Author: Michael Nordskog

When Father Louis Hennepin first saw the great falls of the Mississippi in 1680, he was on furlough from a prolonged captivity at Mille Lacs Lake. The Flemish cleric and his Dakota escorts portaged downstream along the east bank on what is now Main Street in Minneapolis, then beheld the cataract he would later document…

Those fond of appropriating F. Scott Fitzgerald’s observation that “the very rich are different from you and me” rarely include the follow-up—the part about why they are so. “They possess and enjoy early,” Fitzgerald explained in The Rich Boy, “and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where…

Minnesota boasts no defining fine artist, no painter of universal renown. Alexis Fournier, Seth Eastman, Nicholas Brewer, Wanda Gag, Dewey Albinson, George Morrison—any of these names may ring a distant bell. But Minnesotans have no Albert Bierstadt or Winslow Homer, no Grant Wood, Georgia O’Keefe or Frederic Remington to lionize. The central Minnesota town of…

The north is the same wherever it might be.—Sigurd Olson, Listening Point Soon after I was born, my grandparents bought a cabin on a small lake in the Arrowhead, not far from my hometown of Two Harbors. My parents, in turn, took over the property after my grandfather died a few years later. With two…

The naming of babies, according to psychology professor Dr. Cleveland Evans, has reached a new frontier. Parents seeking to distinguish their newborns from the herd have turned to canned food and footwear for inspiration. According to Dr. Evans, the following luckless toddlers will soon enter pre-school and get a foretaste of peer cruelty: DelMonte, Celica,…