Wildfire season has been normal in northern Minnesota, at least by recent standards. Nevertheless, it’s been more dramatic than usual. Extreme wind and dry conditions caused a shotgun blast of fires last week. Highway 61 closed on the North Shore. Water planes filled up in Lake Superior. Over near Crosslake, an even larger fire flared up. Though increasingly contained, these fires are still burning. Dozens of homes and structures have been lost, however, which is devastating.

Today’s column (gift link) looks at how fire season works. Smokey Bear is right. We can prevent fires and help those who fight them. One way NOT to do that is to shoot the tail of a water bomber when it scoops up water at your local lake. One man did this for yet unknown reasons, and will pay a legal price for his folly.

Read “As wildfires burn in northern Minnesota, here’s how you can help” in the Tuesday, May 19, 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 Many ways to prevent wildfire (shooting water planes not included) appeared first on Minnesota Brown.

I wanted to share some events I’ll be doing in Duluth and St. Paul over the next week. I leave the compound so little these days that this might qualify as news.

On Saturday, May 23, I’ll be delivering the John Bushey Memorial Lecture for Duluth Dylan Fest from 1-3 p.m. at Zeitgeist Duluth, 222 E. Superior Street. The event is free and open to the public. 

Then, on Wednesday, May 27, I’ll be part of a book event for “On an Inland Sea: Writing the Great Lakes.” I wrote an essay for this collection from Belt Publishing in Cleveland. I will be among four Minnesota writers appearing at SubText Books, 6 West 5th St., in St. Paul from 7-8 p.m. that Wednesday night. We’ll do a short reading and sign books.

The Dylan lecture is entitled “The Plowman: Exploring the Northern Minnesota Stories That Influenced a Young Bob Dylan.” I look at the cultural conditions that shaped Hibbing, Minnesota, when Robert Zimmerman grew up there after World War II.

My essay in “On an Inland Sea” speaks to the spiritual, economic and cultural connection between the Iron Range and the Great Lakes. The “inland seas” draw away the very earth beneath our feet. It also tugs at the imaginations of small boys growing up along the DM&IR tracks. 

I hope you take the chance to stop by if you can. I’m going to do a lot more events when my Victor Power book is done, but that still has a year in the barrel to go. 

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 Talkin’ Bob Dylan Great Lakes Road Trip Blues appeared first on Minnesota Brown.

Today’s column (gift link) is about affordable cars.

Cars dictate status in America. If you can afford a comfortable, reliable car, especially one that’s new, you’re in the middle class. Period. That’s all you need to know. And that’s good, because you need a car to safely navigate most American cities or live anywhere outside of a city.

Most folks, however, live in a semi-constant state of car struggle. They’re either driving a car they can’t really afford or a car that will soon let them down. Sometimes both.

In a lecture I used to give about perception failures, I explained that the worst kind of car is the one that starts four times out of five. If it always starts or never starts, you retain control. But the “maybe” of driving a shitbox car — the hope — it can drive you crazy.

Part of the problem is that shitty cars used to be cheap. Today, used cars fetch record prices, because new cars are more expensive than ever. The all-powerful market has pushed the envelope of what Americans will pay to stay on the road. (To stay in the middle class). Supply issues, tariffs, political spats over electric vehicles, regulations all conspire to keep cars complicated and costly.

My son Doug got me interested in these small Japanese trucks, called kei trucks. If I was ever to buy a utility vehicle for use around our property it would probably be something like this. And yet, these small trucks tell a story of why it’s become so expensive to buy practical, affordable vehicles.

Read “On tiny kei trucks, and the problems with today’s car market,” in the Saturday, May 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 The vanishing cheap car that runs appeared first on Minnesota Brown.

After a year at the writer’s desk, my previous two decades in a college classroom already feel like a dream. Twenty-one years. More than 2,000 students. Innumerable committee meetings. One of the things that made my experience unique was that, from the start, half my teaching load was online.

When I started in 2004, online education was not new, but new enough that it still had a large number of skeptics. I had researched online education as a way for colleges to reach more students and deliver more diverse curriculum. Thus, I became an early adopter and proponent.

By 2025, that argument was over. Students couldn’t get enough online credits. More convenient for work and activities, online offerings filled immediately. Meantime, we struggled to put butts in the seats of our actual classrooms. 

