BY STEPHANIE FOX Each year, thousands of people flock to Open Streets events in Minneapolis. During these city celebrations, streets are closed to automobile traffic for blocks and people walk, bike and even skate, visiting booths and businesses along the way. But then, COVID-19 happened. In non-pandemic years, there are…
BY ELINA KOLSTAD Rep. Barbara Lee is having a well-deserved moment as the sole congressperson to have voted in 2001 against the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), which granted war powers generally held by Congress to the president of the United States. Twenty years of war has long…
The desperate need for prison reform Linda Franks of Baton Rouge, La., turned a room in her beauty salon into a meeting place for the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison Reform Coalition, exemplifying what is happening to prison reform all over the country. One example is Vanessa Fano’s brother who…
BY DEVIN HOGAN In 2005 the junior senator from Illinois – then in office for just six months – gave the commencement address at Knox College, a small liberal arts school in western Illinois. It was a speech whose themes would define his career. Knox and the city of Galesburg…
BY KATHRYN KELLY Lake Hiawatha is impaired with phosphorus. Much discussion has happened over the past few years about how to resolve this issue. What is the solution? There are several possible solutions: (1) implement natural wetlands (called constructed wetlands), (2) control the sources of excess phosphorus, and/or (3) phosphorus…
BY JOE HESLA AND ALICIA SMITH MURC (Minneapolis United for Rent Control) You may have noticed, there is a big conversation and fight for rent control going on in the Twin Cities. In St. Paul, renters and organizers collected nearly 10,000 signatures to put a tenant-centered rent control policy on…
BY JIM SPENSLEY The “MSP airport noise problem” isn’t a real problem as much as it is a sign the airport is at the center of life-threatening health and safety problems. An apt health analogy is that hearing airport noise is like seeing the light from a forest fire on…
BY DAVID TILSEN Over 45 years ago, several of us from the Alive and Trucking Theater gathered in a small apartment in Phillips. We were called by Sandy Spieler and Ray St. Louis to discuss a vision. They believed that regular festivals helped make communities strong, and that South Minneapolis…
BY TONY BOUZA One of the many flaws I’ve nurtured over what seems to have evolved into an interminable stay on the planet is a serious predilection for criticism. I’m always going on about this idiot or that fool. Surely I can’t be infallible on the issues. And I am…
BY DEBRA KEEFER RAMAGE New eating places and concepts and “new to me” Amazingly, new restaurants and cafes and food service “concepts” keep on opening. Three fairly recent openings, in descending order of grandness (which pretty much relates to price and that pampered, entitled feeling, but not necessarily to actual…
BY ED FELIEN Before there was a city of Minneapolis, there was the town of St. Anthony on the east bank of the Mississippi. Its Main Street was bustling with a thriving lumber trade. In 1861 when they incorporated, they looked at the federal system of government in Washington, D.C.…
BY TRISH STACHELSKI On July 15, I attended the Women for the River’s Rally at Shell River Campground in Shell City in Wadena County, Minn., where Winona LaDuke and her organization Honor the Earth have been camped since the beginning of summer. All people were invited to participate in a…
BY ELAINE KLAASSEN Remember a few years back when Twin Cities Nonviolent partnered with individuals and peace organizations to create 10 Days Free from Violence in the Twin Cities? It was in the fall. The initiative wasn’t so huge the first year, but the next year, in 2019, hundreds of…
BY DEBRA KEEFER RAMAGE We have a load of interesting things to tell you about on or near Lyndale Avenue South. A few are long-time stalwarts, and a few are either new, or newly reopened since the last shutdown, or newly discovered by me and checked out for the first…
BY JOHNNY HAZARD Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) has resorted in recent weeks to the open promotion of certain possible presidential candidates during his daily press conferences. These are semi-official, not campaign events. And it’s three years before the next election. More worrisome than what appears to be…
