A few months ago, while walking along the Stone Arch Bridge with a friend from Manhattan, the bright blue Guthrie Theater looming above us, I realized that Jean Nouvel’s big new thing might be one of the few places in Minneapolis that would actually impress a New Yorker. So we wandered into one of its … Read more
As a relative newcomer to the Rake family, I was reassured and gratified by fresh research asserting that you, the average Rake reader, are not much of a couch potato. Or if you are, your eyeballs are fixed to a book or magazine rather than a TV screen. The numbers say twenty-six percent of you … Read more
When I was a kid, I wanted to grow up to be a lot of things. I wanted to be Carol Burnett. I wanted to be a trapeze artist, performing death-defying loop de loops high above the crowds while wearing a dazzling bikini made entirely of rubies and sapphires. I wanted to be a kindergarten … Read more
One of life’s great truths—one that we desperately seek to avoid with proverbs and catechisms and even magazine articles—is that beneath its surface lies complexity. Our beloved fictions of heroes and villains crumble with scrutiny, leaving only convolution, shifting meanings, and unstable realities. The same is true of things. Even the simplest object has its … Read more
A recent intercepted email exchange between Monica Moses, executive director of product innovation at the Star Tribune, and Steve Perry, editor of City Pages, provided both a good laugh and good fodder for online discussion of “What the hell are newspapers and why are they seemingly dying?” The exchange (posted on The Rake’s media blog) … Read more
I’m wearing yellow in honor of Jupiter,” declared design-cum-business maven Stephanie Odegard. The Minneapolis native was in her twelfth-floor studio in the New York Design Center, cosseted in a modest office near two large showrooms that feature her acclaimed carpets and furniture. Odegard Inc. has six sales offices in the United States, operations in Nepal, … Read more
Even casual strollers of downtown St. Paul will most likely notice the majestic High Bridge, just west of the business district. Towering above the other bridges of the city’s scenic Mississippi River valley and summiting at 160 feet above the Big Muddy, the High Bridge carries Smith Avenue from the bustling West Seventh Street commercial … Read more
PLEASE NOTE: THIS EVENT CANCELLED. “If there is a thief in a novel,” said Elif Shafak recently, “it doesn’t make the novelist a thief.” Nevertheless, the Turkish novelist faced three years in prison for the purported crime of “insulting Turkishness” by having an Armenian character in her novel The Bastard of Istanbul refer to Turks … Read more
There are a few unwritten rules of food snobbery that come into play, especially when dining in a new hot spot or restaurant run by a big-name chef. One is for the dining party to order as many courses as possible, making sure to hit all areas where the kitchen’s repertoire is considered notable. Another … Read more
Heaven knows the European Community (or whatever they are calling it this week) fails to warm the cockles of the English heart. (How would you like life in Minnesota regulated in detail by a bloated bureaucracy, living on expense accounts in a foreign land?) But one of its pleasanter side effects has been a scheme … Read more