Author: Katie Quirk

I’ve been thinking about spaghetti sauce a lot lately. I grew up in a very busy household with parents who didn’t have a lot of time to cook, so the sauce on our noodles was always of the canned variety. Not knowing the different between canned and fresh, we kids slurped it right up—the soggy…

Never take a self-defense class with your sisters. Especially if the class is called Training for Life, in which you learn techniques that, unlike traditional martial arts, are designed not to inflict permanent or even semi-permanent harm upon an attacker, but instead rely on a series of intensely painful, twisted pinches. Three sisters, six hands,…

Tea is a crop we could grow in Minnesota, but the end product would be so foul that no one with working taste buds would go near it. The mountainous soils of Nepal, though, produce some damn fine chai, as they call it. Swadesh Shrestha and his brother Saujanya serve it at their Uptown Minneapolis…

It was like a scene from a mobster film set in the Prohibition era. An overcast day on tired Minnehaha Avenue in South Minneapolis. I pulled up to the nondescript, red brick building that bears a sign reading “Tapestry Folkdance Center.” From the outside, it was quiet, barely a soul in sight. I figured the…

On a recent Wednesday evening, hundreds of overdressed teenage girls gathered outside Southdale’s MegaStar movie theater. Squeezed into their tightest jeans and tiniest tees, they hummed with excitement as they waited for Josh Hartnett, the movie star and Minnesota native, to arrive. Hartnett was making a rare appearance to raise money for a local charity…

The next time you wake up at three in the morning, sweating and shaking and befuddled by what the appearance of Barbara Flanagan’s bustier in your dream could possibly symbolize, don’t just make yourself a glass of warm milk, roll over, and try to forget about it. Oh no—that’s what someone in Andrew Carnegie’s day…