Bob CollinsIt was the perfect plan. How could it possibly have not worked? Danielle Shea of Quincy, Mass., was supposed to graduate from Quinnipiac University in Connecticut over the weekend. The whole family was going to be there to watch. They would, no doubt, be so proud. Her mother had given her thousands of dollars for 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.
With less than a month before the official opening of the Green Line, street.mn’s David Levinson takes a look today at one particular stretch of the route: Washington Ave SE. Many of the problems he highlights, he notes, will be solved in time. The signals will be timed better and maybe pedestrians will start paying Read more →
Commercial radio and TV will probably die off when the :15 and :30 second advertisement does. One gets the sense that the day is approaching, considering advertising’s growing fascination with docu-ads, entertaining films that, at the end, sell you something.
The latest comes from Cornetto, a U.K. ice cream company, which has taken 8 minutes to tell you that more than just the world of advertising is changing in a hurry. Read more →
Jill Abramson, the ousted boss at the New York Times, is expected to speak for the first time about her firing from the Times. She’s giving the commencement speech this morning at Wake Forest.
Watch it here. Read more →
Kevin Love can come forward any minute now and say ‘I don’t want to leave Minnesota.’
Any… minute… now, Kevin. Read more →
We like to think of our generation as smarter than those who went before, but we dump junk down the throats of our kids, spurred on by the marketing of food companies.
Read more →
Don Meyer, the long-time men’s basketball coach at Northern State University in Aberdeen, has died, the Associated Press reports today. He had also once been coach at Hamline.
Read more →
“We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate facilities are inherently unequal.” With that, the U.S. Supreme Court overruled several states’ system of providing separate and unequal education to the children of the United States — one for whites, and one for blacks. That Read more →
A plan to let the students ride a camel Wednesday, apparently the last day of class, was canceled, reportedly because some students felt it was racist. Read more →
It’s National Bike to Work (Wearing a Parka) Day today and science writer Joseph Stromberg gives the pot a good stir on Vox by suggesting it’s time to stop forcing people to wear bike helmets. Read more →
An anonymous senior at the school today left 3,000 paper cranes around the school, apparently to help dispel the image of the Edina student as a self-absorbed rich kid Read more →
The end-of-hockey-game handshake is the epitome of good sportsmanship — most days. Read more →
The case of Mario Hernandez defies all logic. When he signed up to fight in Vietnam, and took his oath to uphold the Constitution, he thought he was becoming a citizen. He had a Social Security number that he got when he arrived in the United States as a child. He went on to a career as a prison guard. He voted.
He did everything a good U.S. citizen does. Then he tried to go on a cruise with his wife and when he tried to get a passport, he found out he’s not a citizen after all. Read more →
Bullying reached a boiling point over in Kenosha, Wisconsin, when a father got a restraining order against a kindergartner who allegedly was bullying his daughter. Read more →
Carl retired as an NPR newsreader a few years ago, and last night he taped his final episode of Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me. Of his many accomplishments, proving that a serious news person can have a personality may be the most important, especially for public radio types. Read more →