Bob CollinsSure, old-timers might look upon the rise of soccer as a threat to tradition, but baseball hasn’t been the National Pastime in a generation. And there are things that soccer can do for a community that softball and baseball can’t. 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.
… or at least the most popular posts on NewsCut this week. Read more →
A woman who knows something about the worldwide impact of the picture of a child in war is worried that this picture is going to prolong the agony. Read more →
Bradley Bartlett-Roche is pretty well known around Boston. He plays for tips around Faneuil Hall as the ‘Piano Kid,’ partly because the ‘Piano Man’ was already taken by another artist, and partly because he’s a kid. He’s 13. Read more →
Eight giant ships of yore, their sails unfurled, are expected to glide underneath the Duluth Aerial Lift Bridge Thursday afternoon during the “Parade of Sail” to kick off Tall Ships Duluth 2016. Read more →
A Utah woman posted on Facebook that her autistic daughter is fixated on a shirt and design that brings the 10-year-old comfort. As the daughter grows and as the shirt wears out, she buys a new version of the same shirt.
Then the company that made the shirt for Target stopped making it.
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This is the way things have to be. We know this and we’ve known this since the day we dropped the kids off at elementary school and for the first time, they didn’t turn around to wave goodbye. Read more →
Researchers found that as men’s income increased in comparison with their spouses, their psychological well-being and health declined. The men’s mental and physical health (measured by self-assessment) were at their worst during years when they were their family’s sole breadwinner, according to The Atlantic. Read more →
If there was a nuclear core of my childhood, it was probably the Woolworth’s store on Main Street in my hometown, which sat next to a W.T. Grant, which was across the street from an S.S. Kresge.
My home milltown had a vibrant downtown and if you were a kid with a couple of pennies, which you might have lifted from your mother’s purse and still won’t say out loud, you headed for Woolworth’s.
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It’s a sweet letter but what is particular comforting is this: Kids still write letters to the president of the United States. Read more →
We must decide for ourselves which state fair is better, but you have to admit that the outhouse races in Iowa are, as we say in Minnesota, ‘different’ Read more →
It it hadn’t been for schoolkids picking milkweeds, a lot of sailors wouldn’t have lived long enough to tell their stories of surviving ship sinkings in World War II.
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Give the people of Morristown, New Jersey some credit for at least acknowledging out loud — sort of — that a person’s car is their castle and they have a god-given right to do whatever they want therein.
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We are told today that this image of a little boy, hurt in the civil war that has leveled Aleppo in Syria, is shocking the world. Now what? Read more →
A cemetery is a destination venue, but perhaps there are better ways to attract people to them than dying and funerals.
That’s the most fascinating aspect of the brouhaha over plans for a hot rod show at a Roseville cemetery: its directors want people to come visit without having it be about dying. Read more →