We don’t often talk about how a paper’s collapse makes people feel: less connected, more alone.

A queer Black man's chance encounters.

How a war over a domain name ended in a bloody shootout.

In 1971, an unlikely activist sued to overturn Iowa’s ban on married women and mothers playing school sports. She just wanted to play.

An Iowa sports radio pioneer turns scammer.

Paranoia and hypocrisy in America’s heartland.

It all started with an unclaimed lottery ticket worth millions, soon revealing a string of unlikely winners that pointed to an inside job. But who had rigged the lottery? And how?

The country’s elites are desperate to figure out what they got wrong in 2016. But can they handle the truth?

The brains behind the uncannily accurate Des Moines Register poll.

The life of a conflicted IT worker from Iowa.

</blockquote><p>“Roger Jeffries is given to bouts of fantasy in which he speculates the possibilities suppressed by his current set of circumstances: that, indeed, he could have, if he had chosen to make the effort, packed a moving truck full of his stuff and left UNI for more cultivated frontiers. The Twin Cities, maybe, or Chicago, or back East to New York. Westward to the Pacific, perhaps, a destiny realized in Los Angeles. At any rate, he frequently imagines a young self packing up his stuff and driving for days—regardless of how close this destination might actually have been to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, home of the UNI Panthers, he always envisions driving for days, young, stubbled, over-caffeinated and chain smoking—to some more prestigious or renowned place.”</p></blockquote>