Category: Columns

  • Wine for Graduates

    I have a colleague at the University of Minnesota who hates commencement. Marching in gowns and hoods to the boom of Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance” puts her in mind, she says, of the army. I hardly like to point out that most faculty marching would have its practitioners instantaneously in the guardroom were it ever…

  • Heroes and Villains

    There’s a story in the good book, about a cup that is clean on the outside and dirty on the inside. The cup is golden, pretty to look at, and almost certainly the first one that you would take off the shelf. But you wouldn’t want to drink from it, because you’d probably get sick.…

  • City Council Smackdown

    This November, Minneapolis’s only African-American City Council members, Natalie Johnson Lee and Don Samuels, will go head to head for the same council seat. Redistricting has yanked Samuels’s troubled Jordan neighborhood out of the Third Ward, the old “Nordeast,” and fused it with the Fifth Ward. The Fifth Ward, meanwhile, lost the Warehouse District and…

  • Creamy Vouvray

    Home is where we start from. That’s why different things appear perfectly natural to different folk. For much of the Near East it is not democracy that is natural but the milet system of the old Ottoman Empire, where no one had votes, but each minority was responsible for itself under an Islamic umbrella. For…

  • Come One, Come All

    Not too long ago, I worked at a suburban branch of a major weight loss chain. As day jobs go, it wasn’t too bad. We wore our own clothes with understated name tags—no absurd lab coats or ill-fitting logo’ed shirts. The job consisted of light filing and listening to lite rock. As weight loss consultants…

  • Extreme Makeover

    Ask anyone who has gone through a breakup—the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. Need a testimonial? Just ask the Star Tribune editorial board. Once upon a time, the Strib’s endorsement meant something. It was a player in Minnesota politics, an institution crossed at one’s peril. Not anymore. Minnesotans have rejected the Strib’s…