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The Uptown Association Doesn’t Seem to Want to Spend Time in Uptown
After two sad years in exile, languishing as the SoMi Art Fair in the parking lot of Bachman’s, a stone’s throw from Richfield, Minneapolis's Uptown Art Fair is back—at least in name.
As Alicia Eler reports for the Strib, the Uptown Association is bringing the re-redubbed Uptown Art Fair to an area around the Lake of the Isles from August 7–9.
Now, no one wants to get into a long debate about the borders of Uptown, which may well include the new fair site for all we know or care. But the event placement does suggest that the Uptown Association is somewhat ashamed of the area we all definitively think of as Uptown: the crossroads of Hennepin & Lake.
It’s a ‘hood that’s a little down-at-the-heel these days, partly due to buildings left vacant by landlords who dream that monied tenants like Victoria’s Secret and Urban Outfitters will someday return.
Setting the fair down by the lakes is a way of confirming what we already know: The Uptown Art Fair is not really an event for Uptown residents. But, as the Uptown Association knows, this site will ensure that no one from Edina will accidentally see a homeless person while buying a painting of a loon for their cabin.
Why Don’t Our Schools Teach, Um, “Virtue”?
Well here’s the weirdest story about a Minnesota school you’ll read all week. In an opinion piece for the New York Times, James Traub discusses his visit to the Eagle Ridge Academy, a “classical” charter school in Minnetonka. He’s impressed by how polite and disciplined the school’s largely immigrant student body is as they discuss Homer and Virgil. A blueprint for the future of education.
This is a whole genre of op-ed, of course. As U of M Professor Charlotte Garden pointed out on Bluesky, this type of piece features “anecdotes about one school” and “generalities that will have an intuitive appeal to a certain kind of reader” (in this case, that "schools for poor kids should be stricter").
On top of that, Traub’s column feels unmoored from the issues that public schools actually face. (Particularly true public schools, which suffer economically because of charters like Eagle Ridge.) State legislatures are passing off nationalist propaganda as curricula, and does anyone even know if the Department of Education still exists? Of course, Traub has a book to sell, subtitled, How Schools Can Help Save Our Democracy. I don’t know, maybe the problem with our schools is that we already ask them to do too much.
Anyway, does reading classical epics necessarily inculcate civic virtue? Plato sure didn’t think so. On top of that, at least one Racket editor (me, Keith) read the Aeneid in high school—and look how I turned out.
Thief Breaks Into Pub and Steals… D&D Maps?
No, this isn’t the shenanigans of a rival role-playing group. Earlier this week, someone broke into Brühaven in Minneapolis's Loring Park neighborhood and stole a toolbox. While the thief probably thought they were scoring tools, what they got was supplies used by Dragons, Dungeons & Drinks to host the group's popular D&D nights. “Instead he [got] maps, mini figures, table cloths, and supplies,” a Brühaven employee writes on Facebook.
According to Mastress Renee, founder of DD&D, the robber stole thousands of dollars worth of supplies (“practically everything we own”), including 500-plus hand-laminated character sheets, binders, tokens, and dice.
“I'll be honest: I have been feeling wave after wave of grief,” she writes via a GoFundMe page. “Not because of the cost of what was taken. But because I watched our volunteers sit around tables laminating and binding those sheets. They gave their time, their care, their Saturday afternoons to make sure a stranger walking into their first D&D night would have something beautiful to hold.”
Brühaven is also pitching in to help the group recoup supplies; a portion of the proceeds from the sale of Third Space Pale Ale will benefit the crew.
Chicken Fight!
Two purveyors of hot chicken in Minnesota are ruffling each others’ feathers, and it’s turning into quite a cock fight.
Last month, national chain Dave’s Hot Chicken put up a billboard above Nashville Coop in Richfield, encouraging folks to visit its Edina location instead. The advertising move, whether intentional or not, is not a great look. Nashville Coop is a small chain headquartered in Minnesota, blending Ethiopian soul food with the hot chicken trend, while Dave’s is a nationwide chain backed by (former Mr. Kim Kardashian) Kris Humphries. NC is beefing (er... clucking?) back, with an Instagram post proclaiming that DHC “can buy a billboard, but you can’t buy taste!“ Oh snap!
“We didn’t ever want to be the first ones to say something,” Nashville Coop co-owner Kamal Mohamed tells J.D. Duggan for Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal. “So once they put up that billboard, it just gave us permission to say, ‘OK, if we really want to have that discussion, let's go ahead and let people know what is what.’”
Meanwhile, Dave’s reps tell Duggan the billboard placement is nothing personal, just business.
