The internet is doing some funny things to time, space and relationships. Our perspective is warped. We feel close to faraway things and far from nearby things. But the world — the real world — is bringing us closer together whether we like it or not.

Smoke from Canadian fires is again turning Minnesota air hazardous. In fact, we have our own fires adding danger to communities in St. Louis, Lake and Cook counties. That’s the inspiration for today’s column (gift link).

The air we breathe is something we all share. After all, there is no special air for God-fearing patriotic conservatives or community-minded progressive allies. It’s just air, and today it’s lousy for everyone. Same for fire. Fire will burn any fuel. There is no difference between scrap wood and a house.

Most Minnesotans live in the seven-county metro area of the Twin Cities. People go online and see the fires up north, interpreting them through their own lens. How’s my cabin? How’s my favorite tourist spot? This is perfectly natural. It’s how our brains work. But today, I flip it around. How would those questions feel if the fire was burning your home?

I started noticing this phenomenon in our neighborhood Facebook group. We’d have a big storm, maybe lose power for a day, and even as the storm was happening people from somewhere else would be asking if someone would check on their cabins or docks.

Again, I know why people want this. The internet creates the illusion that people you don’t know are open to intimate requests like this, while they are actually strangers who have their own problems. For instance, they might not have potable water, or in the worst scenarios, a place to live. You don’t know because of distance you aren’t properly perceiving.

There’s a lot to this that goes beyond weather and natural disasters. A whole philosophy of time and space. But for today, I share a harrowing story of a woman who had just ten minutes to flee a wildfire last May. Her experience relates not only to people being evacuated today, but to all of us.

Read “Minnesota wildfires aren’t just destroying tourist areas. For some, their homes are at stake” in the Thursday, July 16, 2026 edition of the Minnesota Star Tribune.

Aaron J. Brown is a columnist and member of the editorial board for the Minnesota Star Tribune. His new book about Hibbing Mayor Victor Power and his momentous fight against the world’s largest corporation will be out soon.

The post People live here appeared first on Minnesota Brown.

Today’s column (gift link) takes you along on my first trip to the wild rice stand at the Rice Lake National Wildlife Refuge in Aitkin County. I went there to meet with leaders from the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, whose reservation borders the federal reserve. Rice Lake is one of the state’s most bountiful sources of wild rice — some 3,000 acres — and is a crucial stop for a massive population of migrating waterfowl every year.

Our topic of discussion was Talon Metals proposal to mine nickel just a few miles away at Tamarack, Minn.

Longtime readers know I’ve been researching, exploring and pontificating upon new forms of mining in northern Minnesota since I started this blog in 2006, and even before that. I’ve taken a cautious but curious view toward mines like Talon, Twin Metals in Ely or New Range Minerals in Hoyt Lakes. I understand the appeal, and also the skepticism.

I often frame my views in the context of whether new mining will help diversify the economy of northeastern Minnesota, my true cause. This column makes a more focused point. If we can’t compromise on nonferrous mining, what is the question we must answer to make this fateful decision?

Read “Is what we might get worth what we might lose?” in the Sunday, July 12, 2026 edition of the Minnesota Star Tribune.

Aaron J. Brown is a columnist and member of the editorial board for the Minnesota Star Tribune. His new book about Hibbing Mayor Victor Power and his momentous fight against the world’s largest corporation will be out soon.

The post Weighing risks and rewards in Minnesota’s copper-nickel debate appeared first on Minnesota Brown.

Today’s column (gift link) takes us to my home away from home, Chisago County. People sometimes think I moved to the Cities after I became a columnist for the Minnesota Star Tribune. Not so. I stayed right here at MinnesotaBrown World Headquarters in Itasca County. But it is true that I travel to the Cities more often and, when I do, I stay at my dad’s place in Chisago County.

It’s not the kind of place one generally associates with the labor movement. That’s why it’s been so interesting to watch Chisago County workers in Teamsters Local 320 maintain one of the longest public sector workers strikes in state history.

The strike wears on, with many familiar refrains about wages and health care. But in dissecting the deeper cause, we come back to a common theme: rising costs. This problem must be addressed, or the scrap for resources might tear our communities apart.

Read “Chisago County strike exposes social price of rising costs” in the Thursday, July 9, 2026 edition of the Minnesota Star Tribune.

Aaron J. Brown is a columnist and member of the editorial board for the Minnesota Star Tribune. His new book about Hibbing Mayor Victor Power and his momentous fight against the world’s largest corporation will be out soon.

The post Cost conflict hits home in one of state’s longest strikes appeared first on Minnesota Brown.

Today’s column (gift link) is a recent favorite, mostly because I got to hang out with one of the most entertaining people I’ve met in the last few years. Rosanne Omersa recently-retired as an administrative assistant at the Eveleth campus of Minnesota North. She was there when it was Mesabi Range College and started back when it was the Eveleth vo-tech. But that’s not how I initially met her.

