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.
Mary Bue frolics her way across Minnesota in her new music video “Right Now.” The track is from her ninth album, The Wildness of Living and Dying, due out in early 2025. The video was directed by Jon Herchert of Deck Night Productions.
Duluth features prominently in this segment from the latest episode of Great Lakes Now, a monthly program focused on developments affecting the lakes. The show is produced by Detroit PBS in partnership with a network of PBS affiliates around the region.
The latest video from Duluth Urbex explores the space under the stage at Leif Erikson Park‘s outdoor amphitheater. The structure, completed in 1928, was designed by Abraham Holstead and William Sullivan.
Art by Nelle Rhicard at reframeideas.com.
Food insecurity, housing insecurity, poverty and social justice are intertwined, a knot of problems facing our community. Thirteen percent of Duluthians face food insecurity, and more than 54% of renter-households are rent burdened. Often these difficult social problems are addressed by nonprofit organizations that run food pantries or housing shelters. They build affordable housing and support people living on the street. While these workers are heroes, they are also human, and their stories are also intertwined with larger issues like poverty and social justice. These frontline workers are also often former college students who enter the job market with the consequential task of supporting those who others have left behind.
