West Des Moines Native Spins Yarn About Craigslist and the NSA in Piece in The New Yorker

If a byline in this week’s issue of The New Yorker looks familiar, it belongs to West Des Moines native Ross Hyzer, 32, a stand-up comic.

Hyzer spins a hilarious yarn in the magazine’s “Shouts & Murmurs” section about what might happen if the National Security Agency started looking for nefarious action in the missed connections posts on Craigslist.

It starts like this:

“The revelations concerning the N.S.A.’s clandestine global-surveillance programs have stoked privacy concerns and increased skepticism about digital communications. Against the background of such heightened sensitivities, a rash of odd posts appeared on Craigslist’s Missed Connections last week, fuelling speculation that the intelligence community has taken to the popular message board to fill the gaps in its data-mining operations.’

Hyzer, who lives in New York City with his wife, has performed at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Apsen, and his humor writing appears regularly on The Huffington Post.

Watch the YouTube video, in which Hyzer discusses the dilemma creation scientists, who he says reckon the world to be as old as America, face when trying to explain what happened to dinosaurs.