Bob CollinsHe lives in an old farmhouse on 40 acres he bought for $5 an acre years ago. That’s valuable land these days, and so Barth has given it away to provide more music for kids in school, the newspaper reports today.
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MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
Arts & Culture
The Rock ‘n Roll food fight that started last weekend when long-time Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame critic Steve Miller was inducted into the Hall of Fame has intensified.
Miller called the people who run the music industry ‘gangsters and crooks.’
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Ralphie May, the comic who was booted off the schedule at a venue in Bemidji, is finding new fame by being infamous. Read more →
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I got a good look at Cottage Grove’s newest addition when I was testing out an external mount on a GoPro a couple of weeks ago: an island in the Mississippi River.
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Slate’s Leon Neyfakh is the latest media watcher to predict doom for Public Radio, specifically the organization formerly known as National Public Radio.
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The tribute last night to the inductees of the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame revealed a continuing split between the artists it honors and the institution. Read more →
Bruce Springsteen announced on his website that Sunday’s concert in North Carolina is canceled because of a new law that fails to include sexual orientation and gender identity as protected categories in an anti-discrimination law. Read more →
Thanks to the migration patterns of previous centuries, people from Sweden aren’t the exotic species in Minnesota that they might be elsewhere.
But I couldn’t ignore the invitation of the Swedish Tourist Association to call a ‘random Swede,’ part of its campaign to get people to know the place. Read more →
There’s certainly plenty to love in this video about a group of surfers on Lake Superior. The visuals are stunning. More impressive is the revelation that they’re not just chasing waves on a lake.
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In the category of ‘What’s Your Passion?’ we give you Mike Dennison, 37, of Stoneham, Mass., who invites us to consider the source of our various inspirations. Read more →
Veteran actor Kosmo Esplan, 8, has been a big fan of Carol Burnett for more than half his life. The Northfield boy has never had stage fright, he says. But he’s worried that someday he might. So he wrote a letter to Burnett looking for a little advice, Northfield News reports. And he got it. Read more →
Even though he’d fallen earlier in the day and wasn’t feeling well, Arne Mayala walked into a Forest Lake dance studio and asked for a lesson. Read more →
She won an Oscar for her role as Helen Keller in ‘The Miracle Worker,’ but her legacy should be that she was also one of the first people to talk openly about her depression, which she did after she was diagnosed bipolar and tried to kill herself in the early ’80s. Read more →
If you’re lucky, when you die they’ll say something like what Conan O’Brien said last night, hours after he found out that comedian Garry Shandling died. Read more →
At a dinner in Argentina last night, President Barack Obama had that look on his face that every man of a certain age has when someone asks him to dance. Read more →