The attendant at the dump extended a pair of Inspector Gadget tongs into the recycling bins to retrieve contraband. His sworn enemy is styrofoam. “If I could un-invent anything on earth it would be styrofoam,” he told me this month. He also told me that the rules would be changing. Itasca County now must pay… Read More →
Homebound on a global scale
March 22, 2020 by 1 Comment
Who buys soup at Target? Apparently everyone, because the soup is gone. But we can get soap. So let’s get soap. Walking the aisles of the store last weekend my phone rang. It was my sister Alyssa in Italy. She’ve been living there almost two years now but was hoping to come home for a… Read More →
COVID-19 crisis threatens iron ore demand
March 19, 2020 by 1 Comment
NOTE: This post also appears in the Hibbing Daily Tribune as part of a content partnership. Economic effects of the global pandemic could reach taconite mines on Minnesota’s Mesabi Iron Range later this year. U.S. automakers Ford, General Motors and Fiat Chrysler announced Wednesday they would close all American production plants in response to the… Read More →
Iron Range epidemics and the greater good
March 15, 2020 by 2 Comments
NOTE: This article also appears in the Hibbing Daily Tribune. It’s part of a new expanded partnership between this blog and the newspaper that runs my column. Frank Hibbing could sense iron nearby when he and his team camped beneath a grove of towering white pines on the western Mesaba Iron Range. Indeed, they would discover… Read More →
2020 Hindsight: Revisiting the future of our past, Part 3
March 15, 2020 by Leave a Comment
This is the last of a three-part series. See Part 1 and Part 2. There is no historical blind spot quite like the recent past. The living defend their memories, true or not, with self-interested passion. The recently departed are far more saintly than the long dead. Over the past three weeks I’ve been exploring… Read More →
2020 Hindsight: Revisiting the future of our past, Part 2
March 8, 2020 by Leave a Comment
This is the second of a three-part series. Last week I told you about a 1998 Hibbing Daily Tribune special section entitled “2020 Vision.” Back then, reporters interviewed local people about what they saw happening in our region by the year 2020. They got a lot right. For instance, many predicted the rise of health… Read More →
2020 Hindsight: Revisiting the future of our past
March 1, 2020 by Leave a Comment
This is the first of a two-part series. Look around. Somehow we’ve stumbled into the year 2020. We write 2020 on our paperwork. We gird for a 2020 election season that seems anything but futuristic or forward-thinking. In short, 2020 seems nothing like the sci-fi utopia of our dreams. And, frankly, I feel ripped off…. Read More →
Questioning our past to understand today
February 23, 2020 by 3 Comments
The word “nostalgia” comes from the combination of ancient Greek words for “pain” and “coming home.” Literally, the word described the ache that came from longing for a home that will never be the same. Nostalgia is the pain of leaving home. And it could be considered as powerful as a drug. When you peruse… Read More →
Bad ice on the rise
February 16, 2020 by 1 Comment
This winter, Minnesotans pursue an unrelenting quest for justice. Check that. Just ice. Just some halfway decent ice. This year’s January temperatures ran warmer than average. In addition, heavy snowfall during the early freeze produced poor, if not outright dangerous lake ice conditions across Minnesota. You know it’s rough because the requisite “area truck falls… Read More →
The power of stories, true or not
February 9, 2020 by Leave a Comment
Human beings are more than just ambulatory bags of meat. We are ambulatory bags of meat with stories to tell. In fact, deep down, that’s what’s really separates us from other mammals. No matter our language or technology, we transmit wisdom through stories. That’s evident in the oral tradition of early humans. The mythology of… Read More →
