Over the years, I’ve often been asked by individuals how they can most effectively help those who are most directly touched by the death of a loved one. As a result, I’ve come up with a list of Do’s and Don’ts when it comes to dealing with grief. It is based on conversations I have had with people who have …
As I reflect on the purposes of the retreat I attended this past weekend in the Little Missouri Badlands of western North Dakota, I have been asking myself hard questions about my approach to what the retreat hosts have called “the situation.” I inquired. Turns out they mean the whole enchilada: borders and immigrants, health care, global warming, the 1 percent and the 99 …
The University of North Dakota women’s volleyball team dropped a three-set match to the University of Nebraska-Omana 25-15, 25-14, 25-13 Thursday night in a Summit League play in Betty Engelstad Sioux Center. North Dakota (1-17 overall, 0-16 Summit) was led by Alexa Albinson with five kills and Elizabeth Norris who had 11 assists. UNO is 8-7 overall and 5-0 in Summit. (Check …
In yet another bizarre twist to the long-running story of the controversial proposed bridge over the Little Missouri State Scenic River north of Medora to serve the oil industry, the state of North Dakota is now considering stepping in and taking over the whole project, including paying for the bridge and using eminent domain to condemn the land for the …
The University of North Dakota men’s hockey team kicked off its 2021-22 season with a 2-1 exhibition win over Bemidji State University on Saturday night in Ralph Engelstad Arena. The No. 8 Fighting Hawks usually open their season with an exhibition game against a Canadian team, but travel restrictions because of COVID-19 prevented that this year, so the NCAA allowed …
Colorado River’s Glen Canyon Dam is at risk of reaching dead pool — that is, the water level at which a dam’s turbines are no longer able to generate power. A new report from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation puts the risk at 3 percent next year, escalating to 34 percent in 2023, and up to 66 percent in 2025. As Lake …
The University of North Dakota football team held North Dakota State University to just one touchdown and three field goals Saturday afternoon in the Alerus Center in Grand Forks, but the Bison defense was a bit better, holding the Fighting Hawks to one touchdown and one field goal en route to a 16-10 Missouri Valley Conference win. The 10th-ranked Fighting …
Just about everyone loves a pasta sauce. You know, the kind with sweet Italian sausage, a lot of tomatoes and some nice mushrooms and peppers. And don’t forget the Parmesan cheese. You can count me in that camp. In fact, it’s one of our favorites when served with spaghetti. When my grandson come home for visit, it’s one of the …
This is going to be a story about bacon. It’s an article which appears in the October issue of Dakota Country magazine, which is on the newsstands and in the mail this week. Hang in there with me for a little bit while I provide some background. I’ll get to the bacon part in a minute. This bacon is worth …
In a week’s time, I will be attending a retreat in the Badlands to talk about the future. The organizer, a close friend of mine, invited me to participate, along with several dozen others, perhaps because I have a new book on North Dakota and the Great Plains, “The Language of Cottonwoods.” He called to talk logistics Saturday. As the …
In the end, I was thankful for what seemed like the thankless task of coaching a first-year women’s softball team in Jamestown, N.D., in 1985. Early on, I realized I had just one very good ballplayer, a third-baseman named Margo, who carried herself like Geena Davis in “A League of Our Own.” We had an OK shortstop, one outfielder who …
Grand Forks photographer Michael Bogert recently has spent time capturing nature sights the past few weeks of summer, flora and fauna alike
President Trump promised a big infrastructure bill many times, but nothing came of his repeated declarations that he was about to launch “infrastructure week.” Now the Biden administration, in cooperation with the Democrats of Congress, is hoping to make its $3.5 trillion infrastructure investment its most important legislative accomplishment before the 2022 and 2024 elections. Two giant pieces of legislation have been working their …
More than three years after it was first given an Air Quality Permit To Construct an oil refinery on the doorstep of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, Meridian Energy Group has received another 18-month permit extension to begin building the refinery. The company said when the permit was first granted in June 2018 that it would be in operation by now, …
If you don’t have an agreed-upon national narrative, you cannot accomplish great things in a democracy. One indication of America’s current confusion and disillusionment is that we no longer agree on our national identity, our origin story or our mission. We can chart how we got to this abyss, but it is much harder to imagine how we can lift …
