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.
This video is burning up the Internet this week. It’s tragic and lovely at the same time, and it comes with a troubling question: Why is Alzheimer’s so much more common in women? Of the more than 5 million people in the United States who have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, two-thirds are women, the Washington Read more →
We flew down to Rushford on Monday and it was impossible to mistake what the summer rain has done this year compared to previous years. It’s green in a way that makes you feel selfish for keeping the beauty the state can offer to ourselves.
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A woman wanted to drive despite having her plates revoked, so she found a piece of cardboard and some coloring pencils and made her own license plate. Read more →
Minneapolis is considering a streetcar line on Nicollet Avenue from Lake Street to Fifth Street NE. St. Paul is noodling on a streetcar line on Seventh Street between Randolph Avenue and Arcade Street. These might be bad ideas, CityLabs’ Eric Jaffe suggests today, indicating that where streetcars have been put back in service in America, Read more →
KMSP provides a perfect example of the threat within with its report that Abdirahmaan Muhumed, the second man with Minneapolis connections to die fighting for ISIS, was close to terrorism’s weapon of choice in the U.S. He worked at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. Two former employees confirmed working with Muhumed at Delta Global Services, Read more →
Serge Vorobyov, the local guy who got arrested last winter when he tossed money in the Mall of America rotunda in an attempt to woo his estranged wife back (it didn’t work), tossed more dough from the Sky Ride at the State Fair last weekend. “It was good fun,” he tells City Page’s Aaron Rupar. Read more →
If you want to hear high school students wail, tell them they’ll have to take 30 minutes every Friday to read something. The Duluth News Tribune reports on the reception East High School principal Laurie Knapp got at a student assembly yesterday when she announced the district has added 30 minutes to the academic day. Read more →
Substitute “killed” or “murdered” or “executed” for beheaded in this headline and does it have the same impact? Probably not. We’re generally more desensitized to the atrocities of war and terrorism and the Islamic extremists know that. Beheading carries its own terror. So should we be complicit in furthering their terror? Or is there an Read more →
We’re seeing a generational change for the news media, an industry where relationships and practically everything else was sacrificed for what traditionally constituted “success” in the business. Read more →
The Minnesota court on Tuesday overturned a lower court ruling that tossed out the blood-drawn on Derek Stavish of Sartell, Minnesota, who was driving drunk in June 2012 and crashed his truck, killing an occupant. Read more →
If Ty Hoffman is eventually to have been discovered hiding out in one for the last month, it likely wouldn’t surprise a lot of pilots. Read more →
Faricy worked on the restoration of Saint Paul’s Landmark Center in the ’70s, which was saved from destruction in what would’ve been an everlasting “what on earth were they thinking?” moment for the city. Read more →
A woman at Columbia University, one of dozens of schools which allegedly did little to investigate reports of sexual assaults on campus, is starting the school year today by carrying a mattress from class to class. “I was raped in my own bed,” Emma Sulkowicz tells The Guardian. “I could have taken my pillow, but Read more →
The oldest flight attendant in the United States has been grounded. Bob Reardon, a St. Paul man who turned 90 in May, retired from Delta over the weekend, and, apparently, not by choice. Read more →
Another police scandal is brewing, this time in Atwater, Minnesota, east of Willmar, where the police chief is accused of beheading a pet chicken.
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Bob Collins