Bob CollinsWhy, no, we do not ever tire of the annual promotional hype surrounding an appearance in these parts by the Harlem Globetrotters. Read more →
MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
By Bob Collins
Bob Collins retired from Minnesota Public Radio in 2019 after 12 years of writing NewsCut and pointing out to complainants that posts weren’t news stories. A son of Massachusetts, he was a news editor 1992-1998, created the MPR News regional website in 1999, invented the popular Select A Candidate, started several blogs, and every day lamented that his Minnesota Fantasy Legislature project never caught on.
Rep. Stephanie Borowicz, a Republican from rural Pennsylvania, insists she was just praying when she led the Pennsylvania House of Representatives on Monday in what appeared to be a broadside against non-Christians. Read more →
Ayd Mill Road is a metaphor for the entire transportation policy of Minnesota. For decades, it’s been a road in search of a vision. With officials and residents unable to agree on one, it collapses under the weight of its own existence. Read more →
The nation is awash in red ink, a path hastened by President Trump’s tax cuts in 2018. It was pretty much a given that subsequent budgets would have to pay for the giveaway through cuts to those with the least political power, but the announcement this week that the administration will whack support for Special Olympics still took people by surprise and a fair amount of disgust. Read more →
Here are the stories, topics, and guests you’ll hear today on MPR News. Read more →
It’s really not that people don’t want solid news reporting; they just don’t want to pay for it and they’re going to keep that insistence, apparently, until it becomes a moot point. Soon. Read more →
It’s been a tough year to be a tow truck driver. Few people think kindly of the people who haul their cars away during snow emergencies. They’re just doing their jobs, people.
So it’s good to see one getting a little love for a simple act of concern and kindness.
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Now that the state is on the eve of banning the handheld use of cellphones, let’s talk pig, specifically driving with a pig on your lap. Read more →
We’re certainly aware that it’s fashionable these days to proclaim baseball an irrelevant and dying sport, with its staid traditions and constant stories of connecting parents, grandparents, and children. That, we will argue, is the strength it has left and to prove it, we point today to Jim Walsh’s excellent story in Southwest Journal about Read more →
Former WCCO anchor Jamie Yuccas’ interview this morning with UCLA gymnast Katelyn Ohashi captures perfectly the contradictory nature of her sport to outsiders. Read more →
The annual NewsCut tradition — our 10th and last — is underway with the arrival of your property tax statement, that completely indecipherable calculation that leads to the bottom line. Read more →
Here are the topics, guests, and stories you’ll hear today on MPR News. Read more →
In many ways, the debate over guns ended in 2012 when the nation went on about its business and changed pretty much nothing after little kids and their teachers were slaughtered in Newtown, Conn. That must have been particularly difficult for people like Jeremy Richman, who hasn’t been able to take any positives out of Read more →
All the passengers got on the plane thinking they were going to Germany. But the paperwork submitted to the pilots said Edinburgh. So Edinburgh it was.
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Today would be Norman Borlaug’s 105th birthday. He is known by some fans as the greatest human who ever lived. Read more →