Bob CollinsYou can do some interesting things with a Minnesota lake. Take the right temperature, a little snow, and a plow, voila! You’ve got an airport. Read more →
MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
This or That
TV reporters are outrageously vulnerable when they’re doing live interviews and “stand-ups” as we learned in 2015 when a TV reporter and her camera crew were shot to death on live TV.
What happened to a CBC reporter in Toronto the other night wasn’t murder, but it was an assault. Read more →
We have reached the point in our winter when we have to make an important calculation: is the risk of my roof collapsing under the weight of the snow greater than the risk of me being permanently disabled by falling off it?
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The Minnesota Wild today continued blowing up its underachieving franchise, sending former future-of-the-team Mikael Granlund to the Nashville Predators for winger Kevin Fiala. Come in off the ledge, fans. Read more →
The mayor of Cormorant Township in Becker County has died.
Duke, as his friends called him, was a good boy. Oh, yes he was. He was a good boy.
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Arvid Dalby, of Debs, Minn., is the sort of guy you wish you’d known, and we know that because his family and/or friends have written pretty near the perfect obituary, featured here in our continuing series on the subject.l Read more →
We are through one round of the great Twin Cities snowball challenge and, so far, St. Paul is wiping its snow-clogged streets with the spiffy neighbor. Read more →
When Amanda Kehler, who runs a cafe and antique store in Steinbach, Manitoba(about 90 miles northwest of Warroad), was out antiquing a week or so ago, she thought the stack of old newspapers and documents she bought for a dollar was a pretty good deal.
It might have been a priceless one because this letter from Earl Sorel was in it. Read more →
Back in the winter of 1971, Ron Knappen, of Galesville, Wis., went for a drive while he and his wife were on a trip to visit relatives in Illinois for Christmas. He came back with eight old wood wall telephones which he’d bought from someone for $50 each. Read more →
Stephen Martin, who owns a sporting goods store, has a lot in common with a guy he doesn’t much care for: Colin Kaepernick, who angered some people for protesting racial inequality in America.
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Every once in awhile, a day comes along when a simple tweet captures everything that is good in the world.
Today is that day.
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Minnesotans are particularly bad at a number of things: taking the last piece, the zipper merge, and catching turkeys.
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Martha Everett didn’t mean to provide a time capsule to the people of Jeffersonville, Ind. She simply lost her purse, which has now been found. It contains the artifacts of a lost generation of high school teenagers: lipstick (‘made in New York’, it said), wrappers of Juicy Fruit gum, the school’s basketball schedule, a ribbon for the mile relay, bus schedule, a mirror, her Social Security card, a note asking her to the prom. Read more →
For reasons that remain unclear — there weren’t that many accidents — rush hour traffic in the Twin Cities last evening was a nightmare, particularly the stretch of I-35W southbound where someone once thought it a fine idea to design an offramp to I-94 westbound that intersected two other ramps.
The more we pave over the Twin Cities with highways, the worse the traffic seems to get, and we don’t even get bragging rights out of the deal for our horrible traffic. Read more →
The police at Towson University in Maryland are circulating images of this woman. She’s a threat. She’ll stop at nothing, apparently, to get a date for her son. Read more →