Today’s column (gift link) is about the recent hack of Canvas, one of the nation’s biggest learning management systems. These LMS platforms are how colleges big and small deliver online courses to their students. Minnesota State, the system where I worked, uses one called Brightspace. On May 7, hackers hit Canvas. The resulting outage allowed hackers to briefly take over the platform and extract student data from colleges across the country.

This might seem another one-off data breach. Perhaps just the next of many to come as our privacy becomes a commodity on a web that grows darker by the day. But today I argue, with some experience behind me, that the bigger problem is the homogenization of content and delivery that comes with the “freedom” of online learning. A system that can be stopped cold during finals week by some guys is not the robust educational progress we were promised.

Read “Canvas hack exposes a dangerous weakness in online education” in the Tuesday, May 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 The finals week hack heard ’round the world appeared first on Minnesota Brown.

For 25 years I’ve been writing about economic development on the Iron Range. In fact, I could blindly type the words “Iron Range economic development” on the underside of a dark car trunk as I’m being hauled away. One day I might do just that.

Today’s column (gift link) is about Iron Range economic development, but not in the way you might expect. Yes, regions like the Range — long dependent on big industrial employers — need to diversify. They need “jobs, jobs, jobs.” That’s a phrase coined by Gov. Rudy Perpich during the 1980s regional depression that fundamentally changed this region.

But how we solve the region’s economic woes requires more than just job creation. It demands development of the people who will work those jobs. With sufficient creativity, we could develop the people who create those jobs in the first place.

How? Well, we must acknowledge the private crisis affecting families everywhere. If both parents work, they need child care. Right now, that child care is often unaffordable, and sometimes — like on the Iron Range — unavailable to begin with.

New research from the Iron Range Child Care Task Force doesn’t just diagnose the problem; it argues for a series of potential solutions. Though both the private and public sector must contribute, there is a strong argument for local solutions. And while the data relates specifically to the Range; the ideas here could bear fruit for any part of Minnesota.

Read “Up north, parents wait years for child care they can barely afford,” in the Sunday, May 10, 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 ‘Jobs, jobs, jobs’ only works if there’s available, affordable child care appeared first on Minnesota Brown.

We experienced a small tragedy and a big epiphany this week. I describe it all in my latest column (gift link).

Last Saturday night — well, actually Sunday morning — I was up late working on the book. I let our very sleepy small dog out one last time and she immediately started barking. This rarely precedes anything good. She was circling a motionless animal of similar size. I went down there and saw a snowshoe hare, still alive, laying in the grass near our fence.

Assuming it was frightened or stunned, I said “go home, bunny” and brought the dog in. But when my wife woke up early the next morning, the hare was still there. It turns out that it’s back legs weren’t working right.

We brought the hare to a local wildlife rehabilitation clinic, and we were glad we did. Unfortunately, the outcome wasn’t as good as we hoped. The hare injured its spine — likely after getting stuck in our chain link fence — and had to be euthanized. At least its life ended humanely, which would not have happened otherwise.

The experience showed us the thin, furry line between injured or displaced wildlife and often inadvertently human-caused suffering. A few people, none of them well-compensated, if they get paid at all, are out there nursing these animals back into the wild.

I met an amazing woman doing this work. I also talked to experts about what we can do to help the wildlife in our neighborhoods.

Read “One volunteer runs the only wildlife rehab center for miles,” in the Saturday, May 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 Keeping nature healthy, wild and free appeared first on Minnesota Brown.

Today’s column (gift link) knows where you live.

Somewhere near your home lies a very important intersection. At this intersection, an international spy, world-renowned detective or merciless bounty hunter could tell “them” (whoever “they” are) everything about you. They could certainly tell when you’re running late. They could even determine if your phone failed to sync with the car, because you’re a hot mess driver when things don’t work right.

After a couple weeks, your patterns would become very clear. Imagine this went on for years! These nefarious observers could pinpoint your daily movements more accurately than you could, identifying contributing factors that you never considered.

Don’t worry. I’m pretty sure you won’t find a secret detective or spy at this intersection. But there’s a decent chance you’ll find a camera maintained by local law enforcement. License plate reader cameras even cropped up here in the wilds of Itasca County, deep in the woods near where I live.

On one hand, these are incredibly helpful tools for law enforcement. They help catch criminals and literally save lives, especially in missing person cases. On the other, most of them are provided by a third-party company called Flock, a private security firm that exists outside the realm of our government. Privacy advocates point out several concerns.

When you distrust the government, you can vote against it. When you distrust the private sector, your options are limited.

