Bob Collins
One of the first ‘retro’ baseball parks that ushered in the stadium building boom in the ’90s is about to be demolished because it’s not enough anymore that a baseball stadium is a great place to watch a baseball game.
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MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
Archives for May 2016
A report on youth and sports in the last week revealed that among the decline in sports participation by kids, track and field is among sports with the least amount of interest. That’s too bad, really, because track and field kids have a way of being some of the classiest and truest sportspeople in all of athletics. Read more →
It’s no surprise that the Minnesota Legislature has waited until the last minute to try to get any work done. Increasingly, it’s as dysfunctional as its federal counterpart in Washington and reached a new level of paralysis in this session.
When it comes to open government, Minnesota spends far too much time patting itself on the back. Read more →
Three giants of neurology will be talking about the mystery in our head, but one guest’s story of how she ended up in a position to be the human who solved the cause of a horrific neurological disease is worth particular attention. It’s also a story that should frame the various debates over immigration. Read more →
On Wednesday evening at Chanhassen High School, the Chaska Hawks baseball team defeated the Chanhassen Storm 1-0.
Any game that ends 1-0 is quite a game but it was quite a tribute from the kids on both teams that people will long remember, because they long remembered Ethan Herman, who would have been a senior this year had he not taken his own life in 2010. Do the math on that. He was just 12 years old. Read more →
There are probably a lot of high school tennis teams who would love to be 203-1 in tournaments, but the Grand Forks’ Red River High School isn’t one of them. Read more →
Here’s the audio of the show I hosted today on third-party candidates. Read more →
Unlike the ’60s and ’70s, and because of the sharply-fractured media landscape, there don’t seem to be the journalists anymore than can make an entire generation of wonderers want to get into the field. Maybe that doesn’t hurt us much now, but it’s hard to see how it doesn’t hurt us a few years from now. Read more →
A journalist thought she was racing to solve an old woman’s mysteries before she died. Instead, she uncovered the past. Read more →
You wouldn’t know it by the journalism he’s been turning in, but Minnesota Public Radio reporter MPR reporter Mukhtar Ibrahim has had a challenge other reporters haven’t faced at the trial of three Somali men accused of trying to join the ISIS terror group in Syria. Ibrahim, who is Somali-American, has been singled out for different treatment than his white colleagues. Read more →
According to reports today, David Stras, a justice on the Minnesota Supreme Court, is on the short list of people who would be under consideration to fill Antonin Scalia’s seat if Donald Trump were to be elected president. Stras has not been, at least from this non-lawyer’s perspective, particularly flashy or even ideologically driven, at Read more →
Last Sunday, science writer John Horgan gave a speech to the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism, the name of which should give you a clue about what happened.
The skeptics weren’t happy.
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I’m a sucker for stories about newspaper carriers, a dying breed that operates in darkness but still has a bigger impact on the day’s news agenda than any journalist. Read more →
Oh, it got a little chilly and breezy over the weekend, did it, Minnesota?
So sad.
Let’s check in on balmy Mount Washington. Read more →
‘Could kindness be bad for your health?’ the Valley News Live story asked the other night, noting the Centers for Disease Control report that tuberculosis rates are rising in the country for the first time in 20 years. Read more →