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…

Some might say that newspapers spill far too much ink on Zohran Mamdani, the new Mayor-elect of New York City. Why would a local leader in one place, albeit a big, important place, matter that much thousands of miles away in places like Minnesota. It’s a fair point that I am refuting in today’s column (gift…

History is like a log floating downriver. Much of the time it bobs along in a predictable sort of way. Sometimes it snags on a rock or along the banks, but the river always moves it along eventually. And then there are the times that the sheer momentum of spring melt or quickening rapids takes…

Sometime around 1865, Francis “Frank” Browne crossed the Atlantic from St. Austell, Cornwall, England. He was part of a generation of young, skilled British tradesmen who left dying mining towns looking for work across the seas. These men had few prospects at home, but many abroad. Frank landed in Canada. Immigration was malleable then. To…

This week I interviewed I interviewed former Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire and former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota about the issues facing rural America. The pair are co-chairing the Brookings/AEI Commission on US Rural Prosperity, a bipartisan initiative to promote a more resilient rural economy. They’ll be in Minnesota on Thursday, Oct.…

In a big world with big problems, we should not overlook small places. My writing has mostly focused on one such place: Minnesota’s Iron Range. It’s not that this one place explains everything about everywhere, but rather that taking the time to understand the many layers of a place helps you understand the composition of…

Maybe it’s my age and the fact that my kids are starting to fledge, but I often think about the phoebe nest underneath our deck. The nest was constructed by some enterprising lady bird two years after we built our house in 2005. She and her mate raised their first clutch and then they skipped…

What do you do when it feel like the whole world is falling apart?  The answer begins with a simple choice: do something or do nothing. We assess whether doing something would make a difference, whether it is safe, and then what to do. This is where most people stop. That’s just not where folks…