Jennifer Vogel The only woman I ever knew who was truly serious about plucking her eyebrows—or at least would admit it—was a long-ago girlfriend of my dad’s. This was the 1970s. She plucked and pulled with persistence, until there wasn’t much hair left. Then she’d take an eyebrow pencil, heat it with a match, and sketch on … Read more
Lakewood Cemetery, situated between Lake Calhoun and Lake Harriet in South Minneapolis, is a place of big lawns and grand monuments. It is one of the city’s fanciest and most meticulously maintained community spaces. Indeed, it holds the graves of some of our state’s most prestigious former citizens, including Hubert Horatio Humphrey, Paul and Sheila … Read more
On the third floor of the temporary library in downtown Minneapolis—a retrofitted office building that once housed the Federal Reserve Bank—a skinny man with a shock of white hair paced hurriedly up and down the aisles carrying a bouquet of roses wrapped in a wad of shredded newspaper. He looked disheveled, a little like Sam … Read more
The house stands on a barren corner lot, across from a vacant, industrial patch of Northeast Minneapolis. Nearby, the tracks of the Burlington Northern cut a swath to the Mississippi. And in the other direction, just around the corner, there is a busy grocery and liquor mart called Sentyrz, which one neighbor calls “the store … Read more
In State Center, Iowa, a town of barely a thousand people that, in fact, occupies the state’s center, there’s a small white house whose owners deck the halls with an extravagance that verges on the fantastic. From the beginning of October to the week after New Year’s, the home of Dwayne and Janet Pundt (they … Read more
The last time anybody heard from Eric Utne, it was the year 2000 and he had just walked away from the magazine he’d founded and run for almost fifteen years. The Utne Reader was faltering. It had published a “Y2K Citizen’s Action Guide,” which predicted a radical reorganization of society that never happened. Circulation and … Read more
I hadn’t smoked pot in more than a year, but why not? I’d just packed up and dragged everything I own 1,700 miles from Minneapolis to Seattle. Quite a daring move. I was feeling like Lewis and Clark in one, Amelia Earhart, a pirate even. A little marijuana? Peee-shaw. I huffed a huge drag. Unfortunately … Read more