Bob Collins
Here are the topics and guests you’ll hear on MPR News today. 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.
From all indications, Newsweek is exhibiting a death rattle this week.
It started when the magazine retracted its story suggesting that ‘bots’ took down Sen. Al Franken. Read more →
That old joke about Minnesotans being willing to give you directions to anywhere but their home is case aside by a lovely story in the Star Tribune about two families that have eaten together once a week for 30 years. Read more →
There’s a war going on inside the brain of 26-year-old Sioux Falls school teacher Katie Blunck. Either that one or the one she’s waging with an insurance company could kill her. Read more →
A call in Bemidji, Minn., to join a planned nationwide protest over school shootings did not survive a school superintendent’s review, the Bemidji Pioneer reports today.
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‘One life can give so many gifts,’ Jim Walsh writes, “a sad fact that we realize profoundly when death comes calling.’ Read more →
Here are the topics and guests you’ll hear today on MPR News. Read more →
Skateboards, DNA, and lobster are getting new emojis after a rash of complaints from — I guess — fans of lobster, skateboards, and DNA. Read more →
Elizabeth Swaney’s motto might as well be, ‘somebody’s got to finish in last place.’
Mission accomplished. Read more →
For a horrible-tasting drink, Red Bull certainly is able to get people to do odd things in support of its ongoing marketing.
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One doesn’t have to go to Appalachia to see the poverty and ghost towns from failed and abandoned mining. One need only take a relatively short drive from Minnesota to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where copper mining isn’t what it once was. Read more →
There’s no reason for the Russians to stop messing with our democracy. They’ve figured out Americans, who too often only see what they want to see and won’t question where the information came from nor what they’re told.
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Here are the topics and guests you’ll hear today on MPR News. Read more →
In her New York Times op-ed over the weekend, Honor Jones acknowledged it’s not for women to criticize what other women wear.
Then she criticized the choices of women at the gym, specifically: yoga pants. Read more →
Will Buckley, 62, of Eau Claire, needed a kidney once his University of Minnesota doctor told him the ones he had were done for. He would be too if someone didn’t step forward. Read more →