Bob Collins
New legislation should fix a longtime problem: pilots who don’t seek treatment for various medical conditions because they fear they’ll lose the medical certification required to fly general aviation aircraft. Read more →
MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
Archives for July 2016
Plenty of people were upset that a Canadian group changed the words to the country’s National Anthem before last night’s baseball All Star game. But there seems to be disagreement about why. Read more →
If you’re old enough, perhaps the brouhaha over the Minnesota Lynx wearing T-shirts to comment on social issues reminded you of a similar time when uppity athletes didn’t just shut up and play. Read more →
There’s no real reason for the ‘1st’ sign other than its historical significance. First National Bank was absorbed into a series of mergers years ago. But we tend to fall in love with these sorts of things over time. Read more →
If you make the La Crosse Tribune, Greg Remen gives you a kite. Otherwise, it’s $2. Read more →
Vi Hart, famous — and adored — for her YouTube videos explaining complex math, has a point in her latest video. Even with all of the hours of news coverage, and the barrels of ink in newspapers, the surrounding coverage of rising tensions ignores the complex problems behind complex problems. They’re not doing all that well with the simple context either. Read more →
When a group of mostly black protesters met a group of mostly white protesters in Dallas, it could’ve gone badly. It didn’t. Read more →
The worst job in the Upper Midwest right now? It’s the person responsible for figuring out how to fix Bayfield County’s washed out roads. Read more →
In a speech that was emotional and inspired as any consoler-in-chief has given, Obama chided the nation for refusing to recognize the things ‘we know to be true’ and being unable to talk about our differences in a productive way — preferring instead to choose sides. Read more →
It costs a ship $400 an hour for a pilot, and that’s why the Norwegian Viking Ship, Draken Harald Hårfagre, might not make it to Duluth’s Tall Ships Challenge 2016.
Read more →
It is either a feature or a bug — after all these years, I’m still not sure which — that a good conscience never lets go.
It punishes us for the transgressions of our youth. Read more →
Two trauma surgeons at Dallas’ Parkland Hospital — one white, one black — had something to say to the nation, so they asked CBS News to interview them this morning. Read more →
MPR reporter/editor Toni Randolph, claimed by cancer last week, wasn’t from here. She was from Buffalo, N.Y. So when family members arrived in the Twin Cities to attend to her affairs, they realized they had to do something here in addition to a funeral in Buffalo. Read more →
There is drawing lines in the sand between police and the public (embodied in the next post down) and there is law enforcement pulling a community closer together. Read more →
When the Minnesota Lynx put on warm-up T-shirts memorializing two black men killed by police, the Dallas police officers killed in an ambush, and calling for us to look to ourselves for change, it was too much for Minneapolis police officers to take. Read more →