BY STEPHANIE FOX Everyone in Minneapolis recognizes the large, elegant neoclassical building facing Hennepin Avenue near 23rd Street. Temple Israel, housing Minnesota’s oldest Jewish community and the state’s largest Jewish congregation, is more than an architectural landmark. It is a cultural and religious one as well. Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman leads…
BY DEBRA KEEFER RAMAGE Merlins Rest 3601 E Lake St 612-216-2419 merlinsrest.com www.facebook.com/pages/Merlins-Rest/43488676171 Merlins Rest is a Longfellow mainstay and one of four area “pubs” that offer an interpretation of British and/or Irish food along with the beers and booze. Merlins Rest’s main claim to fame is its impossibly huge…
BY POLLY MANN What can be done with guns? In 2012 after the rampage shooting of 20 school children and six educators, in Newtown, Conn., Connecticut lawmakers passed some of the toughest gun measures in the country: 1) expanding an existing ban on assault weapons; 2) prohibiting the sale of…
BY ED FELIEN He’s their useful idiot. They’ve been playing him for 30 years. In March of 1986, Dubinin, the Russian Ambassador to the U.N., with his daughter, went up to the Trump Tower to meet Trump. According to his daughter, in an article for Komsomolskaya Pravdanewspaper, he told Trump,…
BY ED FELIEN Dave Bicking has stopped the reappointment of Susan Segal as city attorney. Bicking has been a longtime opponent of the city attorney. He challenged her decision to allow the city to give a New Jersey racketeer hundreds of millions of dollars to build a sports stadium when…
BY COOPER Recently, I took my third trip to Paris. My first was when I was 17, to visit family friends and to take my first trip to Europe. A week into my trip I was scouted for a top model agency—Marilyn in Paris, one of the top five agencies…
BY ED FELIEN This year Valentine’s Day fell on the same day as Ash Wednesday. They always happen around the same time, right after Groundhog’s Day on Feb. 2. What a strange collection of holidays. What could they possibly have in common? Perhaps they’re all a riff on the ancient…
BY JOHN CHARLES WILSON Metro Transit is planning something called the D Line for the Chicago Avenue corridor in South Minneapolis. The D will also serve Fremont Avenue on the north side and will follow the C Line, which is planned for Penn Avenue North. These streets are currently served…
BY DEBRA KEEFER RAMAGE Way too many people don’t take teachers seriously. Teachers have massive educational requirements, several hundred years of history as one of the major recognized professions, and they provide a service so valuable to the health of society and the needs of the economy that even in…
BY ELAINE KLAASSEN In my garden grows memory, knowing and imagining. I imagine a garden. I really do. My keyboard is a protected garden, maybe an arboretum, and I imagine that my fingers are droplets of dew touching leaves, grass, branches, stones. There is no frenzy in my garden. The…
BY ED FELIEN You had a great Super Bowl party, and the Downtown Council honored you at a fancy luncheon. But you work for us, not Jimmy Fallon or Tom Brady, not the Downtown Business Council or the StarTribune. We hired you to run this City, and we expect progressive…
BY DEAN ZIMMERMANN Annie Young lived life to the fullest for 75 years. I feel lucky and blessed to have known her for the last 45 of those curious, remarkable and productive years—and, to call her my best friend for much of that time. Friends tend to come and go,…
The purpose of this letter is to comment on the conversation about Poverty between Joe Selvaggio and Elaine Klaassen. To be sure, they did not find the answers on how to solve Poverty, even though they seemed to wax eloquently around the subject. Selvaggio had one very astute observation on…
BY ED FELIEN It won’t happen fast. We don’t want it to happen fast. It’s an important educational experience. It should take time and it must be as public as possible, so nobody freaks out and thinks it’s a trick or unfair. They won’t bust him for collusion with the…
BY ED FELIEN This year Valentine’s Day fell on the same day as Ash Wednesday. They always happen around the same time, right after Groundhog’s Day on Feb. 2. What a strange collection of holidays. What could they possibly have in common? Perhaps they’re all a riff on the ancient…
