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And fate shall dwell at the crossroads
The intersection of Itasca County Highways 57 and 336 is one of those sleepy crossroads you see all over the back woods of northern Minnesota. When my wife and I moved to that neighborhood 16 years ago I learned that no road goes directly from one place to another. Every highway leads to an intersection…
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Love, hate, and a year of Bob Dylan
EDITOR’S NOTE: I wrote another piece about Dylan’s 80th Birthday for the Minnesota Reformer a few days ago. That piece was designed for a broader audience, while I aimed this one at a more local readership for the Mesabi Tribune. It was a surprisingly fun exercise to approach the same subject with a different goal…
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Pressure, time, and the tricky business of hope
Pressure and time. That’s how minerals concentrate into ore formations beneath the earth. You might learn this in a geology class. But pressure and time also explain how humans extract those ores. Now we’re talking economics, the kind that affects our lives here on the Mesabi Iron Range. This spring brings an avalanche of news…
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‘The Ocho’ lives, but numbers can lie
Most folks get the idea behind the state legislature or Congress. We are all drawn into districts based on population. Each district elects representatives to make laws and speak on our behalf. If we don’t like the representative we vote them out for a new one. Most of the time, we pay little attention to…
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Deadline or bust
“Deadline” is such a harsh word. “Line” seems to imply a fixed point after which some consequence is realized. And “dead” suggests that the consequence is death. You know, pass away, croak, kick the bucket, go to heaven, expire, breathe one’s last, succumb, bite the dust, trip the light fantastic. Depart, transcend, buy the farm,…
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Drawing lines won’t solve problems
This week we learned that Minnesota would keep all eight of its Congressional seats after the federal government released the results of the 2020 Census. Good news for our state. We almost lost a seat. Nevertheless, this political analysis will now fixate on maps and lines as demographic change shapes new maps. Political districts are…
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Part History, Part Mystery
Longtime readers at MinnesotaBrown might wonder where I am or why I only post my weekly newspaper column these days. The answer is found in this story by Kristen Vake at CBS 3 in Duluth. This weekend the radio show and podcast “Power in the Wilderness” by Karl Jacob and myself will re-launch on Northern…
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The early swing for spring
They shouldn’t even schedule youth baseball games until it’s safe to plant your garden outside. Aren’t they pretty much the same thing? Yeah, your kid can put on a sweatshirt, but so can your vegetables. That doesn’t make it a good use of our time. If you wait long enough the frost will let up.…
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The way we were
About 13 months ago I packed a bag from my office to teach and work from home. It would prove to be one of the most challenging years of my whole career as a college teacher and writer, but I really didn’t need most of what I put in that bag. A few notebooks, maybe.…
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Power in the Wilderness on Almanac
Each day I write like a madman. My book deadline fast approaches. But, you might enjoy another check-in on the Power in the Wilderness project. You know I’m working on the book, but you should also know that the limited-run podcast I’m working on with filmmaker Karl Jacob is about to re-launch. The first two…
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Gearing for a century in spin
In recent weeks my wife and I have been thinking about buying a car. We haven’t decided on one, nor are we in a hurry, but it’s been fascinating to research different vehicles. Being from the Iron Range I always think about where cars are made before buying one. In the case of modern cars,…
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Weighing the effects of a year at home
Early in the pandemic I decided that I wasn’t going to obsess about body weight. Someone I know tweeted that they’re not a cow, so there is no need to keep a scale near their sleeping quarters. That made sense to me at the time. Then over the next several months I ate an entire…
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How titans scooped up the Range
When I was a kid one of my favorite pieces of playground equipment was the excavator in the sandbox. You could sit on a little stool to control a shovel with two levers. Dig a hole over here, make a pile over there. I could do that all day. To grow up on the Mesabi…
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Legislative ‘bluff and bunk’ no different after 100 years
Just when did politics get so … weird? When did politicians become sociopathic performance artists, huffing their own vapors long past the point of inebriation? Of course, we begin by blaming the other party, whoever they may be. But then, upon sober analysis, we might conclude that it’s the internet’s fault. The answer, however, is…
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It truly is robot-fighting time
There’s a lot of dumb TV out there. Thus, I hesitate to explain that one of my favorite shows is about fighting robots. But I also think there’s a lesson in this program that would reinvigorate northern Minnesota’s Mesabi Iron Range. “Battlebots” wrapped up its tenth season on the Discovery channel recently. The New Zealand…