“It vibrates. But is it, y’know, a vibrator?”
I’d just been dumped by a guy when I first heard about the Bakken Museum’s vibrator collection. Minneapolis’s Bakken, for the record, bills itself as “The Museum of Electricity in Life,” and since my...
View ArticleStand Down
Exit 127 off Interstate 90 doesn’t seem to go anywhere. There are no towns, no farms, no apparent reason to build an exit in the middle of the driest, flattest section of South Dakota, a desolate...
View ArticleErased from Memory
A waiter hurries a tray of tall drinks toward a café table. A dapper trio sits there: A young man wearing a straw boater, a suit in candy-colored stripes, and a silk cravat is entertaining two beauties...
View ArticleThe Sixties—Dead By Self-Inflicted Gunshot
The moment flickered past while I realized that the last of them was gone, the last of the sixties counterculture iconoclasts, those world shakers and rainbow revolutionaries: Lenny Bruce, Jack...
View ArticleThe Ruin
If you were seeking God, you probably wouldn’t think to look in Inver Grove Heights. The fast-growing St. Paul suburb is a good place to buy a fleet of used Cessnas, or a truckload of corn chips,...
View Article"We went crazy for a decade."
On a chill December night last year, hundreds of artists and art lovers of a certain age poured into the Minneapolis Institute of Arts to view a departed friend’s art collection. Dressed in eclectic...
View ArticleGimme Grain!
At 9:28 a.m. thirty-one grain traders are milling around a trading pit—an octagon about the size of a pontoon boat, recessed into the hardwood floor—at the Minneapolis Grain Exchange. Steps are wide...
View ArticleDaughter of God
Sometimes, Grace Kolenda Deters dreams in Portuguese. Ordinary dreams are of her daily life in Nevada, her home five hundred feet above Lake Tahoe, with its shore-to-shore views. Or scenes from past...
View ArticleA People’s History of Circle Pines
Photo courtesy city of circle pines; An early brochure touts the cooperative, courtesy minnesota historical society The landscape of Circle Pines is bleak. Entering town off I-35W, drivers are greeted...
View ArticleWhen Harry Met Betty
One of life’s great truths—one that we desperately seek to avoid with proverbs and catechisms and even magazine articles—is that beneath its surface lies complexity. Our beloved fictions of heroes and...
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