NY Times Takes Minneapolis to School
“If there is anywhere white families might embrace an integration plan, a likely candidate would be Minneapolis,” the New York Times says of our “bastion of liberalism” and its recent experiment in desegregating schools. *Bugs Bunny voice* They don’t know us very well, do they? In fact, Sunday’s Times piece on the attempted integration of North High School not only addresses concerns from white parents (crime, long commutes, and er, lack of an option to study Japanese), but also Black parents, who worry that an influx of white kids will dilute the school’s focus on their own children, and who ID “red flags” of gentrification like lacrosse. Obviously, this is a complex issue, and the Times story raises many important questions, but I’d like to focus on this hardly pressing but still quite intriguing one: Is North High principal Mauri Friestleben as cool as she comes across here? I hope so.
Is There a National Guard Member in the House?
The Minnesota National Guard has been plenty busy this past year, the Star Tribune reports. It’s estimated that Guard members will have been activated for 10 times as many hours in the past two years than they were in the entire decade before that. While the Guard’s highest profile gigs have been in Minneapolis, where they rolled in as an occupying force more than once, much of the activation time has been spent working Minnesota-wide on “the state’s COVID mission.” So why exactly do we need troops to administer vaccines? Erstwhile south Minneapolitan Alex Pareene asked that question in the New Republic earlier this year, and arrived at an unsurprising conclusion: because the military is the only federal program that receives unlimited funding. The Guard is “simply doing various essential tasks the pandemic revealed our state was too broken to handle," Pareene determined, "state-building in the U.S., after the nation gradually, over a generation, toppled its own government.”
Daunte Wright’s Family, Friends Speak Ahead of Trial
Jury selection begins tomorrow in the trial of former Brooklyn Center police officer Kim Potter, who shot 20-year-old Daunte Wright during a traffic stop last year. Potter faces charges of first- and second- degree manslaughter. Wright’s mother, Katie, spoke at a press conference this morning, saying, "Everybody who's been there for us, standing with us, on one of the worst days of our life, one of the worst months going forward of our life, we really thank you and we appreciate this.” George Floyd’s girlfriend Courteney Ross, who had also been Wright’s teacher, spoke as well, calling out "the fact that Kim Potter garnished a weapon for a routine traffic stop when the entire world was looking at racist cops under a microscope.”
Mayo: Long COVID Is Exhausting
What the hell is up with “Long COVID”? Researchers, including those at the Mayo Clinic, have been looking into the mysteriously lingering aftereffects of the virus and have published some discoveries. Bring Me the News looked into those findings here. Notably, men and women often have different symptoms. Women seem to suffer fatigue, and an abundance of IL-6, a protein related to inflammation. Men are more likely to have trouble breathing. That doesn’t tell us a whole lot about the long-term effects of COVID, obviously, but we thought you might find this information more useful than us shouting “THE OMICRON VARIANT!! WILL IT DESTROY US ALL??” like everyone else.
