The West Coast celebrates Bigfoot and the East Coast has Champy, the purported lake monster claimed by both New York and Vermont. But Wisconsin English professor and author B.J. Hollars is here to tell you: The oft-overlooked Midwest is just as murky and mysterious as the next place.

For well more than 30 years, starting with the Iranian Hostage Crisis in 1979 and ending with the Sandy Hook school massacre late in 2012, Marion Stokes quietly and obsessively recorded televised American news.

Germany’s defeat in World War II was inevitable by late 1943, but Adolf Hitler supposedly had an audacious plan for softening the final terms: dispatching a team of hand-picked Nazi commandos to Iran to kill Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin, then hoping for less hard-line replacements.

We’ve been beguiled over the past decade by a romanticized, Silicon Valley-inspired take on entrepreneurship, glorifying its practitioners as daring dreamers and heroes who’ve revved innovation and invented the future. But startup failure is an all-too-common truth.