The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

It would almost be redundant – and probably pitiful, too – to try and summarize The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in a single, obligatory paragraph that precedes an interview with its author, Junot Diaz. The book, which won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, is deserving of long, in-depth coverage.

According to this survey, the results of which were posted last week on this blog, the University of Minnesota's MFA program in creative writing is the 3rd-best in the nation. Go gophers!

Like Jabba the Hutt, whose only purpose was to give George Lucas an excuse to put Princess Leia in a slave bikini, this year’s $1 billion budget deficit seems only to exist to further divide a legislature already spoiling for a fight. And much like the epic struggle between Empire and the Rebellion, the battles are pretty damn fun to watch, but the fallout is pretty painful for

To highlight our semi-annual selection of new fashion, we turned to a population that—let’s face it, unfair as it seems—looks delightful no matter what they’re wearing. Our models are four dance students at the University of Minnesota and their choreographer (who moonlights as The Rake’s stylist); we captured them during a rehearsal at the Barbara Barker Center for Dance on the Minneapolis campus.

University of Minnesota Athletics Director Joel Maturi is a triple-A battery of a man. Walk into his office at the Bierman Athletic Building on the East Bank and he leaps out of his chair and shakes your hand as if you’re about to parachute out of an airplane together. Trim and fit at 62, Maturi is glib and empathetic.

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 to be forty or fifty feet high. This figure was exaggerated (though somewhat prescient), but empirical accuracy was never a missionary priority, and Hennepin ventured only to tally souls.

Let’s begin by getting one fact clear: Al Milgrom, the Twin Cities’ most famous fool for cinema, is an old man. His driver’s license makes the bold claim that he was born in 1922—a claim belied by both his appearance, for he doesn’t look a day over sixty-five, and his behavior, for he acts like a teenager. But even without the state’s corroboration, Al is old by anyone’s reckoning.

At 7:20 a.m., on a hilltop overlooking the wooded highlands in Minnesota’s Iron Range, a dozen men and women emerge from parked cars, some wide awake in flannel and Carhartt, some weary in khakis and button-down shirts. A few discuss the Wild and the politics in nearby Ely; others trouble over germanium crystals and liquid nitrogen. Nobody bothers to look to the left, at the random assortment of old mining buildings and the pastoral view over the town of Soudan just beyond.

If the title of patron saint of journalists were not already held by the seventeenth-century French priest Francis de Sales, many American reporters would be ready to canonize Professor Jane E. Kirtley of the University of Minnesota for her steadfast support and defense of their work. Through a serendipitous career as a reporter, attorney, advocate, and academic, Kirtley has built a reputation as the nation’s leading expert on the First Amendment and its practical application to the media. She has also emerged as a major critic of increased government secrecy since September 11.