Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
See Ya, Christopher Ingraham!
Some sad news for Minnesota media today as Christopher Ingraham announced on social media that he’ll be skedaddling from his northwestern Minnesotan home and returning with his family to upstate New York, to be closer to the rest of their family.
Ingraham made local news 10 years ago when he called Red Lake County, Minnesota, "the absolute worst place to live in America" in the Washington Post. Riled up Minnesotans invited him to visit, and he liked it so much he moved his family here, inspiring national news coverage. (You can read the whole tale in his book If You Lived Here You’d Be Home By Now.) In his time here Ingraham was diagnosed with (and recovered from) lymphoma and started working at the Minnesota Reformer.
So now, having proved his point that outstate Minnesota is indeed habitable, Ingraham’s done with us? Here’s what he had to say when we asked:
We've loved our time here. Once you get past the frigid temperatures, howling winds, blowing snirt, lack of landscape features, rapacious insects, oppressive corn sweat, and limited food options, northwest Minnesota is a delightful place to live. You have to have a big heart to survive here, and our friends and neighbors have demonstrated that to us every single day. We'll miss them terribly.
If Ingraham’s name is familiar to Flyover readers, that’s because we’ve regularly spotlighted his Minnesota Reformer stories in this column. He poses a particular challenge to a news aggregator hoping to avoid plagiarism: The more you try to reorganize his stories in different words, the more you realize Ingraham chose the ideal ones to begin with.
Everything Musk Go!
The Trump/Musk administration’s mindless unloading of federal properties appears to be fumbling forward, with the General Services Administration prepared to dump two offices in St. Paul that serve the Mississippi River recreation area, the Star Tribune reports. According to a list distributed by Democratic representatives on the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources and shared by the National Parks Conservation Association, the GSA plans to terminate the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area’s HQ and the park’s visitor center at the Science Museum of Minnesota later this year.
But maybe it won’t! As with most decisions affiliated with billionaire sociopath Musk’s make-believe entity, DOGE, GSA’s plans combine spectacular ineptness with sneering contempt for the people their decisions affect. Initially, GSA targeted 11 buildings in Minnesota for sale. More recently, six Minnesota buildings were listed on the GSA website among those to be unloaded; these later vanished from the site. Who can really say what these fuckers are up to?
Remember, as all this is going on, that government employees who've been working from these offices are expected to come back to offices full time. “At the end of those lease dates, they don’t have a place to go,” Christine Goepfert, the park conservation association’s Midwest campaign director, says of these employees. “Are they meant to move somewhere else?”
Most Racket readers don’t need to be told this, but just so we’re all on the same page: The goal here is not efficiency or cost-cutting but immiseration of federal workers, perpetuation of hard-right ideology, and the resegregation of the workforce; the amount of money the federal government will save on these lease cancelations is negligible, and Elon Musk should be shot into the sun. (I’m not sure I can say that about a sitting president, so I merely wish President Trump many hefty servings of fatty red meat combined with a lack of exercise.)
Bob Mould Remembers Macalester
Unlike some Minnesota outlets, Racket does not consider Bob Mould a “local” musician. But we’re still interested in the Hüsker Dü guitarist’s recollections of his time here, so your podcast-avoidant Flyover-er du jour gritted his teeth and listened to a portion of this installment of the podcast Caropop, which begins with Chicagoan Mark Caro stating that his daughter is attending Mould’s alma mater, St. Paul's Macalester College. “What a great school!” Bob exclaims, and with that we're off down Memory Lane and/or Grand Ave.
There’s no info here you wouldn’t already know from Mould’s 2011 memoir, See a Little Light, but it’s still nice to hear him discuss the Twin Cities of 45 years past. “In getting to know the neighborhood around the school, that was where I met Grant [Hart],” Mould reminisces. “I think he had a half a PA set up out in the front [of Cheapo Records] and was playing Pere Ubu, The Modern Dance album." Mould credits the long winters with inspiring Minnesota’s musical creativity, disparages the term “Mini-Apple" (who wouldn't?), evaluates the differences between Minneapolis and St. Paul (“Hüsker Dü was a St. Paul band, originally"), and namechecks Tim Carr, the Longhorn, Duffy’s, and that “punk rock rumpus room” the 7th St Entry. Sadly, Caro does not ask Mould about the Macalester sex bell.
Keeping the Neighbors Warm
Over at MPR, Chandra Colvin has a story on the Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center (MIWRC), a 40-year-old organization that's begun using its resources to provide a warm space and a hot meal for homeless people on Tuesday afternoons. “We have the community room, the gym, that just sits open, vacant a lot of the times, I think majority of the time, it's left sitting there vacant. And it’s a pretty big space that could be used for a lot of things on a daily basis,” CEO Ruth Buffalo says. The effort was originally community-funded, but the Minneapolis City Council allocated $100,000 in emergency funding in late January. Obviously, the folks stopping by need more than this, but it's nice to read about somebody doing something now, isn't it?
