Bob Collins
Few stories have touched people like the friendship story of Erling Kindem, 89, and his 3-year-old neighbor Emmett Rychner of Farmington. Today is the day the two part ways. Read more →
MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
Rick Bacon is the latest to contribute to our growing of list of obituaries the way they should be written. He wrote his own. Read more →
No matter what’s going on in the world, reflected by today’s news stories, there are still first-grade teachers. No one changes the world like a first-grade teacher.
This might be the most fascinating news image we’ve seen in a few weeks. Protesters confronted police in Ferguson, Missouri, where a police officer shot to death an unarmed teen who allegedly had struggled with the officer. Does the dog really help? When the sun went down, however, protesters resorted to what usually happens in Read more →
Fifty-five years is an awfully long time to wait before giving an African-American man the diploma he was denied because he had a picnic in park that was off-limits to blacks. Read more →
Golf has been losing its popularity in recent years. Maybe it’s just too courteous. Read more →
“It’s like trying to buy bread in Poland in the 1980s,” Jeff Mudge tells the Pioneer Press. It’s funny he chose the analogy because several paragraphs into the weekend Pioneer Press’ story about how long it takes to get a driver’s license road test, I was thinking, “this sounds like the old Eastern Bloc days.” Read more →
Something different accompanies the start of the school year this year. For the first time in modern U.S. history, whites will be the minority. Non-Hispanic white students are still expected to be the largest racial group in the public schools this year at 49.8 percent, CBS News reports. But the National Center for Education Statistics Read more →
This was the last image Jamaliah Jannah had of her two children, before they swept away in a tsunami in Indonesia 10 years ago that killed 275,000 people. The four year old daughter, Raudhatul, was swept onto an island, found by a fisherman, and raised with the name Winni by the fisherman’s mother. A couple Read more →
Well played, Twin Cities comedian Mike Brody. Related: Kevin Love: Overrated, Underrated, or Properly Rated? (Grantland).
You’ve probably heard that today is the 40th anniversary of the day Richard Nixon resigned the presidency, a day that now is typically marked by younger people revealing the massive failure of American history teachers. Read more →
August is the most underrated month on the calendar, resigned to being only known as the end of summer. Read more →
NPR’s Melissa Block is looking for a stranger who was passing through Minneapolis in late July 2013.
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A new app lets users rate neighborhoods on a “sketchiness” factor. Is it racist? Read more →
The Fargo Forum says the Rape and Abuse Crisis Center complained about the sign which advertised chainsaws and duct tape in its ex-wife sale.
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