Savers, Perkins and a laundromat

BY ELINA KOLSTAD On arriving in MSP after a two-week trip to Germany visiting family, I found out that the Perkins in my neighborhood, the last remaining Perkins in Minneapolis, had permanently closed a few days earlier. The next day I went to an event near the house I grew…

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Bloat, and more bloat

BY TONY BOUZA [On Sunday, July 29, The StarTribune reported: “Arradondo told reporters after a meeting of the City Council’s public safety committee that he wanted to add 400 more street officers by 2025 in order to keep pace with attrition and population growth. “Last week, Arradondo shared a startling…

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Good Morning, Bloomington Avenue!

DEBRA KEEFER RAMAGE This article is about good health, mental health—and breakfast. Obviously, these things are quite interconnected. We had a very fun Sunday morning breakfast at Hot Plate, a diner on Bloomington Avenue and 52nd Street. Hot Plate has been around for over a decade, having been started by…

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How the world works

BY RICHARD TAYLOR In his book “The Grand Chessboard,” Jimmy Carter’s former National Security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote, with refreshing candor, “The three grand imperatives of imperial geo-strategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians…

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TRIPARTITE

TRIPARTITE brings together three distinctly different “street artists” to share the gallery walls at Modus Locus. In this exhibit, each artist brings their own unique perspective to their somewhat elusive public art endeavors. GROE’s body of work embodies and reveals the relationships active graffiti participants encounter: the bold, colorful, calculated…

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You can work for climate justice

BY ALLISON ANDRADE The U.N. warns that the world is “on course to exceed the temperature threshold” of warming, meaning another 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) above that set out in the Paris climate agreement. Many cities and community organizations in our country have set out to hold themselves…

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Better transit needs better roads

BY JOHN CHARLES WILSON There are internet forums where people discuss every issue under the sun. Yes, even obscure subjects like public transit have their own online discussion groups. And, as you can guess, many people in those groups have the “transit vs. roads” or “transit vs. cars” misconception. Interestingly…

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MN350 meets with Cargill executives

Members of the MN350 Solutions Committee met with Cargill executives on July 11 to make them aware of changes they could make to benefit the environment. When the activists arrived at Cargill corporate headquarters in Wayzata, they were not allowed to enter the building but rather were escorted by security…

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Community disempowerment in Minneapolis

BY DAVID TILSEN The East Phillips neighborhood has experienced more than its share of outrages. It holds a superfund site called the “Asbestos Triangle,” continues to have polluting industries like bituminous roadways and foundries, saw much of its land taken by Abbot Northwestern Hospital, and continues to be ground zero…

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The subtle art of losing

BY TONY BOUZA Every essay is a drip between the Scylla of truth and the Charybdis of offending. What is your responsibility to readership? It is really a sort of sacred trust and central to my pretensions to integrity—pathetic though they be. The reader must be served. The writer is…

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Back to the ‘20s?

BY KATHRYN KELLY At the last Hiawatha Community Advisory Committee meeting in June, Assistant Minneapolis Park Board Superintendent Michael Schroeder referred to my research about constructed wetlands, and stated that the Park Board is not doing a constructed wetland; they are doing wetland restoration. I researched constructed wetlands because the…

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