Bob Collins
Jerry Huffman leaves Friday for the Czech Republic, where he’ll meet the woman who posed with his dad on the day the war’s fighting ended. 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.
St. Cloud’s lesson to Rust Belt cities? Don’t be a city in the Rust Belt. Read more →
A little warmer temperature, some gusty winds and voila! We get one of the most entertaining weather events of the year: the march of the lake ice. Read more →
There haven’t been many cases of school music programs surviving cutbacks, despite the pleas from parents and educators that there’s learning value in the arts.
But the music program in Laporte, Minn., will play on. Read more →
The price of gasoline is heading back to economic reality and we’re about to see the effect of Americans’ appetite for not learning lessons about trucks and SUVs. They’re really expensive to drive when the price of gasoline lives in economic reality.
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Here are the stories, topics, and guests you’ll hear today on MPR News. Read more →
It’s not popular with a lot of people, I suppose, to point out that teachers — and I will insist that in particular, third grade teachers — are angels on earth. But they are. Teachers put pieces of themselves in their students and then send them off to the world. Read more →
Ken Doctor, of Nieman Lab, reveals that Alden Global Capital, the hedge fund that owns dozens of newspapers in the country, had a 17-percent operating margin in 2017, well above most newspaper companies. The Pioneer Press cleared $10 million in profit, a 13-percent operating margin after the company slashed the workforce to about 60 people. Read more →
We’re only a month into the season and yet it’s hard to ignore the troubling signs for the game’s future. Read more →
The difference between drivers in Houston and those in the Twin Cities appears to be the fingers that are used. Marco Sanchez, a Texan, was faced with a driver who wanted to merge into his lane. “He was on the side on the right and I saw him way in the back. No one wanted Read more →
You’re hearing a lot about ‘ice out’ on area lakes at this time of the year. Who reports these things?
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Second-graders can teach a lot to high school seniors about drinking.
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Joe Hill, 26, of Plymouth, Mass., isn’t exactly sure why he joined a Facebook group about New Jersey, but it’s paid off even if it ended up not being about New Jersey. It was dedicated to Jersey, a British island just off the coast of France. Read more →
Here are the stories and guests you’ll hear today on MPR News. Read more →
One of the many reasons I wish I could do parenthood over again is so I could enjoy youth baseball games in the manner in which they were intended.
This is how they were intended. Read more →