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New ICE Occupation Longread Just Dropped
Minnesotans might not learn much from Emily Witt’s lengthy piece on Operation Metro Surge in the New Yorker, but it’s invaluable to have all this detail documented so thoroughly in one definitive place. And it’s certainly the only story about ICE's Minnesota occupation you’ll read today that spells “coöperation” with a diaeresis. (Yes, that’s what those dots are called.)
Witt speaks to patrolling neighbors, court observers, state and local government officials, detainees (including a Peruvian man waiting for his green card who was shipped off to Texas), one of the Minneapolis 15 defendants, a former federal attorney, and an activist who offers one of the most Minneapolis quotes ever: “What if we lived in a utopia where puppets drove civic action?”
They’re Gonna Put Us in the Movies
In other “the world notices us” news, They’re Here, a short doc about Operation Metro Surge that edits together street-level filming, dashcam footage, and crowdsourced data opens at the Venice Film Festival next week.
The documentary is a collaboration between local filmmaker Rachel Lauren Mueller (who I’m pretty sure I met earlier this summer?) and non-local filmmaker Laura Poitras (most recently celebrated for her doc about artist and activist Nan Goldin, All The Beauty and the Bloodshed; we've never met).
The New York Times spoke to the documentarians about their film and the challenges they faced. “Telling the story through individuals is grounding emotionally, but then how do you communicate the horrific nature of the scale?” asks Poitras.
A Corn Roast Obituary
For years, Jerry Untiedt’s family business has supplied corn to the State Fair’s Corn Roast. And though Untiedt’s Vegetable Farm will remain the fair’s corn supplier (staffers pick each day's batch every morning!), it will have to do so without the founder himself: Untiedt recently died at the age of 77. Estelle Timar-Wilcox at MPR News has a nice piece on his life, revealing that he worked up to the day of his death. (Inspiring? Depressing? Your call.)
“He didn’t want to miss out on anything,” says his daughter Megan Dallmann. “He wanted to be involved in everything. It was his passion, and he wanted to make sure he knew what was going on.”
And in other State Fair remembrances from MPR: The "Info Booth Ladies" remember their fallen member.
Look at These Cute State Fair Sketches
For local media, the State Fair really is the gift that keeps on giving—the event is just endlessly documentable.
Tired of fair photos? Well, the Strib set sketch artist Chen May Yee loose to draw the sights instead, and traveling from the barns to the Horticulture Building to the food stands she’s produced some quite wonderful drawings. The sketches are annotated with praise from fairgoers for Hmong Union Kitchen’s citrus Kua Txob sauce (it really is that good) and this quote from a 13-year-old Stacy, Minnesota resident: “It’s funner to go for rabbit shows than quail or chicken shows … which are dirty and stuff.”
There’s also a great Jeff Wheeler photo of Yee in action, and, as a bonus, she sketched the SkyGilder from far enough away that she didn’t need to include the Google ads. (No, I will never stop complaining about them.)
