Bob Collins retired from Minnesota Public Radio in 2019 after 12 years of writing NewsCut and pointing out to complainants that posts weren’t news stories. A son of Massachusetts, he was a news editor 1992-1998, created the MPR News regional website in 1999, invented the popular Select A Candidate, started several blogs, and every day lamented that his Minnesota Fantasy Legislature project never caught on.
A new documentary on a plane crash 17 years ago must have the National Transportation Safety Board rattled, because the NTSB today announced an unusual background briefing next week in the crash of TWA Flight 800. “The TWA Flight 800 investigation remains one of the NTSB’s most extensive and exhaustive investigations; the final report includes Read more →
Maybe if we loved our iconic places more when they’re still here, we wouldn’t have to mourn their demise. Read more →
Don’t let us down, apple pie. You’re all we’ve got left. Read more →
If you live in Minnesota or the rest of the Upper Midwest, this is the week to deliver payback to your friends who spend the winter in Arizona, and delight in sending e-mails in January that it’ll be so cold tonight — 75 — that they might have to put on a sweater.
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Back in my earlier days — just before I moved to Minnesota in 1992 — I ran the programming at a small-market radio station in Massachusetts. It was a great little station that cared about the town it served, read the school lunch menus, covered the selectmen, broadcast live from charity events, and passed along the news that your dog was lost — all the things that people say now they wanted then but didn’t really want enough to keep from turning on the public radio station from Albany instead. Read more →
The canary in the lake, learning to accept a gay son, the other Supreme Court decisions, how a model railroad fights cancer, and why news photographers matter. Read more →
Real pros say all the right things at the right time, but there’s no getting around the fact that having your show canceled and shown the door is rough on any person with a beating heart.
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Next week is the 4th of July, a day we honor our declaration of freedom to pursue happiness, if not outright attain it. Just one question: What is this happiness we are told we can pursue? Time’s cover story this week considers whether the Founding Fathers’ view of the word is the same as the Read more →
As we learned during the Tim Tebow years, religion and professional sports makes some people pretty nervous. The latest brouhaha? See if you can spot the religious symbol. Check behind the mound in St. Louis. There’s a cross and what some insist is a number 6, in honor of Cardinals great Stan Musial, allegedly put Read more →
Should Hennepin County have whitewashed a mural, the suicide detective, do your cellphone chargers need to be unplugged, the man who sent 19-year-olds to war, art and politics, and 50 states and 50 pictures. Read more →
Tomorrow is the last day for NPR’s Talk of the Nation. NPR is dropping the show and getting out of the midday talk business. So Highlights, the kids’ magazine, dedicated a special edition of its classic game to spot the differences in two drawings. Host Neal Conan had told a Highlights staffer last year that Read more →
Remember that case I told you about in December when the Iowa Supreme Court said it was OK to fire a woman who worked in a dentist’s office because the dentist’s wife was jealous that he found the worker irresistible? Never mind. The court had ruled 7-0 for the Fort Dodge doctor, employing an odd Read more →
My colleague, Paul Tosto, has a loving passion in pointing out Minnesota’s dominance over the state to our east when it comes to the economy. Today, he’s got a little more ammunition from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve. In a report today, the Fed says Minnesota is rapidly catching up to Wisconsin in the total number Read more →
The next time you watch a baseball player throw a pitch, you can thank a hunter from two million years ago, apparently. If it weren’t for our ability to throw, we’d all be having lunch eating our front lawns today. The BBC reports on a study in Nature that traces the origins of humans’ ability Read more →
The little spat in Washington over NPR’s new headquarters has gotten plenty of attention after an article last week in the Washington Post. Conservatives have had a field day with the $201 million headquarters, using it to renew and old debate over whether public broadcasting should get any government assistance (this ignores the fact that Read more →
Bob Collins