Author: Jennifer Vogel

In State Center, Iowa, a town of barely a thousand people that, in fact, occupies the state’s center, there’s a small white house whose owners deck the halls with an extravagance that verges on the fantastic. From the beginning of October to the week after New Year’s, the home of Dwayne and Janet Pundt (they…

The last time anybody heard from Eric Utne, it was the year 2000 and he had just walked away from the magazine he’d founded and run for almost fifteen years. The Utne Reader was faltering. It had published a “Y2K Citizen’s Action Guide,” which predicted a radical reorganization of society that never happened. Circulation and…

I hadn’t smoked pot in more than a year, but why not? I’d just packed up and dragged everything I own 1,700 miles from Minneapolis to Seattle. Quite a daring move. I was feeling like Lewis and Clark in one, Amelia Earhart, a pirate even. A little marijuana? Peee-shaw. I huffed a huge drag. Unfortunately…