Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily midday digest of what local media outlets and Twitter-ers are gabbing about.
Racket Weather Report: IT’S HOT AS BALLS OUTSIDE
Have you been outside today? Spoiler alert: It’s freakin’ hot out there. We've somehow angered Helios, the mighty Sun God, and the only way we can appease him is through local news coverage. Behold all the different ways one can report on a heat advisory: The Star Tribune’s “Excessive heat Tuesday” kicks off with “Hot, hot, hot. And windy and humid, too.” KSTP knows we’re living in a hustle/girl boss economy, so they're giving us tips and tricks to help us save money today. Weather buddy Sven Sundgaard gave us a ton of big radar and map pics in his very correct MPR story, “Brutally hot Tuesday; storms northwest.” Meanwhile, Axios has one lone hopeful bullet point: “It will be windy, if that is any consolation” in its “Heat waves hits Twin Cities” story.
Owamni is America's Best New Restaurant
Do we have to keep calling the James Beard Awards "the Oscars of food"? You guys know what they are at this point, right—they're the biggest awards there are in U.S. food and drink. And at last night's awards ceremony in Chicago, Minneapolis's Owamni took home one of the most prestigious of these already prestigious awards: Best New Restaurant. The well-deserved accolade follows almost a year of national recognition for Sean Sherman and Dana Thompson's Mississippi waterfront restaurant; everyone from Vogue to the New York Times has heaped praise upon the incredible pre-colonial menu. “People of color everywhere have been affected by colonialism, and we just went through centuries of racist bullshit,” Sherman said in his acceptance speech. “This is showing that we can get through that, that we’re still here." You can read Natalia Mendez's review of Owamni for Racket here.
Evolution: Important for Pokémon and Twin Cities Downtowns
Much ado has been made about downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul since the pandemic hit. Practically overnight, as Bill Lindeke writes in the Reformer, more than 150,000 Minneapolis workers and 50,000 St. Paul workers disappeared from downtown, and two years later, many aren't heading back to their offices anytime soon. So how do downtowns survive without commuters? It's "evolve or bust" according to thinkers like Thomas Fisher, who heads the heads the Minnesota Design Center and penned a new book on cities, architecture, and pandemics. Evolving will mean rethinking the balance of office space vs. everything else, perhaps replacing offices with housing and thinking about a "more mixed-use downtown." It's worth reading the whole piece.
Hollywood People Are in Jordan, Minnesota, Next Week!
Movies: Sometimes they're made in Minnesota. Case in point? Marmalade, a buried treasure/prison action flick starring Stranger Things’ Joe Keery and Hidden Figures’ Aldis Hodge, is set to film on Water and First Streets in Jordan, Minnesota. (The Scott County town is about 40 minutes from Minneapolis.) They’ll be in the Twin Cities area on Monday next week. This isn’t the first time a Stranger Things’ cast member has filmed a movie in Minnesota; Natalia Dyer came to the Carleton College area to film Tuscaloosa, a film set in 1970s Alabama. Yes, apparently Minnesota can pass for Alabama.
