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

In case you haven't heard, The Rake recently published a Guide Book to the Twin Cities. So far, we've sold a couple thousand copies, including a few to some of the Republican Convention delegates. Actually, we don't have any way of knowing that for sure, but we surmise that at least a couple of them might have seen it in the book stores and were getting tired of hotel food.

Perhaps no place on Minnesota’s Iron Range personifies its mythical, often misunderstood boom-calamity-boom nature better than tiny Kinney (its population flutters around two hundred), located in the middle of the Mesabi Range on Highway 169. In 1977, faced with an outdated water system and difficulty securing state or federal assistance, Kinney attempted to secede from the Union.