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Mac Staff Probably Prefers Money Over Cow Statue
In 2024, St. Paul's Macalester College swapped its weird Mac the Scott mascot for an adorable Highland cow named Coo. To honor the rebrand, Andy Scott, the welder/artist behind the giant loon statue in front of Allianz Field, was commissioned to create a 12-foot-tall steel cow statue near the campus athletics facility.
According to the school's announcement, the piece has been funded by an anonymous family’s donation to “honor of our faculty.” But Ella Stern, editor-in-chief at the Mac Weekly, argues that school staff needs better pay, not flashy tributes.
“With some faculty underpaid and all facing steep insurance costs, donating a large amount of money for a cow statue to honor them reads as out-of-touch and insulting,” Stern writes, positing that putting that money toward raising salaries would have been a better way to go. (About 25% of the school’s funding currently comes via gifts from donors and endowment revenue.) Stern reports that 25% of the members of MAPE, the union for non-faculty staff at Mac, are making below minimum wage.
Meanwhile, the Union Advocate reports that Macalester’s two new unions (student workers also voted to unionize in February), have struggled to negotiate contracts. The college is working with Minneapolis-based law firm Felhaber Larson, who have “a reputation for advising corporate clients on how to fight unionization," UA's Joel Haskard writes.
Andy Brehm's Needless Needles Opinions
We at Racket would like to congratulate Star Tribune columnist Andy Brehm on six years of sobriety. Addiction is hard for anyone to overcome, and recovery is nothing less than a second chance at life. Sobriety, however, does not make one a public health expert, and so it’s unfortunate that the Strib allows Brehm to opine on how Minneapolis should address addiction.
On Thursday, Brehm complained about sharps containers, saying that providing receptacles for needles somehow encourages addiction (gift link). This is like saying public restrooms make people have to piss. Addicts will have no problem tossing drug paraphernalia anywhere, and sharps boxes are one way to help us keep our city clean of dangerous debris. (He makes no mention that needle bins are also used by diabetics and people with other types of health issues.)
Brehm then touts the success of Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step programs. I, Racket’s Keith Harris, have benefitted from a 12-step program myself, and for certain addicts and alcoholics, these organization can be lifesavers. But I guarantee that in Brehm’s experience with 12-step programs he has learned, as have I, that most of the people who attend do not stay sober or clean.
Addiction is an intractable problem. There is no easy answer. There are, however, people who have studied what works, and those are the people we should hear from, not Andy Brehm.
TriLingua's New St. Paul Micro-Cinema
For six years, TriLingua Cinema has been popping up around St. Paul's East Side, bringing movies to a neighborhood that doesn't have as many moviegoing options as some other Twin Cities neighborhoods. "There were thousands of theater seats at one point over here on the East Side,” TriLingua founder Geordie Flantz told Racket last September. His goal? To find a permanent home for TriLingua and bring some of those cinema seats back.
Roughly one year later, TriLingua has landed a permanent home, with a 36-seat micro-cinema in a building it shares with East Side Freedom Library. To celebrate its Thursday grand opening, MPR News's Nina Moini sat down with TriLingua Executive Director Sidney Pisano and board member Kazua Melissa Vang to learn about the new space and what the future holds for the no-longer-roving group of movie lovers.
"There's something really special ... [there's] this intimacy in the room when you're sitting right next to somebody, and you can hear what their reaction is to something that you might feel entirely differently about to talk about afterwards," Pisano says of the building.
Check out the cinema's calendar for info on upcoming screenings and events.
Happy 40th Birthday, Summit Brewing! Let's Watch the TV News Clip About Your Launch.
As you may have read in these very e-pages, St. Paul's Summit Brewing Co. is going through a financially wrenching time. The pioneering Minnesota craft brewer is staring down the barrel of foreclosure after being sued over $8 million in unpaid debts. But we're not here to dwell on the grim future—we're here to celebrate the objectively better past!
And what better way to do that on Friday, Summit's 40th b-day, than with the following 1986 TV news clip of WCCO anchors Don Shelby and Debbie Ely plus reporter Ava Thompson explaining a "new kind of brewing" that, at the time, was only available in the Twin Cities. "We just hope people enjoy the beer enough to tell someone else who enjoys beer that they like Summit Extra Pale Ale," Summit founder Mark Stutrud tells Thompson at the opening bash that drew around 50 curious drinkers.
Quaint, cute stuff. Long live Summit.
