rakemag

Did we need another Elton John? Apparently so. With Scissor Sisters, we get the five bad children of the Rocket Man, who play keyboards with both a bang and a flounce, and write catchy dance tunes that seize your butt and bounce it across the floor. How can it be that this country, which soundly … Read more

Few venues are brave enough to put an exclamation point in their name. But that’s not the only thing that makes Pop! different. The menu of this Northeast neighborhood joint, which has become a magnet for a broad swath of hipster types, is as bright and fun as the pop-art decor. Nevertheless, please refrain from … Read more

Uptown has more than its share of restaurants where you can ensconce yourself in swanky, towering booths, eat overpriced steak, pasta, and chocolaty desserts, and revel in the company of other beautiful people. But when you take menu items from restaurants around the Twin Cities, add a sparkler here and hybrid vegetable there, and then … Read more

Out on Winnetka Avenue in Golden Valley, north of the spanking-new D’Amico, you run into a place where the bulbs in the street lights have burned out and no one seems to notice, because this is the quiet old suburbs. And that’s where you will find some mighty fine Malaysian food, even though the sign … Read more

I know who I am. I’m not looking for anything or anyone to define me. So why am I such a complete sucker for personality tests: the MMPI, Rorschach blots, Cosmopolitan’s “Hot Lover Quiz”? Recently, someone sent me a Web link to a particularly in-depth Jungian personality questionnaire. Naturally, I forwarded it to three people … Read more

Starting in the mid-nineties, Lauren Greenfield embarked on a project to photograph a broad spectrum of modern American girlhood. She documented girls in states of deep imagination: a four-year-old playing princess, an anoxeric teen who only saw fat. She captured girls getting ready for the big dance, toiling at the fat farm, and primping at … Read more

It’s quite possible that you’ve used one of Jane Frees-Kluth’s public artworks, which live among us in parks, on streets, outside public buildings. Some people sip from her drinking fountain at a housing development in Richfield; others enjoy her colorful, fishlike whirligigs dancing in the fountain at the Hennepin County Government Center. This year she … Read more

It’s never been a better time to be born a girl, and it’s never been quite so difficult to grow up female. Barbie may say, “we girls can do anything,” but what too many girls do is starve or cut themselves, have sex before they are ready to handle the consequences, or simply grow up … Read more