During COVID-19, Rosanne took up playing the button box accordion. With some lessons and hard work, she quickly became pretty good, posting videos. I met her at a holiday party where she pulled out the accordion for some traditional Slovenian tunes. Unfortunately this was after I took my Great Northern Radio Show off the air, but Rosanne was definitely someone I’d have booked on my variety show.

In more recent months, Rosanne inspired me with the way she’s used music to navigate hard times.

Today, you can read a column about hard times and good times. Polka music can be a spiritual balm, not only here on the Range, but far and wide if we open our hearts to its danceability.

Read “Hard times call for the healing power of … polka?” in the Thursday, July 2, 2026 edition of the Minnesota Star Tribune.

Aaron J. Brown is a columnist and member of the editorial board for the Minnesota Star Tribune. His new book about Hibbing Mayor Victor Power and his momentous fight against the world’s largest corporation will be out soon.

The post The polka cure for people in need of joy appeared first on Minnesota Brown.

Today’s column (gift link) returns to a topic I explored last year: mental health care in rural Minnesota. My 2025 series of columns covered the gamut of mental health issues. I explored the availability of care, changing social norms about seeking help and the relationship between emergency rooms and law enforcement agencies and those in crisis.

With that in mind, I was glad to see some progress at a local hospital here on the Iron Range. Essentia Health-Virginia is expanding their emergency department this summer. This includes a suite designed to aid in the intake of people with serious behavioral and mental health symptoms. It offers privacy, more security and a calmer environment.

Last week, I spoke with hospital leaders and providers who work with mental health patients every day. I learned that we’re making progress, but there’s much work ahead.

Read “This rural hospital is taking a step forward in rural mental health care,” in the Wednesday, July 1, 2026 edition of the Minnesota Star Tribune.

Aaron J. Brown is a columnist and member of the editorial board for the Minnesota Star Tribune. His new book about Hibbing Mayor Victor Power and his momentous fight against the world’s largest corporation will be out soon.

The post Making mental health care standard for rural communities appeared first on Minnesota Brown.

Today’s column (gift link) is, as I put it in our editorial meeting, “for the fans.” Once again, and certainly not for reasons of algorithm, the state’s largest newspaper has allowed me to write about history.

History is like a washing machine. You throw all the dirty laundry in there and something just a little bit different comes out. The really bad stains remain, but a lot of the smaller blemishes go out the waste pipe. Many of my clothes have held up pretty well over the years, but none wear exactly the same way.

Spending 10 years on research for a book project (yet unpublished! ha ha ha twitch) was its own kind of spin cycle. My methodology was decidedly blunt: read all the newspapers from Hibbing, Minnesota from the 1910s and ’20s. I was following one man, Victor Power, but ended up immersed in another universe, one where a mutually intelligible language was spoken.

Along the way, I came to see national political figures the way people of the time likely did, though always armed with knowledge of how it turns out. So much ink was spilled on William McAdoo’s attempts to become President. He was all the talk, had some good ideas, but failed twice to win the Democratic nomination. I’m betting you haven’t heard of him.

Is this a tragedy? Not really, because for all his attractive qualities he was a unrepentant segregationist whose best chance to win ended when he refused to repudiate the Ku Klux Klan. The obscurity provided by time is its own sort of detergent.

So when President Trump recently started talking his desire to avoid repeating the legacy of President Herbert Hoover, I perked up.

Hoover? You mean that promising young mining engineer who visited Hibbing?

This weird perspective (and it is weird) allows me to write about current events in ways you might not expect.

The argument that Hoover was our worst president always seems to miss an important point. He was our best president, right up until he wasn’t.

Read “Trump risks learning the wrong lessons from Herbert Hoover,” in the Thursday, June 25, 2026 edition of the Minnesota Star Tribune.

Aaron J. Brown is a columnist and member of the editorial board for the Minnesota Star Tribune. His new book about Hibbing Mayor Victor Power and his momentous fight against the world’s largest corporation will be out soon.

The post The thing everyone gets wrong about Hoover appeared first on Minnesota Brown.

When I mow the lawn I always turn on my garage radio. Because I’m mowing the lawn, I hear almost none of what’s on the radio, until I turn the mower off. You catch a song halfway through; an out-of-context news blurb. It’s like a friend that’s always there, but that won’t be mad if you’re too busy to pay close attention.

This is most people’s relationship with the media. And media is the topic of today’s column (gift link).

I work in the media. I’d like to be remembered as a newspaper columnist, but am actually what is now called a multimedia content producer. My relationship with “the media” is intimate. I’m always following what’s happening, what’s on, who’s saying what and what it all means. It’s literally my job to do this. But I must always remind myself that this is not normal. Most people — even in our ultra-connected, always-on media landscape — have a casual relationship with media sources, even if they turn to them often.

