Brian Gongol

Iowa food banks have taken venison donations from hunters for years, but as the wild-deer population has declined, so have the donations

The entire senior class of magazine-journalism majors at Drake University is made up of women. So they made a men's magazine. It's all-digital.

A Des Moines-area economic-development group has hired ad agency Flynn Wright to come up with a name for the Des Moines metro area, similar to something like the Research Triangle of North Carolina. But don't the really great nicknames emerge organically? Isn't it nearly impossible not to sound a little contrived when giving yourself a nickname, whether you're a person or a business or a community?

But the goal, set in 2010, doesn't look like it's going to be met at the current pace

A research paper from the Chicago Federal Reserve says that countries that didn't respect property rights in the late 1800s are poorer today than the ones that did. Makes that whole short-termism thing about the "fiscal cliff" seem a little more real, doesn't it? Kick the can down the road today and your grandkids may curse you for it.

It's possible that today's extremely low mortgage-interest rates might mean that people will find themselves severely dis-incentivized to move in the future when rates rise again. The argument makes at least some intuitive sense.

Afternoon drive on WHO Radio in Des Moines

The problem is that a rocket that can launch a satellite is the same kind of tool that can be used to launch an intercontinental ballistic missile
