Bob Collins
Thou shalt not pray at high school football games, at least if you’re a coach. 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.
We don’t always know what we think we know. Read more →
You can probably get a pretty good deal on a professional football team most people in Minnesota have never heard of. Read more →
North Dakota State University is considering a significant change to its education program that would allow students to get credit in a subject without actually taking a course in the subject. Students would still be required to take some specific courses — English 102, for example — but other credits would be absorbed into other Read more →
If you live in a metropolitan area, there’s a pretty fair chance that you’ll pull up to an intersection today and a homeless person will be standing there with a cardboard sign.
You might throw a few bucks his/her way, but probably not. More likely, you’ll try to avoid eye contact, and feel fairly miserable in the process.
There’s an alternative. Read more →
It’s somewhat comforting to know that the book-spine trash talking between libraries didn’t end after the Toronto and Kansas City playoff series.
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Quiz time.
It’s a company that has operations all over the country.
It’s already doing business locally.
Who is it? Read more →
Let’s just get this out of the way now and not speak of it again. Read more →
The urgency, the timing, and the history messages us that this isn’t going to be good news for one of the best educators the University of Minnesota ever had. Read more →
In the aftermath of last night’s World Series game, a real mystery continues to swirl around the starter for the Kansas City Royals’ starting pitcher. What did he know about the health of his father and when did he know it? And why did we know it first? Read more →
On the heels of last week’s book-spine smackdown between public libraries in Toronto and Kansas City over the baseball playoffs, we now turn to the musical portion of baseball’s postseason ‘trash talk.’ Read more →
It was an awful tragedy in Dallas this week when Patti Stevens, 54, took her own life, two weeks after a mentally ill former Texas A&M football player hacked her husband to death with a machete while he was out for an early-morning jog.
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If you want to truly appreciate how good we’ve got it, just pull over the next 97-year-old person you meet.
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Today’s ‘let’s blame social media’ item comes from Boston where a theater critic is lambasting an increasing practice in theater: audience laughter where there shouldn’t be any.
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Target Corporation has unveiled an app that will allow people you don’t know, potentially from neighborhoods that aren’t yours, to show up at your door on Halloween because the word got out you’re giving away some decent candy.
What could possibly go wrong? Read more →