In August 1924, one year after a honeymoon tour of India, Alain Coulbec pushed my grandmother down the servants’ stairs at their country home outside Paris. Bruised but uninjured, she promptly pushed the noted aviator from family history, fleeing to Tahoe with her trust fund and newborn son. It didn’t matter that Coulbec had crossed … Read more
The Minneapolis City Council proved itself to be more politically adept than the Minneapolis Library Board in early December when it warded off the pleas for permanent funding of the Minneapolis Library system. Instead of the hoped-for permanent budget increases that had been dangled before the Library Board, the Council instead gave them one year’s … Read more
Five years ago, when we looked at the Twin Cities publication scene, one of the things that struck us was the editor’s column in the front of the various mags. Almost without exception, each month’s installment would feature a list of all the cool things they’d done that month. There was the businessperson they’d lunched … Read more
Pipe smokers like to claim they live longer than nonsmokers. More than four decades after the fact, they’ll still cite a 1964 Surgeon General’s report on smoking, which stated: “Death rates for pipe smokers are little if at all higher than for non-smokers …” That report and others that followed warned of negative health effects … Read more
In January, when the Winona Pie Lady, aka Mary Zimmerman, baked her one-thousandth pie, she called up Governor Tim Pawlenty to see if he would accept it. She talked to someone in his office but never heard back. So the seventy-three-year-old great-grandmother phoned Representative Gil Gutknecht, the Republican congressman from Rochester. Gutknecht agreed immediately and … Read more
Americans have long suffocated under the dead weight of silly, made-up sports like World Wide Wrestling and American Gladiator. Football, basketball, hockey, baseball, NASCAR, even golf and tennis have grown corpulent with corporate money and more branding than you see at a cattle ranch. Then there’s boxing, the oldest sport in the world, which has … Read more
Those familiar with glossy nine-dollar magazines might think they know what to expect by now: hundreds of pages featuring cadaverous European models draped in preposterous clothes and posed in surreal lighting, all presented with an editorial attitude that falls somewhere between the court of the Sun King and a Chelsea heroin rave. Experiences with that … Read more
The best news the fans of James Bond books could have heard last year was that Paul Haggis was working on the screenplay for Casino Royale, and that this movie would stick closely to Ian Fleming’s book. Haggis, the writer of Crash and Flags of Our Fathers, teamed up with writers of the last few … Read more
Just beyond the Hong Kong harbor lies Lamma Island, a small, quiet isle with small, hidden beaches and, during the time my husband and I visited, a remarkable butterfly population. After exploring the green surroundings, we sat down at a bar overlooking the water. What I remember most about that hot September day nearly six … Read more
After twelve happy years in Oxford, the happy year I spent in Cambridge was a far greater culture shock than (several years later) coming to Minnesota. The first thing I learned was that in Cambridge, it is not polite to be rude to people. If you say, “I read your book; what a lot of … Read more