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.
The only real way to survive a Minnesota winter is to embrace it and face it head-on. That was the beauty of the Art Shanty project, in which artists create spaces on a frozen lake somewhere and people who aren’t the type to get pushed around by the weather visit, each experience changing from one shanty to another.
We’re going to need a Plan B, however, because the organizers have announced they’ll take the coming winter off. Read more →
The limits on free speech will soon be seen — or not seen, as the case may be — on Red Wing’s Barn Bluff, the western face of which has served for decades as a giant billboard for people who had something to say even though there’s a graffiti ordinance in the city. Read more →
During the ‘Walleye War’ of the 1980s, after federal courts upheld the right of Ojibwe people to spearfish off reservation land at night during spawning, WOJB helped with the overt racism that threatened violence.
Read more →
What we have here is the face of communism, a Northwestern PhD candidate insists. Read more →
You’re a 17-year-old kid, alone in an airplane a few thousand feet above the ground and a wheel on your airplane falls off. What do you do? Read more →
KARE 11 says distraction may have played a role in this crash in which a dump truck slams into a line of parked cars.
You think? Read more →
Here are the stories, topics, and guests you’ll hear today on MPR News. Read more →
The NHL team on Tuesday became the latest sports franchise to double-down on security measures, announcing a new policy that will hit women hardest. Read more →
Alright, let’s figure this out, people. We’ve got a bear in Roseau who investigated what was inside a 10-gallon metal milk jug. It turns out nothing was inside until the bear’s head showed up there Read more →
Bill Trethewey, who wants to be a firefighter someday, had his own way of marking the 17th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Read more →
A Grand Forks is begging for a kidney. It’s a family tradition.
Bonnie Haman is the thirteenth person in her family to need a kidney transplant. Read more →
The world is such now that when some people die, the neighbors barely notice. Central air conditioning and backyard decks have insulated us from one another.
That’s what makes what’s happened in Plymouth all the more poignant. Read more →
It can be easy for people to give up on North Minneapolis. Just ask a craft brewery owner, who has decided to move his business after another weekend of violence in the neighborhood. Read more →
The killing of a black man inside his own apartment by a cop who allegedly thought she was entering her own unit is pretty much why people of color kneel on the sideline of football games. Some police officers, they say, are far too quick to take the lives of African-Americans. Too many jurors, they add, are too quick to let them get away with it. Read more →
I am sorry to report that Pernina Burke, who graced these pages in March when she turned 100, passed away on Sunday morning, her granddaughter, Christie reports. My life is full of opportunities I wish I’d pursued but didn’t, so it was particular pleasure to be able to tell her story, which is reprinted here. Read more →
Bob Collins