Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
Go Pay Lady Gag-Ugh a Visit
Last year, you may recall the blooming of Como Park Zoo & Conservatory's corpse flower, Horace, whose stink filled the conservatory and brought in hordes of visitors from around the metro to St. Paul. Or Frederick, Horace's smelly sibling, who bloomed just last month?
Well good news, stink-loving sickos: There's another corpse flower in bloom in the Twin Cities right now, and she's even bigger than Horace.
Lady Gag-Ugh (nice), who calls Augsburg University's Hagfors Center home, started flowering at about 6 p.m. Tuesday night in Minneapolis, reports Matthew Beckman, associate professor and chair of the university's biology department. She's over eight feet tall, and while the biology department isn't certain, that towering height could make her the largest corpse flower plant that's ever flowered in Minnesota. (Frederick, who finished blooming June 25, only ever reached a height of 81 inches.)
If you want to see Gag-Ugh in person, today's viewing goes until 9 p.m. at 700 21st Ave. S., and you can find the latest updates on the Augsburg University Greenhouse Instagram.
We asked Beckman for his thoughts on watching Lady Gag-Ugh grow and bloom, and here's what he had to say: "Darwin famously wrote, 'There is grandeur in this view of life.' The corpse flower, in full bloom, shows us this grandeur in visual and olfactory ways. Don't miss it!"
Reminder: MN Literally Needs Immigrants
Good reminder for the xenophobic, nativistic, anti-immigration folks out there: Like all states, Minnesota needs continued population growth to help with factors from fixing labor force shortages to broadening the state’s tax base. But our state, like the rest of the nation, has a declining birth rate; Boomers are getting older, and deaths are expected to outpace births, and soon.
So where does that leave us? Well, let's check in with the Minnesota’s state demographer, Susan Brower, shall we?
Brower tells MinnPost's Shadi Bushra that from the '90s up through 2020, the state population climbed rapidly, largely due to "our own internal growth." Now, writes Bushra, we're "looking down the other side of a demographic mountain," and soon natural growth won't be enough to maintain the population.
“We know that going forward, international immigration is going to continue to be an important source of population growth and actually become a more central component of growth in the future,” Brower says. And if you guessed that federal policies aimed at discouraging and curbing immigration might spell trouble for our increasingly immigrant-reliant state... well, look at you, putting those powers of deduction to use.
Frozen Federal Funds Throw MN Schools in Limbo
Government chaos is the norm these days in the U.S., and that includes funding for public schools as the Trump administration is currently withholding $6 billion in education grants on the grounds that it’s conducting a “review.”
In Minnesota, that amounts to $75 million in promised funds, which are used for things like after school programs, language assistance and resources for ESL kids, educational opportunities for teachers, and hiring more staff to help reduce class sizes.
Melissa Whitler has an excellent breakdown of how this will affect different districts in the state in the Minnesota Reformer today, noting that “federal money accounts for about 10% of funding for public education in Minnesota.” St. Paul Public Schools stands to lose $7.2 million of its $750 million budget while Minneapolis Public Schools will have to do without $4.5 million of its $725 million; in rural areas with smaller populations the loss of funds could be devastating, Whitler writes.
Minnesota has joined a lawsuit with 23 other states, with AG Keith Ellison arguing that this comes down to a Trump retaliation over Minnesota’s laws protecting trans kids’ rights, noting that the executive branch doesn’t have the authority to block funds delegated by Congress. That suit may be facing an uphill battle since earlier this week the U.S. Supreme Court determined that Trump can continue to gut the Department of Education. In the meantime, several Minnesota districts are considering property tax increases to pay for gaps in school funding.
Happy 100th Birthday, U of M Press!
On this day in 1925, the University of Minnesota Board of Regents established the University of Minnesota Press. At first it only published bulletins and pamphlets, but in the ‘30s it began transitioning into a publisher of academic books, including Thomas Sadler Roberts’s Birds of Minnesota (1934–36) and The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), a widely used clinical psychology assessment tool, first published in 1943. These days, U of M Press publishes around 85 titles a year, including cookbooks, kids’ fare, fiction, and non-fiction.
“We've really worked hard to get the kinds of books that attract readers,” Director Doug Armato tells Claire Kirch at Publisher’s Weekly. “I remember Heather Skinner, our publicity director, saying at one point, ‘You know, our books are really getting fun to read.’ This was 16 years ago. They really are. It wasn't always our strength, but we've made it our strength.”
Recent “fun to read” books include Jeffrey Angles’s translation of Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again by Shigeru Kayama and the James Bear Award-winner White Burgers, Black Cash: Fast Food from Black Exclusion to Exploitation by Naa Oyo A. Kwate. Its top seller remains 1983’s Literary Theory by Terry Eagleton, which has sold over 500,000 copies.
