Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
All's Fair in Minnesota and Iowa
It's a little early in the summer to be thinking of the State Fair, but they do things a little differently in Iowa, where their fair is just around the corner. And so today the PiPress ran a cute three-byline comparison between the Minnesota State Fair (yay!) and the Iowa State Fair (boo!) from three retired journalists. Participating were Minnesotan Kathy Berdan (hooray!), native Iowan Deb Wiley (hiss!), and D.C.-based neutral third party Adell Crowe (audible indifference!).
There are some sparks here: Wiley disses pronto pups, Berdan reluctantly tips her hat to the enormity of Iowa's butter sculptures, and it is agreed that Minnesota excels in "ethnic foods." But the story doesn't make good on the promise of the headline: "Minnesota State Fair vs. Iowa’s: Which one is truly best?" I simply cannot condone Berdans’s weak conclusion:
Our resolve to name the best of the two State Fairs melted like a butter sculpture on an asphalt parking lot in August. There’s so much to love about each.
Why is it so hard for people to take sides? Amy Klobuchar famously refused to say which fair was better while running for president, and even afterward getting her to acknowledge Minnesota superiority was like getting a toddler to eat peas. I’ve never been to the Iowa State Fair, but I swear on my parents' graves that if I ever do get there I will be sure to tell everyone how much it sucks.
The Inside Story
Summertime means summer vacations, and in the world of understaffed small publications that means doing more with less. Em and Jessica were both out last week, and I’m out of the “office” for a week as of this Thursday, so we’ve had to shuffle our workloads around a bit to keep the ol’ Racket bus motorin’ along.
But as the Reformer shows today, those understaffed moments are when you can get creative. If we weren't in the sleepy summer months, would they have reprinted this 2023 story from Kamili Matata, an inmate at Stillwater Correctional Facility, that was originally published as part of the Prison Journalism Project? Maybe not, and that would have been our loss. (Also: Welcome back from paternity leave to the Reformer's ace labor reporter, Max Nesterak!)
Matata was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison in 1994, and he was denied parole twice (in 2021 and again in 2024). In his story, he writes sharply about regret and loss, and also about how his love of the Vikings has helped him grow as a person.
"As with the NFL draft, I now have hope," he concludes. "Hope that I could be paroled. Hope that I could possibly have a life. Hope that one day I will be in the stands at a Minnesota Vikings home game, cheering on the team that helped me get through my time."
At a time when the powerful are deliberately dehumanizing the incarcerated as part of a project to marginalize the rest of us as well, we need to hear more stories like these.
Strib: Leslie Fhima Is MORE-lie Fhima
We are the last people in town to criticize a publication for chasing after silly local angles… BUT! You have to wonder if the rest of Minnesota is as obsessed with Leslie Fhima as the Star Tribune seems to be. This summer, as Fhima returns to the tube (can we still call it that in the flat-screen era?) as a contestant on Bachelor in Paradise, the Strib has even pressed veteran music critic Jon Bream into recapping episodes.
It's been less than two years since Fhima placed second on The Golden Bachelor, but she doesn't have to be on TV for the Strib to cover her. My personal favorite one-two punch from the Fhima interregnum is: "'The Golden Bachelorette' is a go. But will it star Minnesotan Leslie Fhima?” later followed up by the defeated “Golden Bachelorette announced, and it’s not Minnesota’s Leslie Fhima.”
The rest of the world seems much less interested in Bachelor in Paradise than the Strib is; the show’s ratings have taken a dive, and longtime fans are complaining that it’s too Love Island-y. Yet the Strib's interest in Fhima hasn't waned—they even ran a humorous exposé recently of what it was like to attend Fhima’s dance class (terrifying, apparently!) I can only imagine the special edition if Minnesota's most prominent bachelorette ever remarries.
See Ya, CMX
The two remaining CMX theaters in Minnesota—CMX Odyssey IMAX in Burnsville and CMX Chateau 14 in Rochester—are now closed, Dustin Nelson reports for Bring Me the News. This isn't a total surprise, as the theaters' owner, Cinemax Holdings USA, filed for Chapter 11 earlier this month. The theaters sent out a cryptic email to their rewards members last week: "Due to a lease change, these locations will be closing—but this isn't goodbye." Kind of a hopeful note for a bankrupt company in a struggling industry to go out on, but we'll just have to wait and see what that means.
