At last, I can share a really big update. This week, I joined the Minnesota Star Tribune as a full time columnist and member of the editorial board. I’ll be working remotely, based here at MinnesotaBrown World Headquarters in Balsam Township, with liberty to travel the state as necessary. In fact, I’ll be the first… Read More →
Solving high costs, low availability of child care
March 2, 2025 by Leave a Comment
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… Read More →
A note to historical researchers, 100 years hence
February 22, 2025 by 2 Comments
For about three years, I spent much of my free time reading century-old Hibbing newspapers on a microfilm machine in my basement. Please don’t throw your undies, ladies; it’s not as sexy as it sounds. My book research took on added meaning as I slowly absorbed the sensibilities of the 1910s and ‘20s. After a… Read More →
New lumberjack history exposes plaid-clad myths
February 15, 2025 by 2 Comments
I live in the woods. So do a lot of my relatives. Go back a few generations and you’ll find lots of us from the woods. So I could say, as do many of my kind, that I know all about the woods. But I don’t. And neither do you. No one alive fully understands… Read More →
Wrestling our demons
February 8, 2025 by 1 Comment
Last hunting season I was determined to read more books than I shot deer. Since I saw as many bucks in the woods as I did elephants or hippopotamuses, this bar was easy to clear. But I was nervous. Both books that I brought to camp featured the word “demon” in the title. My religiosity… Read More →
TikTok dustup exposes empty menace of social media
January 25, 2025 by Leave a Comment
I hope you survived the Great TikTok Shutdown of 2025. For a few hours last Sunday, the popular social media app went dark in the United States. The company wasn’t required to shut down this way, but acted in response to an impending ban that had been upheld in a rare unanimous Supreme Court decision…. Read More →
Bringing it owl bog home
January 24, 2025 by Leave a Comment
My latest column for the Minnesota Star Tribune, “I grew up in a Minnesota bog the size of New York City; I didn’t know it was special,” is out now. I know longtime readers already heard my stories about growing up on a junkyard in the Sax-Zim Bog. What can I say? In more ways than… Read More →
How the Iron Range became an outpost of the oligarchy
January 21, 2025 by 1 Comment
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… Read More →
Global instability will hit home
January 18, 2025 by 1 Comment
The zany comedy, “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World,” came out in 1963. The band R.E.M. released “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)” in 1987. A couple years later, Billy Joel gave his famously frantic history lesson, “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” Despite these facts, those… Read More →
The U.S. Steel deal is dead; long live uncertainty
January 11, 2025 by 1 Comment
When it comes to the U.S. Steel/Nippon merger, it’s all over but the crying. And there will be quite a lot of expensive crying in federal courtrooms over coming months and years. But that doesn’t mean the story is over. We’re going to learn a lot. This is the start of something, not the end…. Read More →
