Bob Collins
Seven years ago next week, Garrett Bazany, then 15, performed a double front flip on his family’s trampoline. He landed on his head and woke up in the hospital, paralyzed from the chest down.
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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.
It was your basic turn-down-the-amps noise call for the cops in Mississauga, Ontario on Saturday night where teenage hard rock band Vinyl Ambush was playing at a party. The party was over for the 75 guests at an outdoor birthday party, or so the band thought. Read more →
Glaydon Iverson was never identified — most of the 400 who were killed on his ship weren’t — until a few months ago, though it was clear he was likely dead, the first Freeborn County casualty of World War II.
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Gary Marquardt, of Excelsior, walks through the local cemetery. When he finds a Vietnam vet, he stops and blows Taps. Then he leaves a penny on a headstone.
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At one time, IBM was considered an innovative, model employer, and boasted of the number of its employees who telecommuted. Those days are over.
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Who on earth would go to the trouble of stealing an old picture of a musky from a men’s room, let alone one that was all over the internet anyway?
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John Taylor sued over the requirement that he register his drone for a good reason: The rules don’t work. Read more →
When the kids at Brainerd High School voted in a mock election last November, Donald Trump crushed Hillary Clinton. So the reaction this week to a comment in the high school yearbook shouldn’t be at all surprising. Read more →
Most journalists of a certain age have a story about the hatred between the New York Times and Washington Post. The two newspapers have waged a pitch battle for generations to be the nation’s newspaper of record. Read more →
We have still not been able to determine why ducklings consistently pick the worst possible place to try to jump off a curb. Read more →
The National Press Club is filing an objection over what it says is the ‘manhandling’ of a reporter who tried to ask a question of a commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission.
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Adams Jones, the Baltimore Orioles star who focused attention on racism among baseball fans, has a message today for people who dismiss his claims.
‘Come play centerfield,’ he said in an essay. Read more →
The Mayo Clinic is requiring its employees to fly out of the Rochester airport when flying on business, the Post Bulletin reports. The Mayo Clinic runs the airport. Read more →
Somewhere in Oregon, there is a young man being raised to be honest and take responsibility for his occasional wrongdoing. Read more →
Over the years we’ve provided plenty of examples of the perfectly-written obituary, in which we are invited to grieve the loss of someone we may not have known. One such obituary appears today in the Star Tribune.
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