Iowa Faces Its Fluid Future

It was just five years ago that Iowa was awash in flood water. Many people are familiar with the dire scenes from Cedar Rapids, where record floods forced the evacuation of 10 percent of the city’s residents on June 13, 2008, swamping the downtown and causing...

Preserving a Tradition

  On Tuesday evening, May 14, I had the special pleasure of receiving an award from the Society of Midland Authors. Every year in May, the Society holds a banquet in Chicago at which it bestows its annual book awards in six categories—adult fiction and...

42: Baseball in Transition

Until this past year, I had served for several years in a row as a biography judge for the Society of Midland Authors’ annual book awards. As a result, a few years ago, I read Judith Testa’s Sal Maglie: Baseball’s Demon Barber (Northern Illinois University...

Stars in My Palate

Photos by Alyssum Pohl I had not planned to use this blog to talk about restaurants. Furthest thing from mymind, in fact. Then again, like most open-minded people, I can be persuaded to change my mind, based on the evidence. There is also the fact that cooking has...

Lessons from Sandy

I don’t believe I have ever previously been to New York three times in as many months. The first week of April, however, I had the honor of leading a team of five experts on post-disaster recovery, including myself, in conducting a series of five workshops in as...