Bob CollinsThere’ll be plenty of citations of Aretha Franklin’s best work on the occasion of her death today.
I prefer to cite its impact. It could make your heart swell and think anything is possible.
Read more →
MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
Arts & Culture
The two were among the first newspaper people in Minnesota to get a radio gig, a practice that exploded in the ’90s as talk radio made a comeback. But AM talk radio attracts an older, male demographic that is declining. Read more →
Marianne CombsA Minnesota team of synchronized swimmers will bring home gold medals from this year’s Gay Games in Paris. “The Subversive Sirens” won gold for their synchronized routine performed to Prince’s song “Let’s Go Crazy,” wearing suits emblazoned with his gender-fluid symbol in purple sequins. None of the five women have ever competed in synchronized swimming Read more →
Dmitri Moua, 16, has gotta dance and if it takes a suit against the Minnesota State High School League, so be it, a conservative/libertarian organization says. Read more →
A key to making fanny packs cool again, New York Magazine says, is calling them ‘waist bags.’ Read more →
Does this scream, ‘Rochester, Minn.,’ to you? It’s the winner in the public voting to replace the city’s official flag. Read more →
Dick Bancroft wasn’t a photographer by training, but he started photographing Minnesotans involved in the peace movement for the Saint Paul Dispatch newspaper. He went on to chronicle the American Indian Movement. He never sold a picture, he said. Read more →
The locals in Sioux Falls lost their collective minds this week, thanks to a fairly non-descript tweet that Tom Hanks made early on Tuesday in support of James and Deborah Fallows’ book. Read more →
The Star Tribune obituary for Rachel Chazin will break even the hardest heart. Read more →
As Minnesotans — natives and adopters — we’re obsessed with how others see us. Maybe we should spend a few moments considering how we see us and consider our good fortune. Read more →
Litchfield’s drive-in theater is one of only six remaining drive-ins in Minnesota. Dave Quincer aims to keep it alive.
Read more →
We don’t like to see news blogs disappear but it’s an inescapable fact that the days are numbered for them in core media. Mainstream news organizations have had a very difficult time squaring the more personal nature of blogs, their willingness to amplify the work of newsroom competitors, and the reader community they create with the traditional practices of newsrooms. Read more →
JD Salinger used to bring his typewriter into the Twin State Typewriter store in Vermont three or four times a year with a key crisis. So did people you’ve never heard of.
And soon, it will be no more; a metaphor for the passage of time.
Read more →
It had all the makings of a typical Twitter fight that solves nothing, two people in an us-against-them world exercising their fingers. But something unique happened in the confrontation between music producer Erick Anderson (Afrokeys) and Sean Tillmann, known as Har Mar Superstar: they worked it out. Read more →
One of the greatest festival choruses in the country — the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, which performs with the Boston Symphony — is in an uproar after a new boss required them to reaudition for their jobs and has purged dozens in what members are calling ‘a bloodbath.’
Read more →