Month: March 2006

Several artists who shall remain nameless wrote to complain that they had not been included in last month’s cover story about hot Minnesota art stars [“Making It”]. We normally love to namedrop and logroll terrific overlooked artists, but we’re looking after you here, folks. Take our word for it: There is no elegant way to press these sour grapes into the sweet wine of publicity. But we’ll mention you the next chance we get!

Send along your own rakish reflections to: letters@rakemag.com. But please remember: We assume submissions are intended for publication, and we cannot return materials sent by mail. (Don’t send valuable originals!) Letters may also be edited for length and clarity.

In your review long ago of Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King [the Broken Clock, December 2004], you suggested to bring “plenty of nerd repellent.” Do you know where I might be able to purchase some effective nerd repellent? I live in a backward state called Illinois where the inmates are running the asylum, so to speak. Social norms have been reversed and nerds have been able to focus their anger and frustration to repress anything that is cool. Nerds have banded together to give the appearance of coolness in their social cliques, but really they just create jealousy through exclusion. They then pass off this aloofness as coolness and convince the suckers in the baby boom generation that they are actually cool and prestigious thereby gaining access to all the best jobs and exclusive clubs and such. Now you know what I know, I can only pray that I make it through the night and I am not taken out by some nerd gestapo.

Patrick Sherman,
Palatine, IL

I have been in the organic-food industry for over thirty-seven years. I have been a retailer, wholesaler, producer, manufacturer, distributor, and IT guy for the largest organic network in the U.S. I will not attempt to repudiate your claims in “Trust but Verify & Serve with a Light Burgundy” [March], although it is very tempting, some are so ludicrous and the logic so ill conceived. I am sometimes asked why organic food is so expensive. I reply, “Why is conventionally raised food so cheap?” The premium prices that some organic growers are paid are merely the prices that every farmer should receive. We are still losing farmers. We are still consolidating farms. Folks are still abandoning rural America after graduating from high school. We pay the lowest percentage for our food of any civilized nation, but no one ever discusses the subsidies that are built into the conventional agriculture system.

P. Marc Schwartz,
St. Paul

Regarding Clinton Collins’ March column [“Who are you calling an ‘underperformer’?”]: You don’t have to go to Silicon Valley to find this point of view about U.S.-born Caucasian students. You can find it here at the U of M. I am a research faculty member in the Division of Biostatistics, School of Public Health. For fifteen years now, a substantial majority of our students have been from mainland China. The same is true of every biostatistics and statistics program in North America. I know of no instances in which a biostat or stat student from mainland China has returned after graduating, so North American junior faculty are now also mostly Chinese. With our foreign students from other countries, this means our native-born U.S. students are a distinct minority. Now, I think this is great. First, our admissions are not competitive, so our foreign students aren’t displacing anybody, and plenty of biostat jobs go begging, so they don’t take jobs from anybody. Second, because they stay here after they graduate, China is essentially exporting its best technical talent to the U.S. Personally, I like mixing with foreign students and I’ve gradually become more and more interested in Chinese culture, to the point where I’m studying Mandarin at the U, playing in the Minnesota Chinese Music Ensemble, and marrying a woman from Taiwan. However, there is some sentiment that our Chinese students are of higher caliber than our native-born students. A U.S. citizen with an M.S. in Biostatistics foregoes a lot of income in the four or five years it takes to get a Ph.D. Also, ours is not a first-tier biostatistics program, so the better native-born students tend to go to, say, Harvard or Johns Hopkins. Therefore, we need to cut our native-born students some extra slack–exactly the attitude Mr. Collins found in Silicon Valley high schools. My own experience supervising M.S. and Ph.D. theses is not consistent with this argument, and this view is by no means universally held. But it’s there.

James S. Hodges,
Minneapolis

The North Dakota article by Jennifer Vogel [“No. 1 Hard,” February] made me want to move back to North Dakota. After living in Minnesota for many years, I have listened to put-downs of North Dakota from fellow workers and friends. But I have always taken it with good humor. After all, most of these people went to a school with a rodent for a mascot. I feel fortunate that I have lived in both North Dakota and Minnesota and it is sad to see what is happening in small towns and rural areas in both states.

Ed Raney,
Lake Elmo