We hear a lot these days about mental health, most often tied to news reports in which someone has ended up dead. But mental health isn’t a topic that should be limited to a post mortem discussion; it’s a very alive reality we must all face in one way or another, sometimes daily. A ...

I guess I wonder what we are waiting for. Permission to be fed up? Permission to act? We watched, didn’t we? One after another, mass shootings took down innocent people — CHILDREN — at Sandy Hook, in Uvalde. We listened, didn’t we? To the attempts to soothe. To the ...

Friday morning I woke early to a text from a close friend. Two women had been murdered Thursday night at Cornerstone Church in Ames, in the mega-church’s parking lot. My youngest daughter was involved in youth group at Cornerstone, years ago. Since then, she has been through more than one ...

Proverbs — little statements of wisdom — fascinate me. Proverbs are cultural truth handed down from one generation to another over hundreds, even thousands, of years. There’s actually a body of study involving proverbs and it’s called paremiology. I’m not a paremiologist; I just ...

There was a time when cigarettes were everywhere. Remember? They were in vending machines, in newspaper and magazine ads. Movie stars portrayed them as sexy. Remember the photo of Hayley Mills' dad in the original The Parent Trap? The one where Brian Keith is posed in a moody black and white, ...

After reading some of the recent round of stories about the final passage of Senate File 581, I’m pretty embarrassed. As a reporter, you’re supposed to tell the reader what happened, who it happened to, how it happened, where it happened and, if known, why it happened. I’m anold school ...