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Fear and loathing at your local Walmart
For reasons explained in today’s column (gift link), I spent about six full days of my life at the Hibbing Walmart last year — roughly 150 hours. We try to mix up our family shopping. We’re fortunate to be able to pay more for better products at other grocery stores, and shop at specialty stores…
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Time unites a divided reality
This moment in history will define our times. Federal agents scooping people up, clashing with protestors in the streets of my home state. Not just in Minneapolis, but across the state, including communities up north. Perhaps some legitimate criminals were arrested, but many innocent people were terrorized. And yet, I found myself frozen for a…
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Are we going to fix problems, or make them worse?
Today’s column (gift link) provides an example of the challenge facing opinion writers like me. To persuade, one’s argument must be clear. You also have to reach people who don’t agree with you. Today, we’re facing an unprecedented use of federal force to patrol a peaceful American state, my state. This action already caused needless…
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Protecting our last great institution
Today’s column (gift link) makes a simple argument for public libraries. And yet, it emerges from a mind boiling with frustration. I want to shake people. I want to tell them, “I know things are bad. We don’t have to make it worse.” As all the money in our substantial economy rushes upward like oil…
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Looking backwards and forwards at MinnesotaBrown
This post is for all you MinnesotaBrown readers who have stuck with me. I know things have changed since I took the new job at the Minnesota Star Tribune. A decade ago I was a veritable fire hose of Iron Range news and analysis. Then I started focusing on columns and long-form essays, and now…
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At hospitals, crisis abounds, and so does danger
We were at my dad’s place in Chisago County over the post-Christmas weekend when we heard about the security officer killed at a nearby hospital. It was close to home, literally. But it also resonated because I spent time researching mental health for a column series earlier this year. We don’t yet know all the…
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Bipartisan friendship finds the common thread
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Please enjoy this gift link to my Christmas column about a bipartisan friendship on the Iron Range. People often associate the Iron Range with its quirky political tradition, a northern gothic tableau replete with loud characters and a genial sort of corruption that somehow passes for lovable. I learned…
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Suppressing environmental debate is not winning
Today’s column (gift link) is another entry in my “observations that will please no one” series. Enjoy? On Dec. 2, U.S. Rep. Pete Stauber and two GOP colleagues tried to make a political issue out of meetings between environmental groups and the Biden White House during the last administration. I was pulled between two reactions.…
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Christmas count a good start for bird curious people
Longtime readers have watched my gradual transition from bird skeptic to avowed birder. Today’s column (gift link) tells you how you can follow this path, if you are ready. This year’s Audubon Christmas Bird Count was the first where I felt useful in identifying the birds we saw. Now, it was 25 below zero and…
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Can we grow film industry in these north woods?
A film is something fake that feels real. The film industry, as I’ve observed it, could be described as fake until it becomes real. The line between fake and real is practically invisible until money changes hands. As today’s column shows (gift link), the film industry could be a potent cultural tool and economic driver…
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On fear and autonomous vehicles
Today’s column (gift link), like much of my work, is about perceptions, reactions and implications of change in a specific place. In our modern media environment, we often feel that everything is happening everywhere all at once. This is literally true, of course, and always has been. But our human perception isn’t really able to…
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Living by gratitude is its own kind of immortality
We’re all trying to make sense of what we experience in this world. Writers just do so with a compulsion to create resolution. The only bad part is that resolution is like a cigarette; the good feeling lasts 15 seconds before you’re on the hunt for a new pack. Over 25 years of professional writing…
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One more opportunity for the Range to diversify
The first time I wrote the words “economic diversification” was probably back in 2001. I was a new reporter and then the editor of the Hibbing Daily Tribune. If you asked any kid who grew up on the Iron Range in the 1980s and ’90s what the place needed, the answer would be “more.” The…
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Our world needs resilience, from climate to everything else
Climate change is real. This upsets some people because they know and are worried. It disturbs those whose politics prevents this acknowledgment, too. But the data is clear. It’s happening. Considerable effort has been expended to create a strange dynamic of denial, which only exists in nations with powerful oil interests. But I can observe…
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Cold weather hits before federal funds are ready
About the rarest commodity left is human attention. We talk about rare earth minerals, rare beauty and rare courage, but it’s all noise without people paying attention. And people aren’t, or more accurately they can’t. The way we produce and consume media punishes focus. That might be the biggest failure of Democratic senators who voted…