Month: January 2007

PLEASE NOTE: THIS EVENT CANCELLED. “If there is a thief in a novel,” said Elif Shafak recently, “it doesn’t make the novelist a thief.” Nevertheless, the Turkish novelist faced three years in prison for the purported crime of “insulting Turkishness” by having an Armenian character in her novel The Bastard of Istanbul refer to Turks…

Even casual strollers of downtown St. Paul will most likely notice the majestic High Bridge, just west of the business district. Towering above the other bridges of the city’s scenic Mississippi River valley and summiting at 160 feet above the Big Muddy, the High Bridge carries Smith Avenue from the bustling West Seventh Street commercial…

I’m wearing yellow in honor of Jupiter,” declared design-cum-business maven Stephanie Odegard. The Minneapolis native was in her twelfth-floor studio in the New York Design Center, cosseted in a modest office near two large showrooms that feature her acclaimed carpets and furniture. Odegard Inc. has six sales offices in the United States, operations in Nepal,…

A recent intercepted email exchange between Monica Moses, executive director of product innovation at the Star Tribune, and Steve Perry, editor of City Pages, provided both a good laugh and good fodder for online discussion of “What the hell are newspapers and why are they seemingly dying?”  The exchange (posted on The Rake’s media blog)…

One of life’s great truths—one that we desperately seek to avoid with proverbs and catechisms and even magazine articles—is that beneath its surface lies complexity. Our beloved fictions of heroes and villains crumble with scrutiny, leaving only convolution, shifting meanings, and unstable realities. The same is true of things. Even the simplest object has its…