Story Time
As a food writer in Minneapolis, I live in a hive of continuous food news and gossip. But here's a story that hasn't hit the front pages. It's the kind of story Midwesterners won't tell you unless you drive across the snow-covered fields to talk to them. The story is..."
Gourmet, the DMG archive
I’ll call him Beans. That’s not his real name. But I used to sing him a lullaby about bumblebees when he was a baby, and over time, bee turned to beans.
Beans was born colicky and beset by acid-reflux. Tilt him off an upright axis and his stomach acid would bubble past a little poorly functioning valve and make him scream...."
The Doughnut Gatherer, Minnesota Monthly
"The Fourth of July parade in every small Midwestern town has the same cast of characters: children holding miniature flags; Jaycees and VFW volunteers giving out candy; and pretty girls—who for one afternoon are Corn Queens or Strawberry Princesses or lesser members of the royal produce family—waving froma fire engine."
"It was 1976, and Mark Forgy was a tawny, blue-eyed hippie from Hopkins sitting in the back seat of a car racing through the distant roads of Ibiza, cradling the frail body of Elmyr de Hory—the greatest art forger of the 20th century.
Years earlier, de Hory had been exposed as the single hand behind a hundred-million-dollar art fraud perpetrated against Dallas oil baron Algur Hurtle Meadows, who had thought he was swindling desperate dealers out of masterpieces torn from post-World War II Europe. He wasn’t...."
A story of the greatest collection of art forgeries in the world, at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine
"New York City in the 1980s was not safe for children. Some were disappearing to kidnappers, others were disappearing to crack. Between that and the garbage strikes and divorce, the best place for kids was inside, in front of the television. I think that's why the New York City natives I know from that era all became different sorts of hothouse flowers, strong and strange...."
Saveur, an essay about rhubarb, and myself
"Let’s pop corks, set off fireworks, take a moment to yell a hooray for that blue, that particular blue private to Minnesotans in winter, that distinct, unique blue that only comes out in shadows during the brightest short days.
Make noise for a blue? Why?"
An essay about blue shadows, at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine