Why Farmers Keep Planting Corn

Iowa's rivers run brown, its cancer rates climb, and its politics tilt redder. Pulitzer Prize-winning editor Art Cullen joins to discuss his new book Dear Marty: We Crapped in Our Nest — Notes from the Edge of the World, Iowa, which serves as both lament and call to arms for a farm state choking on its own abundance. Cullen traces how corn and hogs became economic lifelines and environmental nooses, and explains why Democrats keep losing ground by talking culture instead of livelihood. Plus: the American Dialect Society's newly crowned Word of the Year, "6–7," and how linguistic weirdness keeps getting more political. The Spiel: Seattle's mayoral race, where Bruce Harrell's incumbency fatigue meets Katie Wilson's thrift-store populism and the post-Trump urge to loathe whoever's in charge.

Produced by Corey Wara

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