Bob Collins
For a guy whose weapon was a typewriter, Frank Deford lived a dangerous life. He gave his opinions and, on occasion, they chipped away at his legacy.
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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.
Roy Riegel, who died nine years ago, is being flushed down the urinals at baseball stadiums across the country.
It’s fitting, perhaps. Mr. Riegel was a plumber. Read more →
The shame we feel in incidents like this is our brain’s way of telling us what our heart doesn’t want to accept: We own the racism that lives among us. Read more →
Ann Schieck-Solomon and her husband, Kal, have been donating money to a scholarship in Ann’s daughter’s name since she died as the result of a car crash in November 2012.
This year they wanted to change things up a bit. So they gave away goats. Read more →
‘I am never going to let this dog go,’ Christi Smith, of Brooklyn Park, told the Pioneer Press in 2013. ‘I owe him for the rest of his life.’
Alas, the rest of TaterTot’s life was short. The pit bull, who became famous for saving Smith’s son, was euthanized yesterday. Cancer. Read more →
The closing highlights why Minnesota manufacturing jobs disappear. Factories often make things people don’t want or need anymore.
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Particularly in a rural part of the state, finding people to volunteer for party leadership at the county or district level can be difficult. But the answer isn’t to take whomever is willing to do the job.
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The Americans with Disabilities Act didn’t just make it easier for people with disabilities to move around. It literally changed the way we think about the worth of people. Read more →
It happened last Wednesday evening at a Carolina Mudcats game.
Air Force Sgt. Lance Daigle returned from deployment in Kuwait. His children, Cameron, 11, and Karley, 13, were to throw out the first pitch, believing they’d won an online raffle.
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Someday this will be generally ignored, as the space program was once it became routine. Today is not that day, however. Read more →
When a pickup truck flipped over when tornadoes struck Texas on Saturday, there were plenty of reasons for strangers to think of themselves first.
But they didn’t. Read more →
The online reaction to an otherwise sweet moment is quite the barometer for the divisions in America.
A typical response has been “would Americans do this?”
Maybe it was just a nice moment and leave it at that, America. Read more →
When a newspaper in a small Iowa community won a Pulitzer Prize a few weeks ago, it earned justifiable attention and some that, frankly, bordered on the condescending from the big city media. Of course, great journalism can be done more than a day’s drive from the nearest ocean. And lots of other smart things can happen away from the coasts too.
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Netflix’s “13 Reasons Why” is a popular series that is getting some credit for at least bringing up the issue of teen suicide, which is a sad testament to how unable or how unwilling parents are to talk about the second-leading killer of young adults.
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There is joy, and then there is the unbridled joy when you catch a homerun at a baseball game. Or so we imagine. Read more →