BY ED FELIEN Shocked at seeing human beings other than her father for the first time, Miranda, in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” says, “Oh, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in ‘t.” The forced isolation and sudden…
BY DEBRA KEEFER RAMAGE Timing is everything in the newspaper game. Last year, the piece on Minnehaha Avenue’s ink was barely dry when, on 38th Street and Chicago Avenue, Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd while being video-recorded by a teenage girl. Just before the end of the month of May,…
BY DEBRA KEEFER RAMAGE This issue of No Place Like Home is going to discuss sustainability, building on the themes raised for Earth Day last month. Most of the suggestions here apply mostly to homeowners, but if you’re a renter, you can try to get your property owner or manager…
BY DEBRA KEEFER RAMAGE We last visited 34th Avenue South when the pandemic was just starting to bite, but also patio dining was beginning, and we didn’t know that a year or more of illness, death, economic turmoil and uncertainty was ahead. Also ahead, just, was the murder of George…
BY ED FELIEN Guilty! Guilty, as judged by the whole world. Everyone saw what happened. Millions watched 17-year-old Darnella Frazier’s iPhone video of Derek Chauvin squeezing the life out of George Floyd. The world was outraged. And local politicians acted surprised. Mayor Frey said, “That there will be Black Minneapolis…
BY DEBRA KEEFER RAMAGE George Floyd Square George Floyd Square is still there! That’s the headline, but it’s not the whole story. Over the past eleven-plus months, several attempts have been made to close down the “occupation” and reopen the streets. GFS has continued to evolve, but it’s still there.…
BY TONY BOUZA Nostalgia is morbid homesickness. We are all susceptible. Take, for example, the Stenvig Years. The Seventies. Charles Stenvig, the president of the police union, got elected mayor three times for two-year terms, almost explicitly on the premise he’d control Black riots. The echoes I hear are of…
BY DAVID TILSEN Margarita (Rita) Ortega announced that she is leaving the race for City Council in the 9th Ward. This is a vacant seat left by Alondra Cano’s decision to not seek re-election. Ms. Ortega has been a lifetime resident of the 9th Ward, mostly in the Little Earth…
BY TONY BOUZA In the English history of man the wise (Homo sapiens) there has never been even one who didn’t consider him(her)self a national leader. It might tempt you to ask—then where are all those cockups coming from? People—leadership is in short supply. Just looking at our last few…
Conscientious objection Conscientious objectors of every generation have heard some version of this: “Your freedom to be a conscientious objector was won for you by the military you refuse to join and the wars you refuse to fight.” Yet, those same generations have seen the military used to suppress the…
BY ED FELIEN Daunte Wright was pulled over in Brooklyn Center while driving his parent’s car for driving with expired license tabs. The officer in charge, Kim Potter, was a 26-year veteran of the Brooklyn Park Police Department and former head of the police officer’s union. She was training new…
BY ED FELIEN Go to your precinct caucus … and never leave your couch. Now you can register to become a delegate to the DFL ward and city conventions and never leave the peace and serenity of your living room. You can go to caucus.dfl.org and it will direct you…
BY DEBRA KEEFER RAMAGE Despite its genteel relative prosperity, the business and residential hub around Chicago Avenue and 48th Street has had a rocky year and a bit. It’s only a few blocks south of George Floyd Square, so there has been some disruption to traffic flowing through. There were…
BY DEBRA KEEFER RAMAGE Hennepin Avenue has had more than just a global pandemic to deal with in the past year. Both downtown Minneapolis and the former shopping mecca known as Uptown were heavily targeted by civil unrest and looting in the wake of the George Floyd murder. The “mall”…
BY ED FELIEN Two tormented 21-year-olds unleashed a storm of death and sorrow last month in Atlanta and Boulder. Why? There are no easy answers. They were both victims of bullying. Robert Aaron Long was bullied by his evangelical church to hate and fear his natural need for sexual expression.…