Sept.11 has mostly come and gone. The 20th anniversary of what has become simply “9-11.” I did nothing to observe that anniversary. I did not watch television, or read the newspaper stories about the events of 20 years ago. Instead, I did things I would always do on a Saturday in September. I swam at the Y. I went for …
I’m a mere citizen, in no way connected with the levers of American foreign policy, but I can explain how this looks to an incessant reader of history. As a citizen, I feel deep pain for the fiasco of Afghanistan. And shame. “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it,” says Malcolm of another soldier in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” but for …
It turns out that I’m one in a million. Well actually, one in about 840,000 so far. That’s the approximately number of military veterans like myself who have volunteered for the Million Veteran Program or MVP. The goal is to enroll at least a million veterans. It’s a national medical research effort funded by the Veterans Administration to learn how …
Thomas Jefferson, speaking for the Second Continental Congress, wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” He either meant this to be a universal proposition (self-evident) and therefore was a contemptible hypocrite since he owned as many as 600 slaves in the course of his life, or he meant the statement to serve as what …
Summer affords many outdoor opportunities in the Northland. Travel around North Dakota with Grand Forks photographer Dave Bruner to see some of the sights that await travelers.
Remember when I said, on June 13, “Guess I’ll just go camping”? Well, we did. We hitched up the travel trailer and headed west, straight into the cauldron, to the historic heatwave in the Pacific Northwest. But we got lucky, and cool weather returned by the time we made it to North Cascades National Park. Highlights were glorious Mount Rainier, where …
An Iowa farmer builds a baseball diamond where corn should grow in the 1989 film “Field of Dreams.” Soon, ghosts play baseball. For legal reasons, actor Jimmy Earl Jones plays an author not named J.D. Salinger. The resonant bass voice of Jones says: “They’ll come to Iowa for reasons they can’t even fathom. They’ll turn into your driveway, not knowing …
A short update on a couple of things that I have written about recently. MERIDIAN ENERGY As I reported here earlier this summer, Meridian Energy Group’s Permit to Construct the Davis Refinery just three miles from Theodore Roosevelt National Park expired in June, three years after it was first issued by the North Dakota Department of Health (now the North …
Those who are outraged by the changing recommendations regarding masking by the CDC are a case in point why people should perhaps trust science and get the vaccine rather than leaning on their own limited understanding or the advice of friends who are not credible medical and public health professionals. Life is dynamic, not static, and all things evolve, including …
I haven’t written here lately because we went camping. For about three weeks. We went to the Pacific Northwest, seeking national parks and seafood. We found both. And we learned some things about camper trailers and “glamping.” Most importantly, camper trailers should be towed to a destination and parked for a few days. We spent too much time moving from …
Comedian Ali Sultan made his network television debut last month on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” Happily, he’ll be bringing his comedy to East Grand Forks this Thursday and Friday. Ali moved to America from Yemen at the age of 15. Fast forward a few years and he would be named both Best Local Comic and Artist of the …
Two of the garden vegetables that are first on the scene during the summer are eggplant and zucchini. Both lend themselves to a variety of recipes. Eggplant Parmesan and moussaka come to mind for the purplish aubergine, while the zucchini version of carrot cake and carrot bread get the nod in many corners. Pairing the two with tomatoes and pasta …
Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, an endowed chair named for Said, a professor, public intellectual and a founder of the academic field of postcolonial studies. Khalidi has written a number of books on the history of Palestine and the Middle East. With his latest effort — “The Hundred Years War on Palestine: …
Ignorance kills. It is the reason unvaccinated people are dying from COVID-19 and other diseases whose worst effects could be avoided. It is why people ignoring the consequences of climate change are wreaking havoc rather than being addressed. It is why people are victims of hate crimes and why teaching our children real history — not some whitewashed version that …
County fairs in a way are a slice of small-town Americana. Photographer Russ Hons recently took in the West Polk County Fair in Fertile, Minn. Here is a small sampling of what he saw, including the rodeo Wednesday night and the DockDog’s competition Saturday and Sunday. (Check out more photos from Russ Hons here.)
