Bob CollinsThe New York Times isn’t that thrilled with the Honeycrisp apple, a fruit that has a thicker skin than some Minnesotans, apparently. 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.
‘Where is the most dangerous place for free speech in America? It’s not Iran, it’s not North Korea. We’re not going there,’ Grand Forks City Council member Terry Bjerke told a crowd this week. ‘The college campuses and the University of North Dakota are the most dangerous places for free speech.’ Read more →
The Wild ranked fourth among all major sports teams in amount of money accepted for patriotic displays, according to a congressional report released Wednesday. Read more →
Daniel Heinrich has not been charged with any crime relating to the disappearance of Jacob Wetterling. But officials identified him with a phrase that presents ethical questions for journalists: person of interest. Read more →
In the case Lt. Charles Joseph Gliniewicz the story today is, again, how we don’t know what we think we know. Read more →
Gary and Kris Rothers buried their daughter, Abby, in August in St. Elizabeth Ann Seton parish cemetery on south Highway 61 in Hastings, and then found that pots of mums were being stolen, a despicable crime, of course. Read more →
Have you ever noticed when the Star Tribune takes a photograph of its all-metro high school sports teams, it poses boys differently than the girls? Read more →
Cirrus, deservedly, is getting all of the credit for a happy ending in the sky yesterday, but BRS Aerospace, a company at South St. Paul’s Fleming Field deserves a healthy share of it. They make the parachute system that saved a pilot’s life. Read more →
It’s a bit hard to read the tea leaves this week on the subject of taxes, the new third-rail of politics in Minnesota and elsewhere. Read more →
The University of Detroit Jesuit High School is providing homeless veterans something that the rest of the nation has refused to provide: a little respect. Unfortunately, they have to die to get it. Read more →
Gary Knell, the former boss of NPR who abruptly quit in 2013 because of an offer he couldn’t refuse from National Geographic, might have set a new standard for clumsy layoff announcements.
National Geographic is in the process of gutting its staff now that it’s in the clutches of one Rupert Murdoch.
The layoffs are underway today. Read more →
This won’t be the end of the discussion about what makes millennials different, but perhaps it should. A CNBC poll finds that, at least when it comes to work, millennials aren’t much different, and there they are different, it’s all to the good. Read more →
Because what’s the point of having kids if you can’t make them miserable every now and again.
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The new Pew Research survey on religion in American life — the first since 2007– suggests the United States is becoming less religious.
That’s the headline anyway although it may overstate the shift from belief in god.
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Can you really call yourself a hunter if you have to sprawl in your deer-stand McMansion waiting for a buck to stroll by? Read more →