Jan 26, 2026
The temperature dropped to 5 below zero by 7 pm last Saturday night, January 24. Less than twelve hours had passed since the shooting of ICU nurse Alex Pretti by federal agents on a busy street in Minneapolis; it had been a terrible day following terrible weeks. ...
Jan 19, 2026
A timely excerpt from the official program for the 1963 March on Washington: “It will be orderly, but not subservient. It will be proud, but not arrogant. It will be non-violent, but not timid. It will be unified in purposes and behavior, not splintered into...
Dec 29, 2025
On the unexpected pleasure front, holiday edition, I visited an artist’s market at Springboard for the Arts in St. Paul last week. (Not clear to me how google summaries arrive, but Springboard has a good one: “We’re here to equip artists with the tools to make a...
Dec 17, 2025
Sometime in the holiday season of 1952, my aunt Jane was hurrying through the main floor of the State Street Marshall Field’s in Chicago, a grand landmark department store. In those days, the main floor of Field’s was a full city block square, three stories tall, and...
Dec 1, 2025
In July, I wrote a piece called “Stop the Train! Was that a Rocket Ship?!”, in which I speculated fruitlessly about the origin of a mysterious object, with a galactic if forlorn air, spotted in a Wisconsin field from a speeding Amtrak train. What was that thing? You,...
