Bob CollinsA new theme is emerging from students in these shootings.
Students expect someone to open fire on them now. Read more →
MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
By Bob Collins
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.
With the distribution of high school yearbooks, we are knee deep in yearbook controversies as usual. The latest is from Revere, Mass., where Betshina Bernier’s yearbook quote was taken from a Florida student’s yearbook from last year. Read more →
Plan B — or C, or E, or J; we’ve lost track — is to treat it like a Minnesota dessert; slice it up until there’s just a microscopic piece left. Then just leave it for someone else to take. Read more →
NPR’s Morning Edition made a brief reference this morning to the obituary of storm chaser Jim Sellars, who died in Missouri at age 64 this week. But it did not mention much more than his plan to have his remains rocketed into space. Let’s rectify that: I was born March 3rd 1954 to John and Read more →
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Among the many traditions that appear at high school graduation time, none is better than the one in Rochester, Minn., where the graduating seniors put on their caps and gowns and return to the schools of their past. Read more →
That idea about treating future teachers the way we treat future sports stars is catching on.
ISD 191 — Burnsville, Eagan, Savage — is following the footsteps of Maple Lake (which followed in the footsteps of a school in Iowa), holding a Teacher Signing Day to honor seniors who are going to go to college to become teachers. Read more →
One characteristic about the original colonies: They have a lot of dead soldiers to remember on Memorial Day.
Massachusetts, where the first shot was fired in a war that would create the United States has had 37,268 in war, stretching back to the Revolution. Read more →
So many former students showed up at Brian Johnson’s last concert in Austin, Minn., that there was hardly anyone left in the audience by the time they took the stage. Read more →
By a 3-to-2 vote, Hutchinson City Council members rejected calls to replace a prayer by Christian pastors with a moment of silence. Read more →
Let’s fully understand what yesterday’s decision by NFL owners to crack down on employee protest is. The owners, under pressure from the government in the form of the President of the United States, agreed to modify its speech to please that government.
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Consumer Reports isn’t exactly the embodiment of the liberal media, but Elon Musk, the brain behind Tesla, is adopting the Donald Trump method of responding to journalists doing their job. Read more →
Mainstream news media outlets aren’t very good at covering communities of color and issues of race and class and there’s a pretty obvious reason why not: they’re mostly white. Read more →
The ACLU in Minnesota is pushing the city council in Excelsior, Minn., to reconsider its decision to deny a permit for a group that wanted to hold the Lake Minnetonka March for Our Lives, to show support for students who have marched for gun legislation in the wake of school shootings.
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