I am the Iowa Hawkeyes football reporter for The Gazette. I previously covered business and sports enterprise for The Gazette. I’m a born-and-raised Midwesterner and Marquette University alumnus.

In the Sibillini Mountains of Italy, I have been rereading Buzzati’s Il deserto dei Tartari (‘The Desert of the Tartars’, translated into English as The Tartar Steppe). Written in 1938, this prescient ...