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Whirling West on a metal bird
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” ~ Mark Twain, “The Innocents Abroad” I live in the woods of Northern…
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Trivia battle offers game show thrills
I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with game shows. On one hand, I like believing that I’m smarter than people on TV. That’s really the only bar to clear to stay happy in modern society. You just have to stay off those brainiac channels like PBS or Animal Planet. On the other hand, game shows…
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Reading coded language of Iron Range landscape
The youngest parts of the Mesabi Iron Range are the century-old towns spotted along its back like so many pimples. The geology, the nature and even human occupation go back millennia. Nevertheless, most people who live here see “local history” as a mysterious narrative that begins suddenly during the Grover Cleveland Administration. It’s not hard…
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Mapping new world, new climate
We learn in history class about the search for the fabled Northwest Passage. This coveted sea route between the East Indies and Europe promised untold riches to explorers and traders of the 17th, 18th and 19th Centuries. They searched the Great Lakes, cut inland through Lake Vermilion, forging West. Always these aquatic prospectors crashed headlong…
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Real hope for rural broadband on the Iron Range
Growing up I always lived just outside the towns of the Iron Range. Back roads. Cracked pavement and dirt roads. My family ran small businesses. Some lasted a while. Some not so much. Such is the nature of small business. The ‘80s were bad. They were for a lot of people. School changed my life.…
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Trade war rattles even sturdiest American trucks
Understanding trade policy can be overwhelming. Tariffs. Trade deficits. NAFTA. Currency wars. But pickup trucks offer explicit clarity on how trade policy hits people where they live. Take the popular Ford F-150. It’s the top selling truck in America. You can find a F-150 in almost any parking lot on Minnesota’s Iron Range. This is…
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U.S. Steel balancing act offers economic warning
As the United Steelworkers union and U.S. Steel inch toward a strike, many on Minnesota’s Iron Range wonder why. The economy is good. Steel is selling for a high price. So, why is U.S. Steel playing hardball with its workers? The answer exposes some concerning facts not just in the steel industry, but across corporate…
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The merits of fairness in America
You’ll hear a lot about the American Dream in coming months. You’ll hear that the dream is dying, that it’s alive and well, that the dream faces peril, or even that it’s forgotten entirely. But do we even know what the American Dream is? In this, we may invoke the most American of products: Coca-Cola.…
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New eyes for an Iron Range future
I think one of the best ways to begin strengthening a community is to see the place from a visitor’s point of view. Here on the Iron Range, a place with a cultural tradition of multi-generation families and insular social groups, that’s even more important … and hard to do. As a native Ranger, I…
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Canadian vacation imports memories
This year my family and I decided to go North for our annual summer trip. We would travel to Winnipeg, Manitoba, a cosmopolitan city set in the middle of endless miles of prairie (“endless point six” once you convert to metric). Why? Quite simply, we drew a circle around our home in Northern Minnesota to…
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Farmer-Labor tradition means more than just jobs
We see some curious sights this election year. Oh, I can’t get into all of them. Our times are too strange for that. But one thing struck me as especially odd. It was members of the Republican Party arguing that they are now the “Republican Farmer Labor” party. This comes amid claims that candidates like…
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The enduring importance of obituaries
The first assignment they gave me at journalism school was to write my own obituary. It’s a good way to teach the inverted pyramid writing style. That’s where you put the most important information first. Plus, it reminds young journalists that they’re expendable, valuable perspective for the current state of the industry. The other thing…
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Campaign season means signs are all around us
Someone just posted a campaign sign down the road. Well, there goes the neighborhood. This sentiment now spreads across Northern Minnesota’s tumultuous political environment. A political cycle defined by white hot rage now enters a new phase: paranoia that the other side is messing with your signs. I’ve worked in journalism and I’ve managed political…
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Good money versus bad money in Range development
It’s been dizzying to follow developments in the Mesabi Metallics iron ore project near Nashwauk this week. Last week we learned that billionaire Tom Clarke and his Chippewa Capital Partners won back state mineral leases for the former Butler Taconite property. But that came with the news that Clarke’s other company ERP Iron Ore, which…
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Science can solve mining risks, but only if we demand it
As a nerd who grew up on an Iron Range junkyard, I appreciate anything that combines groundbreaking science with homemade contraptions. That’s why I’m fascinated by a daisy chain of unobtrusive barrels floating in an old Erie Mining pit outside Babbitt, Minnesota. They may save our world. Jeff Hanson put them there. Hanson is an…