Diplomacy, to judge by recent efforts of our not-so-diplomatic commander in chief, is not an easy job. It requires holding your tongue and curbing your temper. First and foremost, however, it requires landing the job, which has always been tough and is just getting tougher. Despite current troubles, or perhaps because of them, interest in … Read more
When Joel and Ethan Coen made Fargo and gave the world a generous serving of the rounded, marbles-in-the-mouth outstate Minnesota accent, it seemed a little over the top. But we all knew it was out there. Just 20 minutes of any WCCO-AM call-in show will prove it. Even those of us in the metro have … Read more
The other day, Amtrak announced that the Empire Builder—the famous train from Seattle to St. Paul—could not make it through its normal route at Glacier National Park here in Montana. “Snow slides” threatened the tracks, and passengers were routed around the hazard on buses. In the last five weeks we’ve gotten ten feet of snow. … Read more
“Do you think you can make an all-star wrestler out of me?” I asked Sheriff and Shifty at Midwest Pro Wrestling in Maple Grove. They looked me over—I’m 5’ 9” and weigh only 155 pounds—and assured me, “Sure, just give us enough time. Size doesn’t matter anymore.” In fact, Terry Klinger (stage name “Sheriff”) is … Read more
You can keep your J.Lo; we’ll take the Jayhawks. Rainy Day Music, their seventh disc, pulls back from the slickness of 2000’s Smile for a sound anchored more deeply in the acoustic. It’s an evolution that sprung in part from continued lineup shifts and the impossibility of touring with a full band in the wake … Read more
Once upon a time, medical students learned from real people in actual hospitals, interviewing them about their all-too-genuine conditions. But thanks to the insurance-industry bean-counters, hospitals began discharging patients after shorter and shorter periods of time, and only the sickest hung around long enough for study. These patients could tolerate only so many repeated exams … Read more
We’re sports fans around here, no matter what our other pretensions. One of our favorite diversions is watching the tournaments that clog the calendar in this season. This year, though, we’re oddly sensitized to the fact that most sports coverage is heavily dependent on military metaphors. To judge from our local sports journalists and commentators, … Read more
Illustration by Christopher Henderson I’m going to miss Minnesota—not because I’m going away, but because Minnesota is. The north woods? There’s a fairly good chance I will outlive them. A walk through the spruce, the cry of a loon—a lot of experiences we think of as quintessential Minnesota may disappear. Or emigrate to Canada. In … Read more
David Cronenberg is infamous for his unique style of horror filmmaking. His films–among them The Fly, Naked Lunch, and Dead Ringers–gaze with icy formalism on worlds where biology has gone mad. They’re a catalogue of physical breakdowns, sexual dysfunctions, florid mutations and hallucinations. His latest, Spider, based on Patrick McGrath’s novel, stars Ralph Fiennes as … Read more
Louise Erdrich is fighting sleep. This explains a lot. It’s said that the threshold between sleeping and waking—the lucid yet lawless terrain of twilight—is a cracked door to enlightenment, a conduit to the divine. How apropos that, here in the grainy borderlands of consciousness, the Minneapolis novelist puts pen to paper and struggles (yes, struggles) … Read more