Bob Collins
The Hill reports that the Trump administration is planning to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for Humanities.
It’s part of a package to reduce the national debt by $10 trillion over the next 10 years. Read more →
MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
Arts & Culture
What happens to old playground equipment when affluent suburbs move on to something better?
They end up in a Syrian refugee camp in Lebanon. Read more →
A moment of silence, please, for the loss of a little bit of “community” in the communities of Madison Lake, Eagle Lake, St. Clair and Pemberton. The local newspaper has shut down after 112 years. Read more →
Several fans of NewsCut’s The Art of the Obituary category have called our attention to Friday’s passing of Dr. Kay Heggestad of Madison, Wis.,who merited two obituaries in Sunday’s Wisconsin State Journal.
She wrote one of them. Her family wrote the other, to fill in the extraordinary details she left out. Read more →
(Video link) Lajos Delej was a composer and pianist of great promise, the Boston Globe says. He was also in love. So when the Nazis invaded Hungary, Pauline Herzek was sent to Auschwitz (where her father and stepmother were murdered) and Delej, who had entered the ghetto to try to rescue her, was never seen Read more →
The power of self esteem is regularly and increasingly mocked in U.S. culture, perhaps one of the reasons the arts has an increasingly difficult time gaining a bigger foothold in the education system. Maybe Kenya knows something we should. Read more →
I’m very late getting to this dissection of a StoryCorps segment last month but since I relayed it on NewsCut I should get complaints into the record, although it did not generate controversy on this blog.
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In his sobering message for the new year, the great nature photographer Jim Brandenburg says he hasn’t heard a wolf howl or been able to take a photograph of a wolf since hunting was allowed in 2013 (a federal court stopped the practice in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota). Read more →
It’s a fair bet that if the “missing link” is discovered, it won’t be in a trailer in Altura, Minn.
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Had we known that it would be her last interview on public radio, maybe we could have dived deeper into the richness of Carrie Fisher’s life than her role as Princess Leia when it aired on NPR’s Fresh Air last month. Read more →
Duluth photographer Levi Drevlow is getting plenty of attention after his Instagram video of sea smoke on Lake Superior last week stormed the Intertubes. Read more →
Being a Catholic, Cecilia Latorre, of Edmonton knows it’s sacrilegious of her to set up a little nativity scene in her home featuring Prince. ‘But it’s important to me,’ she tells the CBC.
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The U.S. ambassador to Norway, a woman who gained fame in Norway for finishing second in Norway’s version of American idol, and Norway’s most famous TV news anchor, drive around Oslo singing Christmas songs in Norwegian in this video provided by the U.S. embassy in Oslo. Read more →
Edwin Benson has died and with him a language may also pass on. Benson, of Twin Buttes on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in west-central North Dakota, was the last living person who could fluently speak Mandan.. Read more →
The Democrats’ search for a savior — a party chairman — is tilting toward Minneapolis congressman Keith Ellison, but it’s not hard to miss the clear dissatisfaction with the choices party leaders have been given, Politico indicates in a survey of them today. Read more →