Author: Eric Dregni

Later this month, the World Future Society brings its annual conference, including a Minnesota Futures Day, to Minneapolis. To mark the occasion, Dregni sat down with the most outspoken member of the Society’s Minnesota chapter, Hank Lederer, who forecast possible advancements over the next century for the book, Follies of Science: 20th Century Visions of…

A few miles north of Bemidji, there’s an old-world mini Bavaria: A cluster of white stucco and brown-timbered buildings that surround a quaint central fountain. The street signs are auf deutsch, schnitzel and sauerkraut are on the menu, and the speaking of German is strictly enforced. When this Concordia language village, a German immersion camp…

In 1967 an article with the headline, “Mentally Ill Take LSD at U” appeared on the front page of the Minnesota Daily. The story recounted the experiences of “William,” a patient in the University of Minnesota’s psychiatric ward who was administered LSD by Amadeo Marrazzi, a professor of pharmacology, as a “clinical yardstick” to determine…

Last summer, Ismail Kadare was awarded the first-ever Man Booker International Prize, beating out Muriel Spark, Doris Lessing, and Ian McEwan. I felt a bit smug about having discovered the Albanian author many years before, in the late 1980s. At Hungry Mind Bookstore in St. Paul, where I was working at the time, no one…

In Ideal Corners, a tiny town near Brainerd, trips to the local dump were a family tradition. My grandfather would pop the enormous trunk of his robin’s-egg blue Oldsmobile and we’d load it up with cans, done-in appliances, or dozens of leaf bags. In the spring, he’d bring along binoculars in order to watch the…

You could be forgiven for believing that Minnesotans had something to do with inventing the Zamboni. But the celebrated Dr. Seussian vehicle wasn’t invented in the back of an Iron Range machine shop, nor in a Twin Cities garage. Your second guess—somewhere in Canada, right?—would be wrong, too. The home of this icon of winter…