Bob CollinsIt was a long walk to school this week for Kirsten Cox, of Swanton, Ohio, who got kicked off the school bus for bullying and was forced by her dad to walk to school instead. That’s his story, anyway. Read more →
MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
This or That
Opening a can of tuna is hard, the Wall St. Journal reported this week. Millennials can’t be bothered opening the can and draining the oil/water and then preparing the tuna. Just thinking about the process makes us want to take a nap; it’s all so exhausting.
That’s pretty much the best the Journal could come up with to explain why the sales of cans of tuna are dropping. Read more →
Ruth Graham, who writes for Slate, probably is a cat lover. Read more →
Olimpia Warsaw, who has Parkinson’s disease and diabetes and has trouble communicating, flew from Detroit to Chicago for her ex-husband’s funeral. The flight was late, the airline lost her baggage, and she missed part of the service. Read more →
Back in the day, people wrote letters — letters! — to people they’d usually never met. Back and forth they’d go until, for one reason or another, the chain would stop and people would go about their lives. Read more →
Zach Carlsen, of Stillwater, had a ‘crazy idea’ last year, he acknowledges. He’d wear the same outfit every day for a year as part of a personal mission to minimize the number of small decisions he makes every day and focus his energy on bigger things.
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A new journal article says dogs fared poorly compared to cats, wolves, chimps and pigeons when it came to intelligence, But there’s something pigeons, wolves and chimps can’t do: keep you alive. Read more →
The U.S. Forest Service has released this video of one gone awry. A couple actually thought putting an explosive — Tannerite — in the middle of a tinder-dry wildland in Arizona was a good idea.
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Jason Stiber could probably just pay his $1,000 fine for distracted driving and get on with his life, but the Westport, Conn., man goes to court soon in search of justice, he says. Stiber was pulled over for talking on his hash brown. Read more →
Three years ago, Vicki Wilner, of Cleveland, Minn., misplaced her wedding ring while on a trip to Arizona. She looked everywhere for it but finally gave up any hope of finding it. Read more →
Truer words were never spoken than those by Abby Jiminez, the owner of Nadia Cakes in two Twin Cities suburbs, who seems as surprised as anyone that there’d be a market for a cake depicting a turkey’s butt with a thong surrounded by dollar bills.
‘I was kind of surprised at how many people wanted this,’ she tells the Star Tribune. Read more →
In 1945, she became the first African American to join the Coast Guard. She got a degree in psychology and became a professor at Fordham. She’s also thought to be the last survivor of the worst racial attack in U.S history. Read more →
The crew was dropping water on the so-called Woolsey Fire earlier this month when it got a call to rescue people trapped on a mountain top. Read more →
The mug I’d chosen for the morning coffee today gave me today’s NewsCut Flashback — yeah, it’s going to be a thing for the next few months. I picked it up at Dog Mountain a few years ago, a place created first by a man and his love for dogs (specifically: his black lab, Sally). His widow, Gwen, worked hard to keep the place open. But in 2013, she killed herself, too.
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In Ashwaubenon, Wis., a turkey named “Smoke” rules the roost.
Smoke isn’t like most turkeys in Wisconsin — insert your own joke here — because he’s a loner. Also, he won’t go away, the Washington Post says.
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