Read “With Flock cameras, you’re never alone on Minnesota roads,” in the Thursday, April 30, 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 all-seeing eyes have it appeared first on Minnesota Brown.

Today’s column (gift link) tells the tale of an unlikely return to a topic I mistakenly thought was resolved years ago. 

Back in 1999, a local community-minded woman secured a small grant to start a community newspaper in Cherry, Minn., where I grew up. She didn’t know anything about newspapers, so she hired me, a 19-year-old with two semesters of journalism school and a surplus of irrational confidence. That summer I designed and built an old-fashioned country newspaper. 

The paper didn’t last long, but we had a good run. Our top story was about “the junk patrols.” A proposed county ordinance would limit the number of junk cars allowed on a person’s property. Local landowners feared that St. Louis County sheriff’s deputies would cruise the back roads looking for people with too much junk. This was pre-social media, so word spread person-to-person. Junk talk permeated of all the townships we covered.

In the end, the county softened the ordinance by allowing more cars if they were screened from view. But what really happened was a tacit understanding that no one would talk about this anymore. What happens out in the sticks was to be left alone.

Flash forward to April 14, 2026. I drive over to Palo to attend a St. Louis County Board meeting. I went to learn about a labor issue. But the parking lot at the Loon Lake Community Center was completely full. Hundreds of people streamed into the building. Labor issues used to draw crowds like this, but that’s not why they were there. It turns out that the county had proposed a tweak to the junk ordinance, and 500 people showed up to show their disapproval.

Now, the tweak really wasn’t as huge as some made out. But the vibes were just like 1999. The fear of what MIGHT happen produced a wide range of emotions. It got me thinking about the relationship we have with our stuff. In this case, stuff is culture. Understanding different cultural perspectives would go a long way to patch some of the seemingly impossible divisions in our society.

Read “In northern Minn., junk speaks to an emotional divide in politics” in the Sunday, April 26, 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 politics of junk appeared first on Minnesota Brown.

Parenting is hard but rewarding. I’d allowed myself to feel accomplished when our three sons hit adulthood. But, in truth, parenting keeps going, and with three in college we’re the latest to realize how expensive it’s become to start a career.

Today’s column (gift link) brings new perspective on the challenges. I grew up in a low-income household that allowed me to use government grants and subsidized loans to pay for college. It was still hard. I worked through college to pay expenses myself and avoid higher-interest loans.

Thanks to the success made possible by college, my wife and I joined the upper middle class. No more grants and subsidized loans for our kids. While we have far more funds to help than our parents did, it feels like just as much hustling as when we were broke. Different, but the same.

No rest for the weary. It still feels like we’re front-loading the youngest members of our society with debt that will follow them far longer than older people seem to understand.

Read “The class-blind conundrum in paying for college,” in the Saturday, April 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 No easy way to pay for college appeared first on Minnesota Brown.

How strange is our relationship with our own bodies and their various functions? Like most Americans, I was raised to hide as much of mine as possible. That was fine with me, because my body was always lumpier than most. “Shirts vs. skins” in gym class was less an activity, more an existential crisis.

So when I learned that generations of my ancestors got naked together for sauna, I had a lot to process. I was told that “no one cares,” but I cared. It was hard to shake the teasing I had received when I was young.

But as the years went on, I learned to love the sauna, even without clothes. Truthfully, I still prefer to go alone, but my circle of trust is slowly expanding.

Part of the hangup is the strange connection between normal, harmless human behavior and shame, along with the paranoia over sexual deviancy written into our cultural norms.

A Minneapolis city council proposal to lift a decades-old ban on bathhouses sparked a boomlet of debate and speculation. Much of the ado centered on sex. And while no one seems to deny that sex occurs at some bathhouses, there remains a broader question of what exactly we’re afraid of when we encounter different cultural traditions.

In today’s column (gift link), I look back at the suspicion cast upon Finnish American immigrants to Minnesota’s Iron Range 100 years ago. What would you think if you saw your neighbors — mom, dad, the kids — walking naked to a little building behind their house? If you didn’t know about sauna, its traditions and sacred status in Finnish culture, you’d be pretty skeptical. In time, however, you might grow to understand. Certainly that’s the case in Minnesota, where the sauna tradition has long since gone mainstream.

Read “For Iron Rangers like me, bathhouses are decidedly unsexy places,” in the Tuesday, April 21, 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 Minneapolis bathhouse debate hearkens memories of Iron Range sauna history appeared first on Minnesota Brown.