Author: Eric Dregni

  • North Dakota High

    The world’s tallest structure is not the Sears Tower, the Space Needle, or those strange conjoined skyscrapers in Kuala Lumpur. The acme of human achievement isn’t even in a city. It stands a few miles outside the hamlet of Blanchard, in rural northeast North Dakota. Two million feet of one-foot-thick steel guy-wire stretch upward in…

  • Stand Down

    Exit 127 off Interstate 90 doesn’t seem to go anywhere. There are no towns, no farms, no apparent reason to build an exit in the middle of the driest, flattest section of South Dakota, a desolate expanse of land. If you steal a glance at the right moment, though, you may notice a nondescript vinyl-sided…

  • The Trek Begins

    A few weeks ago, William Shatner stopped by Riverside, Iowa, to audition locals for Invasion Iowa, a sci-fi screenplay he supposedly co-wrote with Leonard Nimoy. It turned out to be a put-on. There will be no Invasion Iowa, only a reality-TV show making fun of Riversiders. Why did Shatner, an unapologetic Canadian, decide to pick…

  • Funny Money

    When Fort Knox couldn’t hold enough gold to back all the paper money in circulation, the U.S. government in about 1913 began weaning the greenback from being a promissory note for precious metals. Instead, the mighty dollar became “fiat currency.” In other words, it became a slippery theoretical thing that depended on the Federal Reserve…

  • Do It Yourself!

    Maybe they were emboldened by the frank talk of Dick Cheney. Or maybe they’re feeling a little overextended by their thrilling new store in Bloomington, which finally opened in mid-July. Maybe they just aren’t comfortable with their English yet. But Ikea, the upscale Swedish company that sells lots of unassembled Scandinavian furniture, has recently seemed…

  • Land of Milk & Money

    Growing up in Minnesota, I was always taught that Scandinavian society was some sort of utopian system that helps everyone. The taxes were high, but the payoff was the world’s highest standard of living. Living in an age of increasingly regressive tax cuts and anti-welfare rhetoric, I thought it was time to look to Norway…