Author: Katherine Glover

  • Made in the Shade

    Last December I was in Minnesota, chatting with workers at Peace Coffee, a Minneapolis-based one-hundred-percent Fair Trade coffee company. To these guys, who make local deliveries on bicycle, Starbucks is the enemy. It’s a huge, non-transparent corporation; only a small percentage of its coffee is Fair Trade; and it doesn’t re-invest in the communities where…

  • Buffalo Ridge

    I’d read plenty about Buffalo Ridge, the windiest swath of Minnesota, located in the state’s grassy and treeless southwest quadrant, before I ever got there. I’d heard stories of hats blowing off, of windburn, of tumbleweeds that just kept tumbling. People living in the area are said to suffer perpetual bad hair days. But it…

  • The Revolution Will Not Be Silk-Screened

    Ernesto “Che” Guevara has come a long way. Once best known as a fierce companion of Fidel Castro, he now graces the T-shirts of revolutionaries, as well as assorted hipsters, celebrities, and stoners who couldn’t find Che’s native country (Argentina) on a map. Since the release of The Motorcycle Diaries, a film based on Che’s…

  • High on the Job

    On a typical workday, Jeff Speed arrives at work at six-thirty in the morning. He has half an hour to climb twenty stories up to the little capsule where he works, which is at the top of a crane. He brings food with him—with only half an hour for lunch, there is no time to…

  • Public Icon, Private Property

    Imagine: It’s springtime, there’s a sense of optimism in the air. Best Buy is about to open its new corporate headquarters in Richfield. Everyone’s talking about it. Some say it will usher the Twin Cities into a new era; others argue about whether or not that’s a good thing. Wanting to include the community in…

  • St. Salesman

    My mother’s house wasn’t selling. No one was even looking at it; a total of four open houses had yielded less than a dozen people, most of them curious neighbors with no intention of buying. When she shared her troubles with co-workers at the hospital where she works, a fellow nurse directed her to obtain…