Bob CollinsWe detect an odd theme in some news offerings this morning: Cursing and the science surrounding it. Read more →
MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
Arts & Culture
Maybe it’s just as well he skipped the Nobel ceremony. He didn’t say much. Read more →
Dave Chappelle doesn’t do many interviews. But with a three-part Netflix special, he broke his reticence to talk about Prince.
In an interview with CBS This Morning, Chappelle said his friendship with Prince had his beginnings when his sister went to a concert. Read more →
Demographics aside, surely there must still be a place on the radio for his work. Read more →
Jimmy Breslin, perhaps the most famous of the New York tabloid columnists, died on Sunday. He was 88. A legend. The nation’s newspapers don’t do legends anymore. Read more →
StoryCorps’ Friday morning episode today provides some great advice: If you want results, dress like a leprechaun. Read more →
The Oxford comma — also known as a serial comma — will soon be extinct and a lot of people would like to make a federal case out of it.
Someone has.
Read more →
Deep in the recesses of the World Headquarters of NewsCut, there is a picture on a wall of the original employees of Minnesota Public Radio. Young Garrison Keillor, Michael Barone, and Gary Eichten standing with three others.
All of them were men. That’s the way radio was back then. Men. It wasn’t a place for diversity. Read more →
It’s unusual to read a story by NPR’s Nina Totenberg that doesn’t involve the U.S. Supreme Court; this one involves a violin.
But Totenberg has a personal connection to the violin, made by Antonio Stradivari in 1734. It was stolen from her father, virtuoso violinist Roman Totenberg, 38 years ago before it was recovered in 2015. Read more →
Thoughts and prayers this afternoon go out to the social media manager of Vice, who bit the bullet and posted this tweet today to promote an article. Read more →
Author Amy Krouse Rosenthal has died, a little more than a week after she tried to find a new spouse for her husband. Read more →
Although they get credit in captions, photojournalists work in comparative obscurity. Read more →
Today’s moment of sweetness comes from PBS NewsHour, whose “Brief but Spectacular” segments encapsule everything good about public TV.
Last evening’s segment featured writer Kelly Corrigan whose father got cancer around the time Corrigan was undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer. Read more →
Sixty-three years ago tonight (Thursday), Edward R. Murrow set a standard which TV journalism has struggled to equal every day since.
Read more →
We learned something fascinating today in the Grand Forks Herald story about a new license plate for North Dakota: There is a contest for the nation’s best license plate. Read more →