Nine books have been recognized for this year’s Northeastern Minnesota Book Awards, which celebrate books that substantially represent the history, culture, heritage or lifestyle of northeastern Minnesota.
When I served on the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council, I was lucky enough to meet photographer and photography instructor John Gregor. John, through his company Coldsnap in Two Harbors, reviews equipment, leads classes and photography tours around North America, and of course takes amazing photos.
He has recently posted a video sharing his insights into taking night panoramas. It’s a great complement to his video introducing panoramic photography.
Art by Nelle Rhicard at reframeideas.com.
A group of University of Minnesota Duluth faculty, students and community artists came together to explore strategies to communicate the stories of frontline workers in housing and food insecurity.
UMD students met Noah Chan, community engagement coordinator at Agate Community Services in Downtown Minneapolis. Learn more about the Agate Housing at agatemn.org.
Duluth’s Ursa Minor Brewing won a bronze medal for its Equanimity Irish Style Red Ale at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver on Oct. 12. It’s the brewery’s second bronze medal at the festival; the first came in 2019 for Thistle Dew in the Scottish-Style Ale category.
Equanimity also won a gold medal at the Great American Beer Festival in 2022 and another gold at the World Beer Cup in 2023.
Galalee Wright and Jesse Hatten take to the sand dunes of Minnesota Point in their latest EmbalmingEva music video.
Map out your Halloween high jinks with this week’s quiz, which spotlights a few of the many spooky season events happening over the next few weeks. And don’t forget the PDD Calendar has a Halloween tag that filters in the creepiest stuff.
The next PDD quiz will review the month’s headlines; it will be published on Oct. 27. Please send question suggestions to at [email protected] by Oct. 24.
Among the mind-blowing coincidences of my life is how I met the countercultural chaos mathematician Ralph Abraham, who died on September 19. He was a huge influence on me and the moment we met was extraordinary.
Coincidence is not technically the same thing as synchronicity. To believe in synchronicity, you must believe in meaning. And I did.
It was the 1990s and I was a young hippie newlywed in Bonny Doon, the backwoods of Santa Cruz, California. Like a lot of folks, my wife and I lived at the end of a long winding dirt road at the end of another long winding road. It was like a miles-long driveway. People with land out there had sprinkled the place with trailers and shacks, and they let people rent them cheap on the down low. One of those shacks was home sweet home. You could hear the ocean in the distance. The outhouse had no walls or roof, it was just … out.
Duluth band Boxcar is releasing its second album, Black Noon, on Oct. 18. The first video release is directed by Lance Lindahl.
This undated postcard shows the Lake View Tea and Dining Room at 730 E. Superior St., “on the shore of Lake Superior where you can view the large steamers coming and going.”
In the late 1930s, the world was on the brink of war. In 2024, Alexis Pogorelskin is well aware that the threat has returned.
Her book Hollywood and the Nazis on the Eve of War: The Case of The Mortal Storm details the events preceding World War II. It was released in August by Bloomsbury Press.
Lane Ellis presents this GoPro 10 time-lapse video showing most of his recent 43-mile west-to-east mountain bike ride on the Duluth Traverse, ending at Lester Park during the Lester River Rendezvous.
For a few weeks starting mid September, the fall leaves in Duluth are at their most vibrant. Maples turn around Labor Day and birch and poplar closer to Lake Superior begin to turn in early October. Hike the North Shore or head to the top of the hill for a marvelous show of red, burgundy, orange, yellow and gold.
Featured here is Perfect Duluth Day’s annual collection of select images from Instagram showcasing nature’s palette.
How to make Lane Ellis’ time-tested vegan chili.
Photo of the Hemlock Exchange in 1920 by Hugh McKenzie. (Photo from the Northeast Minnesota Collections of the Kathryn A. Martin Library)
A year after Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, George W. Coy set up the first telephone exchange. Making a call to a specific phone required plugging the right cord into the right socket, and that required a person working out of an exchange building. Photos from the Minnesota Digital Library show the Duluth neighborhood exchanges that were operated by the Northwestern Bell Telephone Company in 1920. This post discusses the role of telephone exchanges as a source of employment for women in Duluth with a Geoguessr challenge that reveals what those telephone exchanges look like now.
Until recently, my vision of childbirth was driven by television. Television taught me to imagine a woman reclined in a bed, the way I recline in a La-Z-Boy. The husband stands slightly behind her and to the left, holding her hand, which is squeezed every time the birthing mom hears “push!” from the doctor. After a while, the baby’s head is squeezed, pushed out, and the rest follows. The baby is slapped to ensure breathing, toweled off, and passed to the mom, who immediately offers love. (No mention was ever made of the umbilical cord.)
Nearly every part of that story was inaccurate or even fabricated for television.
I have only recently come to understand that people give birth in a variety of positions (e.g., on all fours, for example), and that the position popular on TV, of the birthing person reclining, makes birth more difficult. The babies on TV are almost always eight weeks old when they are handed to their mothers; new babies look nothing like that. And while we imagine the mother or birthing person to be the center of the picture, in fact, she is sometimes pushed to the side while the doctor takes over.
