Thanks, Wisconsin, for holding the line

I think I speak for all Americans when I say that it’s good to have some rules and to know, after last week’s primaries, that if, in your adult life, you posted online that Thanksgiving is a celebration of colonialism and should be canceled, you’re not going to win the Democratic nomination for governor, at least not in Wisconsin. These are weird times with the president being off-loaded in a food container, and so many rules and standards have fallen in the past decade, that it’s reassuring to know that Thanksgiving is above reproach and, I assume, Christmas and Memorial Day and a few others.

The Democrat defended her comments, just as a Democrat would, by saying they came during periods of personal growth in her spiritual journey to become the individual she is now, and she only lost by 1%, but still she lost. And she doesn’t deny it.

The writer’s life is one of digressions

So I’m working on a new book and then suddenly I’m engrossed in an online story about a 5-bedroom 1.5-acre, $7.5 million home for sale in the Hidden Hills gated community in L.A. and what I loathe about it compared to where I am with my sweetie, in Manhattan in a 2.1-bedroom with a little terrace with hydrangeas where a mourning dove family has raised its young.

This didn’t happen back before laptops, when I did my writing on a legal pad with a Sharpie, the sharp kind. This is the fault of the internet, which makes all of human knowledge accessible by one fingertip. It’s hard to stay focused.

Goodbye, Pearson’s, thank you, Emerson

The maker of my favorite candy bar, the candy I’ve loved my entire life for its salty sweetness — the Pearson’s Salted Nut Roll — is closing its only factory, on West Seventh Street in St. Paul, Minnesota, and laying off eighty workers.

I live in New York and Pearson’s Salted Nut Rolls can’t be found here so when I fly out to Minnesota on the 12th, I hope there are some left in stores for me.

Peter Ostroushko: Living in Wonderful Memories and in his Music Forever

Peter picked up his dad’s mandolin when he was a child and that was the start. Soon he could play fiddle or guitar, too. He was a teenager in high school when he knocked on Rudy Darling’s door and said he lived a few houses away and heard Rudy playing as he was walking by […]

Garrison’s response to Jon McTaggart’s letter of Jan. 23, 2018

Jon McTaggart’s letter was in response to a blizzard of listener anger, all of it richly deserved, after MPR expunged shows that people loved.