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
If you can’t see the image above, scroll down to the PDF and click on that sucker!
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
Pete Hautman did it! In November, our favorite local mystery writer won the 2004 National Book Award. One of the nation’s highest literary honors, it was awarded for Godless, Hautman’s twelfth novel. (It is his fifth Young Adult title.) He tells us that he is now paid $2,000 a word. We think he is joking. … 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
In yesterday’s Sunday Times, Frank Rich makes a point we were trying to make ourselves a few weeks ago. In the aftermath of the election, USA Today had published a story that suggested Big, Bad, Liberal Media was scratching its collective head, wondering where it had gone so terribly wrong in understanding the country–and more … Read more