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Duluth named among top U.S. cities for finding a job
According to the job search and recruiting site Zip Recruiter, Duluth, Minnesota, is the #2 city in the nation for finding a job. From the post: A 4.3 unemployment rate and a rock-solid healthcare sector with roots in the two regional medical centers in the city, Duluth has rebounded from a post-industrial crash to become a job…
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Half and half; Minnesota’s greater metro divide
I think I’ll enjoy reading the work of new Pioneer Press reporter and veteran political data journalist Derek Montgomery. Today he’s up with a blog post showing the urban-rural divide in Minnesota. Simply put, he generated a graphic displaying population split using State Senate districts. What’s striking about this exercise is that the divide here is roughly half…
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Districts seek more production from school trust land
If you ever get tired of trying to figure out how the IRRRB works, another unique foible of Minnesota’s relationship with iron mining is the state school trust fund. About 2.5 million acres of land, primarily in Northern Minnesota, are set aside to raise funds for school districts throughout the state. Some of this land…
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Running no more
Today is my 35th birthday. With this monumental occasion comes an important announcement. Despite now being constitutionally eligible to run for President of the United States, I am suspending my campaign to do so which began 1992 in Mr. Softich’s sixth grade class at the Cherry School. When they brought in the button making press…
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Essar seeks legislation to avoid paying back public funds
Last week, Northern Minnesota media sources, with help from new lobbying activity by Essar Steel Minnesota, finally connected the dots that this proposed new Iron Range taconite mine would really, truly not build a steel mill with its project as originally planned. As such, Essar is due to run afoul of the agreement that brought $67 million in…
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Hibbing’s Dylan Days committee disbands
I bring some long awaited, sadly official news tonight. Dylan Days, the arts and literary event held every May in Bob Dylan’s hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota, will be going on indefinite hiatus. The three-member steering committee (of which I was a founding member) voted to disband this fall. In the time since we’ve been working…
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Season’s Greetings from the wintery joyscape of Minnesota’s Iron Range
Merry Christmas from MinnesotaBrown.com! I’ll be spending the holidays with my family touring across the mighty Mesabi Iron Range of Northern Minnesota’s scenic winterlude. Posting might be sporadic since the kids are home from school. I’ll have my annual year-end review, though … whenever it’s good and ready. I’d like to leave you with the classic…
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Spend holidays with the Great Northern Radio Show
On Dec. 6, 2014, I hosted the winter edition of my Great Northern Radio Show in a live broadcast from the Northern Lights Casino in Walker, Minnesota, as guest of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwa. That show will re-air Wednesday, Dec. 24 — Christmas Eve — from 7-9 p.m. on Northern Community Radio, 91.7…
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Tall Ships will return to Duluth in 2016
Nothing quite excites the people of Duluth, Minnesota, and its surrounding area like the Tall Ships. These tall-masted, wooden ships that harken the 1800s now tour the lakes and seas as a tourist attraction and recreational sailing exhibition. After another successful Duluth event in 2013, officials are now planning the next Tall Ships event in Duluth…
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Last salty leaves Port of Duluth-Superior
The winter solstice brings another kind of change to Northern Minnesota, the end of the 2014 shipping season in the Port of Duluth, Minnesota and Superior, Wisconsin. The last “salty” (ocean-going vessel) left on Dec. 20, and they’ll be running as many “lakers” (ships confined to the Great Lakes) as they can unless it becomes too…
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Paul Metsa to star in musical based on trippy autobiography
One of the more successful musicians to emerge from the Iron Range later in the 20th Century was Paul Metsa, a singer-songwriter who certainly fits in the mold of the Range’s somewhat-more-successful star, Bob Dylan, crossed with a bit of Bruce Springsteen to boot. Metsa, who is from the Range city of Virginia, has lived and…
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Rock and a hard place, change coming to the Iron Range
Some of life’s biggest myths are that 30 years is a long time, that today doesn’t matter, and that anything is permanent. Here on Northern Minnesota’s Mesabi Iron Range, the lessons of change that come from digging out the ground beneath our very feet have been hard learned. But what’s learned is so easily forgotten after those paltry 30 years.…
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Overheard in the Santa line
Christmas arrives Thursday. This, after weeks of new Yuletide songs mixed by club DJs trying to pay mortgages, blinking houses and assorted efforts to render consumerism as Christ-like as possible. For those who celebrate Christmas, nothing can compete with joyous hope of the actual holiday. For everyone else, the promise of a return to normal…
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Longyear finally buys former Ainsworth site in Grand Rapids
Two years ago, I wrote about one of the Iron Range’s oldest families of mining and logging tycoons after Longyear, Inc., signed a purchase agreement for the former Ainsworth mill site in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. The story slipped out of sight for 26 months, until late this last week when the deal was finally completed.…
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Remembering Ely storyteller Mike Hillman
As I travel around the state with my Great Northern Radio Show I’ve had the privilege of meeting many wonderful and talented people in all the towns we visit. Mike Hillman was one such person. Mike told stories in our Ely show last summer. One story was an old pioneer legend from the early day…