We were a little pressed for time yesterday, since our presence was requested at Minnesota Magazine Day. This is an annual to-do over at the Hyatt, hosted graciously by the Minnesota Ad Federation. It consists of a “magazine grab”—basically a shopping spree for most major titles from Hearst, Fairchild, Conde Nast, and the other big … Read more
Can you give me some advice on how to deal with Woodward and Bernstein? I had the opportunity to have lunch with an editor of the Beijing English language daily newspaper China Daily on Sunday. He was in town as part of an exchange program for Asian journalists to see how we do it over … Read more
Okay, let’s add one more to that list of truths we hold self-evident: keep the fraggin’ ball in the damn park. I suppose it was inevitable that Johan Santana would eventually run into a little patch like this, but what’s been sort of disturbing is how hard he’s getting hit. The Blue Jays had four … Read more
As Mike Mosedale mentions here, not everything is tea, sugar, and circulation growth over at the Newspaper of the Twin Cities. For the cilvilian, the finer points of newspaper Guild-speak are often hard to understand. (You mean professional writers have actually stopped sniping at each other long enough to form a working labor union? My … Read more
In the book Freakonomics that I mentioned the other day, there’s a chapter called “Where Have All the Criminals Gone?”. In it, author Steven Levitt examines various theories of why violent crime has decreased in the country. Many explanations are examined: more prisons, more police, better policing strategies, aging population, stronger economy, and gun laws. … Read more
Remember when you imagined stars on the roof of your mouth, and stood in the river in the rain, naked and mooing, your head and palms raised significantly (or so you imagined)? You desperately wanted something momentous to wash over you; to be claimed by something outside yourself, even as you were almost utterly incapable … Read more
A walk is as good as a hit. Never make the first or third out at third. A bloop single looks just like a line-drive in the box score. You can’t steal first. Homerun hitters drive Cadillacs. Respect the game. Bust your tail and have some fun. Good pitching beats good hitting. Pitching is ninety … Read more
We adore David Carr, one of our own who left the Twin Cities Reader to edit Washington City Paper in the midst of a long boom of greatness there that produced folks like Jack Shafer and Brett Anderson. Carr now writes sober and precise media stories for the New York Times, although he is no … Read more
—Dan Corrigan, Bud Blanchard, Motivational Speaker. Omaha, Nebraska, 1978. …he does not notice that he has reached the age of forty-five; then suddenly he realizes that all the time he has been acting and making a fool of himself, but it is now too late to change his way of life. Once in his sleep … Read more
–Illustration by James Dankert That was horseshit. I’m a superstitious guy, and I should have known better than to drag my ass from the house on Friday the thirteenth. I already had a sick feeling on the drive downtown. The muffler on my Celica was kicking up sparks all the way down Portland, and was … Read more