Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
Raz Segal Reflects on Politicized U Snub
In June, the University of Minnesota made headlines after rescinding a job offer initially presented to prominent Israeli historian Raz Segal. Segal, an associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University in New Jersey, was briefly chosen as the new director of the U’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies; the university didn’t like that the Jewish intellectual had written a story called “A Textbook Case of Genocide” about Israel’s continued violence in Gaza.
Today, in an opinion piece for the independent Jewish publication Forward titled “Accusing Israel of genocide cost me a job—just another example of a university failing Jews,” Segal writes about how the “unprecedented decision” represents “grave attack on academic freedom.” Here’s how that piece begins:
Genocide is the culmination of a process that turns the world upside down—that frames defenseless people as dangerous enemies; violent states as innocent societies threatened by blind hatred and fanaticism; and lies as truth. Genocide—the destruction of a people, and destruction of their world—finally, is falsified and rationalized as heroic, as righteous.
We are now witnessing a terrible spectacle: senior administrators in universities across the U.S. who are, when it comes to Israel and Palestine, engaged in such falsification and rationalization.
It is well worth reading in full.
Though the official death toll is only (“only”) 38,000, researchers at medical journal The Lancet now estimate that at least 186,000 deaths in Gaza could result from the Israel-Hamas war.
The Lottery Is a Tax on Poverty
If there’s one thing I (Keith) am a knee jerk puritan about, it’s gambling. Blame it on my past career as a convenience store clerk, where I saw people habitually shell out more for the Pick 3 than they could ever make back from winning. Yes, there are plenty of recreational gamblers in the world who buy lottery tickets. But I’ve always suspected they’re outnumbered by those who see the lottery as their only shot at financial betterment, and today in the Minnesota Reformer, Christopher Ingraham has some numbers that back up my hunch.
The average adult living in the richest 5% of Minnesota ZIP codes buys $100 in lottery tickets annually, Ingraham reports. In the bottom 25% of ZIPs that number rises to $275. That drops by the time you reach the poorest 5%, but even so the average resident there is spending $150 annually. And that $150 is a much higher proportion of their income than the $100 those in wealthier codes pay. Based on these findings, Ingraham calls the lottery what it is: a regressive tax.
Lottery money goes on to pay for parks, schools, and much more, and though I’m no budgetary wiz, collecting money from (more or less) the bottom quartile of Minnesotans seems like an ineffective way of funding state services. And a nation where those earning below the median income imagine their only way to reach a better life is through a lottery? Not ideal.
The Minnesota Lottery is unfazed by such questions. As a spokesperson told the Reformer, “Just like any other product, buying a lottery ticket is an individual choice and entirely voluntary.”
A Tale of Two Empty Downtowns
Empty Twin Cities downtowns: What’s the deal with them?
Let’s start with Minneapolis, where organizers of Warehouse District Live say they've been thwarting crime with a recurring weekend block party that no one attends. “The purpose of the program itself isn't to draw people,” Downtown Council CEO Adam Duininck tells Zoë Jackson at the Star Tribune. “It's actually just to be another place along 1st Avenue for people to move through and, frankly, have some resources they can't get elsewhere." Those resources include a street closed to cars, public benches and toilets, food trucks, inflatables, carnival games, and a DJ who, Jackson noted on a Saturday night, “played to an empty dance floor." Jackson reports that the event runs $28,700 per weekend; the Minneapolis City Council allotted $750,000 for the event, which is organized by the Minneapolis Downtown Improvement District, this year. Man, did we have to give up things like Open Streets and Nice Ride for this?
Meanwhile, Hannah Ward at Twin Cities Business tries to figure out just how empty downtown St. Paul is in this piece. Depending on which firm you ask, the number of vacancies, both business and residential, could range from 12.3% to 31.5%. One reason for variation? There’s no universal agreement as to where downtown St. Paul begins and ends. “Everybody’s got different boundaries of where they think the competitive metro geography ends,” says Patrick Hamilton of real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield. Sounds like an Uptown problem! Inconsistent data collection may also be at hand; for example Ward writes that Avison Young relies on a “mixed bag of sources” that includes conversations with housing management, press releases, and data from “subscription-based listings services.”
RIP PiPress Journalist Rubén Rosario
Today the Twin Cities journalism community is mourning the loss of Rubén Rosario, the longtime Pioneer Press reporter/columnist who died Wednesday in Minneapolis from cancer-related complications. He was 70.
In a lovely obituary published today, fellow PiPresser Mary Divine details Rosario's remarkable career, which began in his hometown of New York City in the '80s. The old-school reporter threw himself into several high-profile crime stories, including one where he smoked crack as part of an undercover, front page New York Daily News investigation into the raging epidemic. Rosario moved to St. Paul in 1991 for a job at the PiPress, where he'd work as city editor and lead the public safety team until, in 1997, he pivoted to a columnist role. He would produce more than 2,000 columns, hundreds of which came over a decade after his terminal 2011 myeloma diagnosis. His final one, published late last November, was about finding hope in the future through the kids of St. Paul.
Rosario exuded the ethos that the “time-honored purpose of journalism was to ‘Comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable,’” his wife of 46 years, Laura Rosario, tells Divine. Adds former coworker David Hanners...
[Rosario] was a warrior for all that is good in this world. There are a handful of people who set the standard for courage, nobility, ethics, honor, a sense of justice and a keen way with words. He was a rare one. He was a crackerjack reporter and writer who had an eye for great detail and a heart that was alternately big and unsparing. He wrote with a streetwise eloquence. He believed in ex-cons trying to lead new lives, and he had little sympathy for uncaring bureaucrats.
We encourage you to read Divine's entire sprawling, fascinating obit for more on Rosario's career, family, mentorship to young journalists, and in-print reckoning with his own mortality. Racket was fortunate enough to talk with Rosario last fall for this expose into Alden Global Capital, the voracious hedge fund that has been eating away at the PiPress for almost two decades. We'll leave you with what he told us...
Man, [the 1990s] were the salad days of the Pioneer Press. In the four years before I got there, they had won two Pulitzer Prizes. We had at least over 200 employees at that time—an investigative team, reporters we'd send overseas for local angles. We were sittin’ pretty, man.
[Alden's ownership] vulture capitalism on steroids, no question about it. But ya know what? That's what they are. If you thought they were gonna be paragons of quality journalism, you gotta be naïve. Is that terrible? Is that morally reprehensible? That's in the eye of the beholder. Before Alden came into the picture, there were layoffs and buyouts—human capital is always taken for granted. They've just taken it to the slash ‘n’ burn level.
