Bob Collins
Can one superstar player change a city’s economy?
A Harvard researcher says he/she can, at least if his name is LeBron James Read more →
MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
Economy
If you’ve tried to buy a home in the Twin Cities, you know the impossible task for mere mortals. If you can find a half-way decent house to buy, the price is through the roof. Read more →
It’s a shameful feeling you might get when you read the story of Brian Johnson and his friends, who are surrounded by old bikes in the woods along the Mississippi River in La Crosse, Wis. Read more →
The closing highlights why Minnesota manufacturing jobs disappear. Factories often make things people don’t want or need anymore.
Read more →
ESPN, which threw way too much money at sports leagues for the right to broadcast games, took its mistake out on its employees again today when it chopped some high-profile personalities, more than a year after it gutted 350 behind-the-camera employees. Read more →
At least in the short term, Corey Jacob, the homeless Rochester man whose van was smashed on Good Friday when it was hit by a drunk driver, is going to be OK. Read more →
Robert Bryce, a free marketer with the Manhattan Institute, a conservative “think tank” funded by oil interests, has dished out some red meat for the anti-solar crowd today by acknowledging that he’s installed solar panels on his home in Austin, Texas. Read more →
The Rochester man lives on disability payments that allow him to spend only $300 a month on housing, the Rochester Post-Bulletin reports. That’s not enough, so Jacob lives in a 19-year-old van he bought with what little money he had two weeks ago.
On Good Friday, a drunk driver slammed into it, disabling it.
Read more →
If the U.S. government actually were a business, it’d have to issue a 10-K filing with regulators — a report to shareholders — and we’d all get a look at how the business is doing.
This morning, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer unveiled the results of his project to do just that and it landed with a bit of a thud. Read more →
Would younger generations be happier if they were back in the ’50s? Read more →
An Anoka ammunition manufacturer is cutting jobs. People aren’t afraid of losing their guns, and it’s killing the industry. Read more →
If you want to be employed in Minnesota, health care isn’t a bad choice for a career, a study from the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development released today says.
Read more →
Paul TostoI hadn’t been to a Sears in years before going there a few months ago; I spent $5. That one sentence explains today’s news that Sears may finally be close to the end, for real. Read more →
It is a given problem in small-town America that the best and the brighest get out as soon as they can. They head for the city to make their future while their hometowns — rural America — decline. The role of college professors, J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy, notes in an op-ed in the Read more →
A new crackdown on border crossings is making it tough to be a tourist to Minnesota’s Northwest Angle, the spit of land separated from the rest of the country by Lake of the Woods. Read more →