Casual means easy. The radio plays in the garage because it’s easier than fiddling with my phone and Bluetooth speakers. TV is good for news, because it’s a couple buttons away when you turn on the set. Most of the time, the phone is easiest for everything. That’s why I recently had to unlearn everything I thought I knew about shooting video to turn the whole rig sideways.

But “ease” does not come cheap. The democracy of media production of our times (YOU can have a podcast, YOU can make a news or opinion video) obscures a dogged consolidation of companies that produce and distribute media.

It’s happening right now, and the impact will affect not only what you will see and read in the future, but also how much it will cost.

Read “The paradox of today’s media” in the Monday, June 22, 2026 edition of the Minnesota Star Tribune.

Aaron J. Brown is a columnist and member of the editorial board for the Minnesota Star Tribune. His new book about Hibbing Mayor Victor Power and his momentous fight against the world’s largest corporation will be out soon.

The post In a world of peepers, who controls the peephole? appeared first on Minnesota Brown.

It’s hard to love a tick.

For the past week, I’ve been researching for a column about the diseases ticks spread. Despite the angle, I ended up kind of loving ticks.

Ticks only move 2-3 feet from where they are born, unless they hitch a ride. They live in the soil. It takes them half a day to crawl up a blade of grass because of their tiny legs (eight of them, because they are arachnids, more like spiders than beetles). They latch onto hosts by holding up their little arms as to hug someone. This process is called “questing.” If they don’t succeed, they must crawl all the way down into the soil for the night. They don’t drink water because they can’t. They excrete special salts to absorb water through moisture in the air.

It all sounds very interesting when you don’t have to look at it up close. In fact, it sounds like a children’s book to me.

Northern Minnesota is “Tick Country,” and this is undoubtedly “Tick Season,” so I would hate to add something repetitive to “Tick Discourse.” Today’s column (gift link) is an attempt to explain why we should care just a little bit more about ticks and tick-borne diseases than we did last year.

Ticks are more numerous, more varied and carry more diseases than even a few years ago. We also see ticks in more places than ever, and we are often their unwitting accomplices in feeding them.

Read “Ticks are on the rise in Minnesota — and so are the diseases they carry” in the Tuesday, June 16, 2026 edition of the Minnesota Star Tribune.

Aaron J. Brown is a columnist and member of the editorial board for the Minnesota Star Tribune. His new book about Hibbing Mayor Victor Power and his momentous fight against the world’s largest corporation will be out soon.

The post Welcome to tick country appeared first on Minnesota Brown.

Today’s column (gift link) looks at the raging debate over hyperscale data centers from a new angle. I got the idea from an old friend, Chuck Marohn, who longtime readers will remember as my co-host on the KAXE podcast “Dig Deep.”

Chuck’s a local guy. He’s conservative because he believes government should be local, not centralized. So when he wrote that a town should not be able to make its own deal with a data center company, that caught my attention. The reason he says this is the same reason towns can’t drain another town’s drinking water or pummel them with cows hurled from a medieval trebuchet. It affects other people, not just the town.

Specifically, these massive data centers are not only big energy consumers, they’re financial pits. And while the world’s largest companies today say they’ll cover all the costs, that might not always be the case. What happens when a small town is sitting on a $100 million bill for infrastructure that’s no longer needed?

Read “Data center deals sound sweet, but costs could swamp small towns” in the Thursday, June 11, 2026 edition of the Minnesota Star Tribune.

Aaron J. Brown is a columnist and member of the editorial board for the Minnesota Star Tribune. His new book about Hibbing Mayor Victor Power and his momentous fight against the world’s largest corporation will be out soon.

The post Despite promises, data boom could bust small towns appeared first on Minnesota Brown.

Ten years ago, the Iron Range swung hard to Donald Trump and the Republicans. Trump gave the United Steelworkers and mining companies something they always wanted: more tariffs on foreign steel. Then, last year, the steel industry started to stall. More than 600 Minnesota miners were laid off. Analysts quietly abandoned rosy projections about exploding domestic manufacturing and steel production.

Meantime, prices rose. This was actually good for steel companies, but bad for workers and consumers. Prices have risen so much that most Americans now perceive some sort of economic downturn even though company stocks and profits remain high.

In today’s column (gift link), I argue that — regardless of our political alignments — we should recognize when it’s time to make a change.

President Trump is not one to ever admit he was wrong about something, but he is one to quietly react to a reality he won’t speak aloud. That’s why a recent decision to lift tariffs and certain restrictions on farm equipment matters. It provides that the administration knows that it’s raising prices on working Americans.

Read “Finally, a Trump tariff that works: reducing tariffs,” in the Tuesday, June 8, 2026 edition of the Minnesota Star Tribune.

Aaron J. Brown is a columnist and member of the editorial board for the Minnesota Star Tribune. His new book about Hibbing Mayor Victor Power and his momentous fight against the world’s largest corporation will be out soon.

The post Now we know: targeted tariffs better than blanket ones appeared first on Minnesota Brown.