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Great Northern Radio Show hits Zenith City
That second week in November was a doozy. It started with a wild election result that left the nation speechless (for a few minutes, anyway). Then the Great Northern Radio Show made its Duluth debut on Saturday, Nov. 12. You now have a chance to hear this broadcast again. Northern Community Radio will rebroadcast both…
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Portable joy at Great Northern Radio Show in Duluth
This has been a hard week for a lot of Americans. Even if you were happy with how the election turned out it’s pretty evident the divisions in our country will endure long past balloting. Of course, slightly more people in this country are horrified with how the election turned out. So that’s how that goes. I’ve…
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Great Northern Radio Show in Duluth
Come celebrate the 10 year anniversary of MinnesotaBrown.com with the Duluth debut of my Great Northern Radio Show on Saturday, Nov. 12. In 2011, the Great Northern Radio Show gave me the creative outlet I needed to be able to continue mining the depths of Northern Minnesota politics and economics here at the site. I…
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Teeming masses for Duluth Tall Ships
On Friday, the family and I made the trek down to Duluth for the 2016 Tall Ships Festival, which runs through Sunday. I love history. I love ships. Good times. I won’t lie, this event was considerably more crowded than the previous Tall Ships events we had attended. In fact, we attended our first Tall Ships by mistake. We…
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Help on the way for St. Louis County workers
County government is probably the most overlooked part of our democracy, and yet in Minnesota it’s the point of contact for the people who need the most help. This includes the messy work of law enforcement, child protection and family welfare, social services and the very apparatus of humane treatment of our citizens. When county government…
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Masterful navigation brings in ship amid Duluth storm
Here’s an exciting display of the power of the Thursday morning storm that has many in Duluth still without power three days later. Dennis O’Hara posted this YouTube video of the 729-foot Algoma Guardian entering the Port of Duluth through the canal. This Lisa Kaczke story in the Duluth News Tribune tells the story, but…
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The hot, wet violence of Minnesota’s summer
They call it a high pressure dome, hot electric atmosphere more vapor than air, parked over Minnesota like a Ouija board. We get these once or twice a summer, about as often as we get deep freezes in the dead of winter. Days like this remind us that 150 degrees Fahrenheit separate our typical annual…
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Duluth looking to remodel, not replace library
Last year it seemed the city of Duluth was barreling toward the demolition of its distinctive library building along Superior and Michigan avenues in favor of a new $35 million building. At the time, the consultant hired by the city was saying that it would cost $31 million to perform necessary repairs and remodeling to the…
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All local Duluth sitcom ‘Old Lifty’ to premiere
Some say we’re in the golden age of television, a time when the breakdown of the big networks’ monopoly on production creates new opportunities for smaller, independent artists with good ideas. That’s certainly the white-capped Lake Superior wave that producers of a new web series based in Duluth hope to catch. “Old Lifty” is based on a…
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Duluth Homegrown runs today through May 8
The Duluth Homegrown Music Festival opens today and runs through next Sunday. This week-long music extravaganza is the hallmark of the emerging Duluth music scene and boasts more live music in one week than some towns see all year long. Quite simply, Duluth Homegrown is back-to-back live music all week long at more than a…
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Kids love rubber mulch for all the wrong reasons
Playground equipment used to be hellish industrial machinery. Kids would bust their arms just looking at the hand pump merry-go-round. The ground was just that: ground. Heck, you were lucky if it was dirt. It might have been pavement. In a quest to make things safer, many new playgrounds use rubber mulch, bouncy chunks reclaimed…
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Simonson prevails in SD7 DFL endorsement battle
Almost 500 DFL delegates met Saturday in Duluth to endorse a candidate to succeed retiring State Sen. Roger Reinert (DFL-Duluth). After a strong 57-43 percent showing on the first ballot, State Rep. Erik Simonson was endorsed on the second ballot over former city councilor Sharla Gardner. Gardner vowed to support Simonson, unifying the Duluth DFL apparatus…
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Duluth passenger rail project slows down to speed up
When I was writing daily newspaper editorials 15 years ago, I spent a lot of time extolling the virtues of passenger rail service. Looking back, it was a tailer-made issue for an editorialist. It cost money. It had statistics. There were maps. Plus, the opposition would have to go on the record against trains. Since trains are…
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First ‘saltie’ of 2016 arrives in Duluth today
Today, the Port of Duluth welcomes its first ocean-going vessel of the 2016 shipping season. The Dutch-flagged Albanyborg just dropped off some wind turbine parts in Canada and is now set to load winter wheat bound for Italy. The first Great Lakes vessel arrived more than a week ago. Even though Northern Minnesota is firmly in…
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Session to explore difficulty of covering Polymet
This Thursday at 5:30 p.m., I’ll be one of three panelists leading a discussion entitled “PolyMet: Reporting on Tough Community Issues” at a venue in west Duluth. This panel is part of a series of community discussions centered around journalism and storytelling for the “One River, Many Stories” project along the St. Louis River in Northeastern Minnesota.…