Growing up in Minnesota, I was always taught that Scandinavian society was some sort of utopian system that helps everyone. The taxes were high, but the payoff was the world’s highest standard of living. Living in an age of increasingly regressive tax cuts and anti-welfare rhetoric, I thought it was time to look to Norway … Read more
Jay Bakker, the son of former televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, is not the same innocent little pudgy kid whom viewers knew as Jamie Charles. Now twenty-eight, he has piercings in his lip and eyebrow, his arms are sleeved in tattoos, and he plays in a Social Distortion cover band called the Creeps. Bakker … Read more
SPECIAL: Napa Spring Report If there is a paradise on earth, for me this is Napa Valley. And it isn’t just about the wine, or about the vineyards. But it doesn’t take long to see why this narrow valley makes some of the world’s very best wines. The weather is perfect. The hot air balloons … Read more
Few photographers have captured a neighborhood as well or as thoroughly as Wing Young Huie did with his massive Lake Street USA series of a few years back. For his latest project, he and his wife and collaborator Tara hit the open road to visit thirty-eight states, Canada, and Mexico in search of the Asian … Read more
April 14, 2004 It’s spring sale time, with plenty of fun and informative tastings to go along with the vigorous market. New releases have arrived, the economy is trying its best to support our interest in better wines, and soon, it is promised, our landscape will finally turn from gray to green. Surdyk’s led the … Read more
“Just to get it over with and done.” While that’s the fictional Tyrell Rawls speaking in “Cumberland Breakdown,” from Oates’ latest collection of stories, I Am No One You Know, he could be explaining how his creator has churned out no fewer than forty-three novels by the age of sixty-six. Without a doubt, there’s more … Read more
Considering her Pulitzer for A Thousand Acres, a deft recasting of Shakespeare’s King Lear in the cornfields of Iowa, Jane Smiley knows very well how to spin good fiction from the human capacity for self-delusion and hubris. She attacks that theme from another angle in Good Faith (due in paperback May 11), in which greed, … Read more
For a guy who so clearly enjoys a tasty snack, Steve Almond looks awfully thin in his author’s photo. In Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America, the Boston-based food writer waxes rhapsodic on Tangy Taffy, Goo Goo Clusters, Peanut Bing, and a hundred others we’d never even heard of—small wonder, considering that … Read more
If a flock of crows is a “murder,” what should you call a flock of mystery writers? An exhumation, perhaps. Whatever the term is, this month brings new books by four Minnesota-based authors of thrillers and police procedurals. In the interest of supporting the hometown team, here’s a rundown of whodunnit and where they’ll be … Read more
For its eleventh year, the Walker’s annual celebration of female film directors kicks off with the apropos new documentary In the Company of Women, a look at the vital role of female filmmakers in the nineties’ independent-cinema explosion. Though it sometimes feels like a ninety-minute commercial for the Independent Film Channel (which funded it), it’s … Read more