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Solving high costs, low availability of child care
My latest column for the Minnesota Star Tribune is out today: “Child care is expensive, but no one is getting rich from it.” Monday is “Day Without Child Care” in Minnesota. Child care providers, families and employers will raise awareness and lobby for policies that reduce the cost and improve the availability of child care…
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Trump’s tariffs heralded by steel, harrumphed by manufacturing
I hold a dim memory from childhood of an afghan quilt just a little too small for my J.C. Penney “husky boy” body. If I pulled the blanket up to my chin, my feet would stick out. If I covered my feet, my nose would get cold. Only when I balled myself up could I…
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How the Iron Range became an outpost of the oligarchy
Today, I’ve got a new essay in the Minnesota Reformer: “Just like Big Tech, American steel lines up with Trump oligarchy.” We’re living in a period of accelerated change. But certain trends have been brewing for a while, and one of them is the rise of an oligarchy in the United States. You may have…
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Election Day! Election Night! Election Week?
Please forgive some brief wistfulness over the old days here at MinnesotaBrown.com. On an Election Day like today, I once breathlessly live blogged northern Minnesota election from the closing of polls to the final results. I nurtured a network of courthouse moles across the region and sometimes was the first to call races on the…
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Blue dirt, red dirt, dust to dust
My latest column, “When a blue district turns red, the dirt stays the same” is in the Sunday, Oct. 27 Minnesota Star Tribune. The “Iron Range is shifting to the GOP” story is now a well-worn trope in Minnesota media and political chatter. As a 20-year columnist in the region, I’ve documented every inch of…
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Who’s driving the bus?
It’s back to school season! For me, this has always been a special time of year. I loved school as a kid. College, too. I covered education as a reporter and editor. Then I became a college instructor. As a parent, school meant something different: freedom, maybe, but also the growth and development of those…
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As flames rise, true progress beckons
My latest essay for the Minnesota Reformer, “As flames rise, true progress beckons,” is out today. This column continues last week’s exploration of the natural world in an industrial landscape. Go back far enough and you realize that words don’t always mean what we think they do. Call someone a “nimrod” today and they’re likely…
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Children of the slash pile
Today, my latest essay, “Children of the Slash Pile” ran in the Minnesota Reformer. Here’s an excerpt: Working people came in like aspens, regenerating what was destroyed, with no memory of what came before. Today, some of us enjoy the privilege of thinking we’ve always lived here. In realizing this, we might better understand the…
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Interview highlights relatability of rural health care woes
After my latest essay, “Health care ‘implosion’ in Greater Minnesota,” in the Minnesota Reformer, I received many kind comments and some very insightful responses. Trying to help my mom after her stroke has been something of a private matter until now. It’s nice to feel the support, even when we’re all still exploring what solutions…
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Rural health care system barely holding on
My latest essay for the Minnesota Reformer is out today. Read it now. Longtime readers know that my mother suffered a serious stroke in late 2022 that changed her life and, to a lesser extent, mine. Every time we see a new doctor or medical provider, they look at her chart and remark how few…
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What goes up ain’t ever coming back
My latest essay for the Minnesota Reformer is out today, entitled “A Fistful of Helium.” This one’s been floating around my office like an old birthday balloon for several months. In fact, the helium discovery near Babbitt is one of the topics I’m most asked about when I’m out and about. I hadn’t written anything…
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Curtailing power of professional influence in Minnesota
My latest column for the Minnesota Reformer, “Democracy for sale or rent,” is out today. It’s about lobbying, specifically how the power-dynamic of our elected government is shaped by agents with an unfair advantage. Lobbying has been part of American politics from the beginning. In the colonial days, an elected delegate strolling the town square…
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Big promises cost small towns valuable time and energy
My latest essay for the Minnesota Reformer just went live. Remember in January when someone proposed building a space port in Hoyt Lakes? You’d be excused for forgetting. News turns over quick these days. But it happened. And while it’s technically possible that a multi-billion dollar space port will be constructed on the Iron Range,…
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How to cover politics in northern Minnesota, and other quandaries
One of my life’s most interesting relationships has been with the word, “journalism.” I’ve always considered myself a journalist, even after leaving daily newspapers 21 years ago. But the nature of that relationship changed with time and trends. In college during the late 1990s, our journalism professor bemoaned “citizen journalism,” a reference to the idea…
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Talking Biden, bridges, Duluth, flags and fame
I was on WCCO Radio early Monday morning talking about a host of northern Minnesota issues. President Biden was in town last Thursday touting more than $1 billion in funding to replace the Blatnik Bridge connecting Duluth and Superior. So was actor Timothée Chalamet, who visited Duluth and Hibbing to research Bob Dylan for an…