Bob Collins1) THE LAST GASP OF JAZZ IN SAINT PAUL
Saint Paul has a habit of calling its vacant buildings “opportunities,” but few people are looking at the bright side of the closing of the Artists’ Quarter, the hole-in-the-wall jazz club in the Hamm Building downtown. Faced with rising rent (question: How are rents rising in a downtown that has so little?), the owner is closing down at the end of the year and, so far, vows from the influential that the closing won’t happen haven’t led anywhere.
The owner, Kenny Horst, tells the Saint Paul Pioneer Press, typically, that once people realized what they were losing, they supported the club more. But, it’s too late.
“I knew that going-out-of-business sales work, but it’s been booming,” he said. “It’s never been better here. I’m seeing people showing up now that didn’t show up for years.”
Related: Pleased and flipped 24: Memories of the Artists’ Quarter (bebopified).
Arts leaders discuss what they’d like to see in the New Year (Fargo Forum).
Where orchestras succeed. Hint: It’s not Minneapolis. (MPR News)
2) HOW TO ESCAPE THE COMMUNITY COLLEGE TRAP
More than half the students who enroll in community colleges do not ever get a degree. Says The Atlantic…
As the matriculation rate has climbed, so has the number of students who enter college with marginal credentials and other handicaps. The least academically prepared and most economically hard-pressed among them are typically bound for community college, where low-income students—plenty of them the first in their family to venture beyond high school—outnumber their high-income peers 2-to-1. Many of these students are already juggling jobs and family commitments by their late teens
Washington has developed an array of efforts to help struggling students, but the results have been disappointing, The Atlantic reports.
Then again, what’s the use: Space scientists fear a new era of cost limits on big NASA missions, just as the universe is getting exponentially more interesting (The Washington Post).
Related: College affordability: Could peanut butter and jelly sandwiches solve hunger on campus? (Slate).
3) SANTA DOESN’T STOP HERE ANYMORE
Santa didn’t make it back to Minnesota this year. The St. Cloud Times says Dick Scott, 72, has stopped dressing up as Santa at a mall in town after his wife died and he was diagnosed with a brain tumor.
“I just loved being with the kids. I just had so much fun with the kids. I absolutely loved being with them.”
“In the fall of 1971, Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger returned to their Crystal, Minn., apartment to find their roommate, Don Rawitsch, sprawled on the living room floor, drawing a map of western America. The three men, all seniors at Carleton College, were student teachers. They spent their days in junior high classrooms teaching math and history in inner-city Minneapolis. At night, they huddled over dinner, sharing tips and debating teaching techniques. Until earlier that day, Rawitsch had been stumped on how to get his eighth-graders interested in his new history unit, “The Western Expansion of the Mid-19th Century.” (Neatorama)
More history: If you asked most Americans what president ordered the largest mass execution in American history, few will know the answer: Abraham Lincoln. Yesterday, Dakota riders completed their ride to Mankato to honor the 38 who were hanged there on the day after Christmas in 1862 (Mankato Free Press).
When I go to a hockey game, I spend much of the time watching the refs. They are marvelous and graceful skaters. What’s it look like from their perspective. At a recent AHL game, one ref wore a camera.
(h/t: Andrew Shipe)
Bonus I: San Francisco on Christmas Eve by quadcopter.
Bonus II: Here's What It's Like to Sell Telephone Poles Door to Door (Wired).
Bonus III: Goodbye, Metrodome. And Good Riddance (Daily Norseman).
WHAT WE’RE DOING
Daily Circuit (9-12 p.m.) – First hour: A panel of entrepreneurs joins Kerri Miller to discuss the things they wish they knew when they first decided to go out on their own.
(Rebroadcast)
Second hour: Alok Jha and Andrew Luck-Baker continue to follow the scientists on the ongoing Australasian Antarctic Expedition 2013. Ice, the oceans and climate change are the themes this week as one of the expedition scientists makes a troubling finding. Moored in Commonwealth Bay in East Antarctic, the expedition’s oceanographer Erik van Sibble discovers a stunning difference in the nature of the water beneath the sea ice. Although it is a preliminary finding, the consequences for the motions of the world’s oceans and climate change could be dramatic.
Third hour: South Sudan, Iraq, and Bangladesh.
MPR News Presents (12-1 pm) – History professor Brian Ingrassia, speaking about the history of college football. He’s the author of “The Rise of Gridiron University: Higher Education’s Uneasy Alliance with Big-Time Football.”
The Takeaway (1-2 p.m.) – A look at the changing norms of privacy across medicine, the Internet and national security.
All Things Considered (3-6:30 p.m.) – U of M students are asking for gender-neutral housing on campus so that they can feel safe and judgment free. MPR’s Alex Friedrich will have the story.
There are a few people who can remember every detail of every day. Its a rare gift that can also be a curse because for some it means reliving their past, day in and day out. NPR will report on the phenomenon known as Highly Superior Memory — and what it teaches us about the importance of forgetting.
