You will be asked to vote on the confirmation of Susan Segal for city attorney at the City Council meeting March 30. Even Segal’s most severe critics would agree with you that she is intelligent, well versed in the law and has been a good and faithful servant to the…
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 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 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 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…
BY ED FELIEN One of my more ambitious projects was to try to take over the electric company. It had all the romantic allure of Castro and Che sweeping down from the hills to take over a radio station and declare the Revolution. In Minnesota more than 146 municipalities owned…
BY TONY BOUZA I first heard the word a couple of years back. Its utterer seemed to be in possession of some unique verity. Profound. I was on my annual, solo pilgrimage to Cape Cod, where I’d spend January in splendid isolation. A friend—Jeff—called and said he had a video…
BY DEBRA KEEFER RAMAGE Fika Cafe American Swedish Institute 2600 Park Ave. 612-871-4907 fikacafe.net Fika (the name means coffee break in Sweden) is the hypermodern, innovative and esthetic cafe, bakery and cocktail bar of the American Swedish Institute, which has won accolades under all three of its chefs since its…
