Author: Jennifer Vogel

In the photo, he’s twenty-five or so. Quite obviously, the picture was taken in the early 1970s. He is wearing loud plaid pants, a shiny pink shirt with ruffles down the front and at the cuffs, and a huge bowtie and vest. His afro is cropped, but not too close, and he’s smiling, one of…

The entire apartment, which can’t be more than fifteen feet by fifteen, is visible from the front door: the makeshift sofa, the kitchen, the workshop, the “bedroom.” In fact, Dick Donovan’s apartment, where he’s lived since August, more closely resembles a fort. “On the second morning I lived here,” he recalls, “I fried eggs from…

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…

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…

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…

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…