Lake Beltrami provided some excellent opportunities to photographer Michael Bogert on a recent excursion to Minnesota Lake Country.
With the 245th Independence Day and the first national Juneteenth commemoration now behind us, here is the question: If we could only keep one document from American history, and one only, which would it need to be? Opinions will vary. Some might say the Emancipation Proclamation, others the Bill of Rights, still others the U.S. Constitution itself. Or perhaps Lincoln’s magnificent Second Inaugural Address, delivered …
The area’s newest comedy club, The Prohibition Comedy Room in East Grand Forks, will be in full swing Friday night with some of the Twin Cities most popular comedians providing the laughs. Among them, Ahmed Khalaf, by way of Minneapolis, San Diego and Somali. Eventually, there will be weekly Friday night comedy shows at the Prohibition. The name, by the way, …
This article appears in the July edition of Dakola Country magazine, which will be on the stands this week. I’m a camper. I started camping as a Boy Scout. My dad was scoutmaster for Troop 34 in Hettinger, N.D., and loved to take his Scouts to his favorite campsite, beside the Grand River just across the state line in South …
Like many people these days, it has been a long time since I’ve been anywhere other than La Farm in Minnesota’s Otter Tail County. So when a friend said she was selling her house in Denver where she’d lived for 30 years after her husband died this spring, and she was moving back to Whidbey Island near Seattle, I thought …
I sat under a partly sunny sky on Father’s Day contemplating fatherhood. I awoke to a text and Father’s Day greetings from Dylan who started it all for me nearly 25 years ago. He was on vacation in the Black Hills. India was still snoozing after a bachelorette party at Green Lake. She was pretty chipper when she went to …
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Yep. This one (above), put up just west of Mandan, N.D.,, en route to the Bad Lands, is the work of North Dakota’s Sierra Club organizer, Wayde Schafer. No more words needed.
It’s not too late to pick some rhubarb for your next dessert or to freeze some to get you through the long winter. I’ve been doing a little of both the past couple of weeks. I’ve vacuum sealed and frozen several 4-cup bags of the “pie plant” as it has come to be known in the U.S. as well as …
On Friday, federal government employees had the day off to commemorate Juneteenth, a new federal holiday formally created the day before — some 156 years after it was first celebrated by newly emancipated Black people in Galveston, Texas. Millions of White Americans became aware of Juneteenth for the first time this past year only after the racial-justice protests that followed the death of George …
“The voters, the courts and the states have all spoken. They’ve all spoken.” That from then Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Jan. 6, 2021, in remarks intended to push back against those who were attempting to stop the certification of the 2020 election results. “If we overrule them, it would damage our republic forever.” Here we are, six months …
Dead perennials, spring 2021 Hosta: Autumn Glow Teenie Weenie Cracker Crumbs Hacksaw Judy Blue Eyes, most (healthy and spreading for ten years prior) Prairie Angel (one of two) Tokudama Sitting Pretty Peanut Praying Hands (most) Cherry Berry True Blue (a huge and beautiful plant) The miniatures, however established, took the biggest hit. Here’s Green Mouse Ears hosta this year: And …
In “The Cycles of Constitutional Time,” Jack Balkin takes an overarching look at the dynamics of constitutional government over the history of the United States. To understand what is happening today, he argues, “we have to think in terms of political cycles that interact with each other and create remarkable — and dark — times.” Single-term presidents, Balkin notes, often …
At midnight Saturday, Meridian Energy Group’s Air Pollution Control Permit To Construct an oil refinery next to Theodore Roosevelt National Park, issued by the North Dakota Department of Health, will expire. Now don’t get too excited. This nightmare isn’t over. This has happened before. This is the second time the permit has expired. The Health Department (now the Department of …
