Bob CollinsWe see your story of selfish professional athletes and raise you one young woman in Wisconsin who sawed her MVP award in pieces to give to her teammates. 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.
Keith Robinson, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Texas, Austin, and Angel L. Harris, a professor of sociology and African and African-American studies at Duke, found in their study that parental involvement may actually hinder student achievement. Read more →
In recent weeks,there have been some astounding acts of grace in Minnesota courtrooms. Read more →
Ice out at Gooseberry Falls is a raging, violent affair. Just what the winter deserved. Read more →
Ohio judges hand out sentences intended to shame the offender. Read more →
On Friday night, Kyle Russell, a tech reporter for Business Insider, was wearing Google Glass eyewear while walking in the Mission District of San Francisco.
If there’s anywhere that would appreciate a little tech, you’d think it would be San Francisco. But it’s also a symbol of the tech-savvy pushing out the ‘little people.’ Read more →
As surprising as the University of Minnesota men’s hockey team’s defensive “no-show” was at Saturday night’s NCAA championship game, anyone could see the Dinkytown arrests and damage coming from a mile away. And the post-“riot” quarterbacking has been even more predictable.
And this is in a city that lost a championship game. Read more →
Not everyone openly subscribes to the prosperity theology, but it’s more common than many mainstream Christians want to admit. Read more →
Some videos are just made for a Friday afternoon. This is one of them.
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If I shout at you while driving, ‘hey, there’s a cop up ahead and he’s running a speed trap,’ there’s no way that is a crime. If people can throw as much money as they want at candidates in the name of free speech, I certainly have the right to say what I want. At least, for now.
What if my headlights do the talking? Read more →
During rush hour, the study found that the volume of traffic on the remaining lane(s) increased, but not to the point where it slowed down traffic. Read more →
The Minnesota Legislature is slowly moving a bill stripping them of their immunity if arrested, although the sense is it’s only because of the publicity the bill has generated.
It’s been impossible to find out how often the so-called ‘get out of jail’ card is being used, although the tepid reaction to the proposed legislation suggests it gets played fairly often. Read more →
Last night the kids at the University of Minnesota took to the streets to stomp on police cars after the Gophers hockey team beat the University of North Dakota in a semifinal game. Read more →
I sat down last night to begin the laborious process of changing all of my passwords now that the Heartbleed bug, described in this space on Wednesday, has been discovered. Though most reputable sites have closed the hole, keeping the same password is the very definition of closing the barn door after the horse has escaped.
Then I ran into a common problem: I have too many passwords to provide different ones for every site. Read more →