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Who eats whom in Nashwauk mine showdown?
There’s an old trope you see in a lot of cartoons and movies. Someone is running through a jungle or forest, pursued by some fearsome beast. Only at some point an even more fearsome beast leaps from the shadows to snatch and devour the previous monster. And just as THAT creature takes off after our…
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Notes from my interview with Rick Nolan
This week I interviewed Minnesota Eighth District Congressman Rick Nolan for today’s newspaper column. We spoke for almost an hour, so much of it couldn’t fit in an already overstuffed 900-word column. Here are a few more thoughts from the Feb. 15 Rick Nolan interview after he announced his retirement from Congress. Of course, you…
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Key takeaways from 2018 straw polls, precinct caucuses
Last night I joined a relatively small group of Minnesotans in attending my local party precinct caucus. I caucus with the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party, so we met at the Balsam Township Hall. The Republicans met in Grand Rapids at the middle school. Six people attended my caucus, including myself. I was prepared to remark that perhaps…
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The hidden importance of Tuesday’s precinct caucuses
With the Super Bowl in the state’s collective rear view mirror, Tuesday night brings the biennial tradition of Minnesota’s precinct caucuses. And while it might seem a precipitous drop-off in excitement, this year’s caucuses offer real world implications. Precinct caucuses are a strange quirk of this moralistic state that once placed tremendous value on grassroots…
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West Side Story: the high stakes Mesabi mining show
A proposed new mine near the western Mesabi Iron Range town of Nashwauk has proven to be a challenge to explain. Every time I go to write one piece, something new pops up, changing the story. I don’t even know what to call it. This thing is a folk story now. So let’s start from…
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New model of journalism won’t happen on Facebook
Lately I’ve been contemplating the difference between how I felt about being on Facebook after signing up a decade ago and how I feel logging on now. It’s a world of difference. In a way, this change explains the reason Facebook is abandoning efforts to curate journalism, and why that probably won’t work either. Looking…
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Is our robot society ready to be human?
A 19-year-old Swedish miner sees new automation coming to the underground mine where he works. “In less than 10 years, he says, “this will then all be automated, but I’m not worried — there will always be other work tasks.” Another miner guides a haul truck through a winter-cold mine shaft. He’s sitting in a…
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MinnesotaBrown’s Top Posts of 2017
Farewell, 2017! Another future year over and yet still no flying car in my garage. Nevertheless, the Minnesota Vikings are contenders and Donald Trump is President of the United States, so the past would still be baffled by our present. Let’s take a look back at the year that was on MinnesotaBrown.com. We cover news,…
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Land deal gives Cliffs edge on Nashwauk mine
Earlier this month, Cleveland Cliffs announced that it acquired land associated with the former Essar Steel Minnesota mine project in Nashwauk. At the time, I and others wondered how significant this news would be. Well, the Mesabi Daily News reports that an anonymous source says Cliffs now controls a critical part of the project, including…
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Cleveland-Cliffs noses in with Nashwauk land buy
Earlier this year, Cleveland-Cliffs lost its bid to acquire the former Essar Steel Minnesota project in the Mesabi Iron Range town of Nashwauk, Minnesota to Chippewa Capital Partners. However, Business North reports that Cliffs is back on the scene today after buying land and mineral rights previously attached to that project. From that story: The…
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Top Ten Tips for Dinosaurs Seeking to Survive Winter
Sixty-six million years ago a 7.5 mile-wide asteroid hurtled from the depths of space toward a warm, lush planet ruled by lizards. The meteor plunged into the Gulf of Mexico, then just a shallow sea, “instantly vaporizing thousands of billions of tons of rock.” A black cloud of boulders exploded from sea level to the…
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Beep-Boop, you can drive my car
News coverage of driverless cars tends to skew from “Oh, wow, look at these fancy gadgets” to “Look out, the robots are taking over!” But we’re going to need to take a very real look at autonomous vehicle technology. After all, it will dramatically reshape our lives in Northern Minnesota. Like most change, the issue…
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Make or break moment for Iron Range mining projects
I’m part of a tortured, high-strung group of people who receive regular e-mail and social media updates about the mining business. It’s part of my duty to better understand the industry that shapes Iron Range history and its current economy. And in recent months the news has been far less depressing than usual. For instance,…
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The economics of dignity, how a tiered economy tears us apart
To read the local papers, a visitor might conclude that the biggest problems facing the Iron Range these days is whether or not we support our most powerful industry *enough.* I find this curious. Because when people talk about “the problem on the Range these days,” they usually mean people working multiple jobs to pay…
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Gov. Dayton OKs Chippewa Capital Partners plan
One way or another, a long awaited new taconite mine and iron briquette mill near Nashwauk, Minnesota, puts new meaning in the old phrase “take a slow boat to China.” On Saturday, Gov. Mark Dayton said he was satisfied with the financial package put together by Chippewa Capital Partners, the new owner of the former…