How the Minnesota Timberwolves Tried—and Failed—to Land LeBron James

Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.

LeBron LePasses on T-Wolves

News broke early Friday that the long-percolating LeBron James sweepstakes has a winner: The Philadelphia 76ers will add James, one of the two best basketball players to ever live, to their star-studded roster. Timberwolves fans with long memories can take solace in the fact that, hey, we were at least in the conversation to land LeBron. Really in the conversation, per sourced-up Athletic reporter Jon Krawczynski:

The Timberwolves threw everything they possibly could at James to try to persuade him to chase a championship with them, including calls from Edwards and LaMelo Ball. Alex Rodriguez led ownership’s pitch given their common ground as superstar athletes who have become business moguls. Tim Connelly’s longstanding working relationship with [agent] Rich Paul helped the two have extended conversations on the fit for James in Minnesota.

Team sources say LeBron gave Minnesota "full consideration for his 24th season," but he obviously considered Philly a better option. C'est la vie as a Minnesota sports fan. Now the Wolves front office must turn its attention on filling the roster's glaring power-forward hole, which woulda looked mighty fine with King James filling it.

Krawczynski does cap the LeBron-to-Wolves news cycle with a delightful anecdote. According to league sources with knowledge of the conversation, T-Wolves superstar Anthony Edwards recently and playfully told James that he'd "tear off [his] head" if the 41-year-old G.O.A.T. didn't choose a new team ASAP. "What happens if I choose another team?" James asked with laugh. "I'll tear your head off on the court this season," Edwards quipped.

In other Ant news: Earlier this month Edwards married his longtime partner, Shannon Jackson, Hennepin County court records confirm. In a weird-ass move, the Strib published a photo of the marriage certificate, which has since been removed from the article without explanation.

Yeah, Climate Change is Contributing to All These Wildfire.

For those of who grew up in Minnesota, summertime memories aren't marked by constant wildfires and smoky skies. Something has changed. Climate changed, if you will. And two experts who recently spoke with Twin Cities media outlets certainly will tell you about it.

Talking to KARE 11, University of St. Thomas mechanical engineering professor John Abraham explained that decades of humans releasing heat-trapping gasses into the atmosphere have created conditions in northern Minnesota that lead to more wildfires. "We have to adapt to a new climate," he says. "We can't unring the bell, but we can create a society that is better able to handle these kind of weather disasters."

And, over at MPR News, atmospheric scientist Sam Potter of the University of Minnesota's Climate Adaptation Partnership sounded the same alarm. "Climate change makes it hotter and drier, and so that changes a whole bunch of fire characteristics. You get easier ignition, faster rates of spread, and more energy released by the fire, which makes it harder to control and more dangerous."

Bit on the nose that our current hellworld is literally engulfed in flames, but here we are.

What's Up With That Beautiful Old Longfellow Apartment Complex?

On the corner of 38th & Minnehaha, across the street from a Super USA, there’s a beautiful 120-year-old Minneapolis school building. While it houses the Simmons Manor Apartments today, in 1906 the building opened as Simmons Elementary. You can kinda tell it used to be a school if you really look, and in a nice historical deep-dive for Longfellow Whatever, reporter Trevor Born offers an in-depth exploration of the neighborhood landmark. Born writes…

To be frank upfront: it's not an extraordinary story, really, but it's at least an interesting-enough tale of reuse amid the fluctuating fortunes of neighborhood schools. And it tells us something, maybe, about the range of options for similar buildings during another era of looming school closures.

Whether or not the building’s story is “extraordinary,” it’s certainly complicated. The school opened in response to overcrowding in existing Minneapolis public schools, but after a few decades of expansion, enrollment declined in the late 1930s. (For some reason that's definitely not being mirrored today, people didn’t have many kids during the Great Depression.) 

Unlike many decommissioned Twin Cities schools from that era, the Simmons Elementary building was not demolished. Instead, it sat empty for years, housed the Northwestern Electronics Institute, became the subject of a legal conflict between the city and the school board, and, 40 years ago, was retrofitted into the apartment complex that remain today. Born tells the story with archive photos and newspaper clippings. 

Much of the architecturally rich building has been altered over the years, though original stairwells, ornamentation, and doorways remain, as well as a massive twin boiler—“it's too large and heavy to be relocated, probably ever,” Born observes.

Bari Weiss Is a Crazed, Moronic Ideologue, Local Angle Edition

Bari Weiss, the ascendent media exec who parlayed her billionaire-flattering Zionist blog into a job leading CBS News, is a sorry excuse for a journalist.

Don't take our word for it?

Let's hear from fired 60 Minutes correspondent Cecilia Vega, who recently spoke to Status about the Weiss regime allegedly shoehorning its right-wing bias into news stories, including one on the killings of two Minneapolitans, Renee Good and Alex Pretti.