by conservative Republican parents in a largely conservative Republican and all white suburb in a conservative ...

A Rainy Night in Georgia

Mike Morgan

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In 1977, I was a signaler (radio operator) in the South African Army, the infantry. I was stationed in a camp called Mpacha, which was a few hundred yards from the border of Zambia in the ...

Screening Slave Revolt

Tim Bruno

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Thereโ€™s a line of thinking that calls out the problem of โ€œslavery moviesโ€โ€”the apparent overabundance of depictions of Black people being enslaved, the way those depictions can too comfortably glide into voyeuristic pleasure at Black suffering. ...

On Sixto Rodriguez โ€“ The Sugar Man

Mike Morgan

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Sixto Rodriguez, the Detroit singer and songwriter, died on August 8, 2023. He was 81 years of age. What follows is a short essay I wrote about him in July, 2012, the day after seeing the ...

A Small Slice of Private Life

Jenny Morgan

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For a few years in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I had the good fortune to be in a relationship with Clem Maharaj, a former jazz drummer from Trinidad whose mother had taken the precaution ...

National Past-Time

James Stephens

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Let’s just get this out of the way first: Rob Manfred is a weasel. In case you don’t know, Manfred is the commissioner of Major League Baseball, and, while you would think a love or even ...

Why I burned the Mediatheque…

Heitor O'Dwyer de Macedo

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Introduction On June 27, 2023, 17 year old Nahel Merzouk was driving a car in Nanterre, a suburb of Paris, when two motorcycle cops stopped him. One of the passengers said that an officer threatened Nahel, ...