Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
MN's 'Disappearing Rinks' Make the Washington Post
The network of city-maintained skating rinks throughout Minneapolis and St. Paul is among the best things about winter in the Twin Cities. But like everything else good in this world—the food supply, National Parks, and sure, even greater L.A.—our rinks are being threatened by climate change.
Sheila Mulrooney Eldred, a local journalist whose work has appeared in Sahan Journal and Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, explains as much in this Washington Post story about Minneapolis's disappearing rinks. Two Minneapolis rinks didn't open this year (Powderhorn and Webber NSP), and temperature spikes have forced some of those that did open to close temporarily.
That's not all! The Minneapolis Parks Board plans to close three more rinks next year "as it weighs the cost of maintaining a local winter tradition with the cost of accommodating fluctuating temperatures that have made the skating season unpredictable," Eldred writes. And while cities like St. Paul and Maple Grove have been moving away from natural ice rinks to rinks with refrigeration systems, that's still a costly endeavor. Maple Grove has fewer than half of the 20 rinks it once did.
"We’ve been fading them out—a couple this year, a couple next year. … The neighborhood skating rink has started to fade away," says Chuck Stifter, Maple Grove’s director of parks and recreation.
“It breaks my heart to close rinks,” adds Minneapolis Park Board President Cathy Aben. But she says climate change is forcing their hand.
Paige Bueckers Gets the GQ Treatment
Locally launched basketball star Paige Bueckers is the subject of a nice long profile by Vogue's Leah Faye Cooper on the cover of GQ Hype today. "Welcome to the Paige Bueckers Era of March Madness," the headline reads; the story kicks off at a launch party for the Paige Bueckers G.T. Hustle 3, the first Nike Player Edition shoe released by a college athlete.
Here's what we've got for Minnesota mentions:
That dream began in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, where she was raised by her father, Bob, after her parents divorced and her mother moved to Montana to open a dental practice. “I played every single sport,” she says of her childhood. “I was always the first pick at recess; anything [with] a winner and a loser, I wanted to win.”
Bob, who played high school basketball and coached some of Paige’s youth teams, started to suspect his daughter’s athletic gifts were unusual when she was three. He threw his preschooler a football and she caught it, easily, and threw it back. He remembers thinking, Okay, I think we got something here. “You could tell at a very young age that her hand-eye coordination and her balance were off the charts,” he tells me when we talk on the phone.
Bueckers grew up watching the Minnesota Lynx's Maya Moore, one of the all-time greats in women's basketball. There's also this: "Though Bueckers had brief conversations with Maryland, Minnesota, Notre Dame, and UCLA, UConn was the only school she seriously considered. 'Like I said, I always wanted to be a winner,' she tells me." Ouch!
Bueckers, it must be said, looks cool as hell throughout, dressed in Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello, Gucci, Balenciaga, and Supreme. If you aren't familiar with her yet, this is a great chance to get to know a player who "embodies the excitement—and the unprecedented power—of the new era of women’s basketball."
Let Uber and Lyft Drivers Unionize!
The Minnesota Reformer's Max Nesterak reports that less than a year after the Minnesota Legislature raised wages for Uber and Lyft drivers, Sen. Zaynab Mohamed (DFL-Minneapolis) is one of two Democratic lawmakers who have have proposed a path for those drivers to unionize.
The bill is modeled after a Massachusetts law that passed via a ballot initiative last November, making the state the first to allow drivers on apps to unionize. It's currently being drafted (and would need one Republican vote to pass in the House), but here's how it might work, per Nesterak...
Under the proposal, if a union signs up 10% of eligible drivers, transportation network companies would have to turn over a list of drivers in Minnesota, with contact information. Then, if 25% of all drivers who’ve completed at least 100 rides in the previous three months sign up to join the union, it would become the exclusive representative in negotiating wages, benefits and working conditions. Union dues would be entirely voluntary under the bill.
Rideshare driver/union security guard Abdi Haybe tells the Reformer that last year's law wasn’t enough. “We’re still struggling all the time,” he says. In December, Sahan Journal's Alfonzo Galvan reported that many drivers hadn't been seeing a difference in their take-home pay, with some telling Galvan that the fine print negatively impacts drivers who take shorter rides.
Target? More Like Tar-getting Roasted in the Comments.
Target Corp. is not having a good 2025. The Minneapolis-headquartered big-box store's decision to rollback DEI initiatives last month caused store traffic to drop nearly 10%, according to Fortune, and the daughters of Target co-founder Bruce Dayton wrote a widely circulated letter expressing their "alarm" over "how quickly the business community has given in to the current administration’s retaliatory threats." Also, the company is getting sued by a group of Florida Trumpers.
And, my god: Target's Instagram. For Retail Brew, Andrew Adam Newman reports that the company has become "a piñata on social media," with every new post drawing hundreds of angry comments from folks who are boycotting the brand. (And because corporations are moral/ethical black holes, Target has opted to ignore the backlash entirely, Newman notes.)
"Doing my shopping at Costco instead 💗," is the top-liked comment on Target's most recent Insta post, an influencer collab about soap. (Costco comes up a lot in the comments; there's also "At COSTCO you can buy two pairs and a chicken," on a post about new spring shoe styles, and "This reminds me, I gotta make another Costco run!" on a post about bedding.) Many people are writing long, thoughtful, impassioned comments about their decision to shop elsewhere until Target reinstates its DEI initiatives, but you can't beat the short, eloquent, "Nah. We good. ✊🏿✊🏾✊🏽" on this February 4 post (2,275 likes).
