A sincere and gratitude-stuffed "gobble, gobble" to all our RacketCast listeners ahead of this, one of the final episodes before Thanksgiving.

As such, we're talkin' turkey—local folks deserving of our unenviable "Biggest MN Turkeys of 2025" designation, that is. (How did we possibly come up with this idea?) Em, Keith, and Jay go around the horn, picking the biggest fools, phonies, and/or foes of '25 and then riffing on 'em accordingly. If you're sensitive to overuse of gobbling sound effects, you may want to skip this ep.

Did we miss any egregious turkeys? Call our hotline (619-RACKTIP, 619-722-5847) with your nominations—we'll play your voicemails on the next episode!

Subscribe to RacketCast wherever you get your podcasts—Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, etc. • Wanna advertise on RacketCast? Email us at [email protected]. • Have a food/drink, event, or show recommendation? How about a civic hot take? General or specific question? Call 619-RACKTIP (619-722-5847) with your first name + city + 3-min.-maximum voicemail, and we might play it on a future episode. • Special thanks to local band Van Stee for supplying our podcast music!

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Naomi Kritzer, author of the best Twin Cities election guide for 20+ years, drops by the pod to assess mayoral races, City Council races, Park Board races, and even the surprisingly exciting Board of Estimate & Taxation races. Study up—Tuesday is Election Day! Kritzer's latest book, Obstetrix, will arrive next summer.

Subscribe to RacketCast wherever you get your podcasts—Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, etc. • Wanna advertise on RacketCast? Email us at [email protected]. • Have a food/drink, event, or show recommendation? How about a civic hot take? General or specific question? Call 619-RACKTIP (619-722-5847) with your first name + city + 3-min.-maximum voicemail, and we might play it on a future episode. • Special thanks to local band Van Stee for supplying our podcast music!

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Eternally cool director/author/personality John Waters—aka the “Pope of Trash” aka the “People's Pervert” aka the “Prince of Puke”—makes his triumphant return this Saturday to the Parkway Theater. That's where Waters, 79, will perform his new "Going to Extremes" show on a Minneapolis stage he has visited eight times in recent years—more like the "Parkway Pervert." Ahead of the gig we chatted about Walker Art Center glory holes, Coen bros friendship/fandom, fearing the Mall of America, and how, in 2025, nobody can take a freaking joke.

But first! Here are the stories we gabbed about during What I Learned In Racket...

• Meet the Volunteer Pilots Flying Patients From Red States to Reproductive Care
• What I Saw at This Weekend’s Minnesota MAHA Fest Scared the Hell out of Me

This episode of RacketCast is brought to you by TPT's You Are Here: Wicked Minnehaha.

Subscribe to RacketCast wherever you get your podcasts—Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, etc. • Wanna advertise on RacketCast? Email us at [email protected]. • Have a food/drink, event, or show recommendation? How about a civic hot take? General or specific question? Call 619-RACKTIP (619-722-5847) with your first name + city + 3-min.-maximum voicemail, and we might play it on a future episode. • Special thanks to local band Van Stee for supplying our podcast music!

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Sometimes, when you're a tiny media outlet with a biweekly podcast, several interview requests fall through and you're left with... three microphones and an hour to fill. And nobody can accuse us of not filling it! Inspired by a dictionary's tweet, Jay, Em, and Keith gathered for the first installment of BookCast, where we go 'round the horn to talk about—you guessed it—those papery, flippable lil devices we love.

But first! Here are the stories we gabbed about during What I Learned In Racket...

• ‘Call It the Clown Car’: An Oral History of Minneapolis’s 35-Candidate 2013 Mayoral Election
• ‘Only Ugly Guys’ Is More Beautiful Than You’d Expect & Black Scholars, Trans Ancestors, and Video Games: ‘I Promise to Burn Forever’ Challenges Visitors to Remember

And here are the books we plugged...

• Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte
• Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights by Samuel G. Freedman
• In the Heart of the Sea: The Epic True Story that Inspired Moby Dick by Nathaniel Philbrick
• The Book of Love by Kelly Link
• Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
• The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn, and the Transformation of Journalism by Adam Nagourney
• Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel
• Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich
• It by Stephen King

This episode of RacketCast is brought to you by TPT's You Are Here: Wicked Minnehaha.

Subscribe to RacketCast wherever you get your podcasts—Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, etc. • Wanna advertise on RacketCast? Email us at [email protected]. • Have a food/drink, event, or show recommendation? How about a civic hot take? General or specific question? Call 619-RACKTIP (619-722-5847) with your first name + city + 3-min.-maximum voicemail, and we might play it on a future episode. • Special thanks to local band Van Stee for supplying our podcast music!

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alt-weeklies: The four Racket founders/editors used to work at one, City Pages, before Star Tribune Media Co. flushed it and its 40-plus-year legacy down the tubes five years ago. And that fate more or less mirrors what's happening nationally with those spirited, smart, and sharp-elbowed publications that once covered news, arts, and culture all across this increasingly stupid land.

So last year when Tricia Romero, former editor-in-chief of The Stranger, released The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture, we were intrigued. And this week when Emma Silvers, an ex editor at SF Weekly, released this deep dive into alt-weeklies for her exciting new worker-owned publication, Coyote, we were doubly intrigued. Here's hoping all that intrigues you, because we—Racket's Jay, Jessica, and Keith—got Romero and Silvers on the line to talk for over an hour about the history, death, and possible new life of the scrappy little style of journalism we all love.

But first! Here are the stories we gabbed about during What I Learned In Racket...

• Fall Arts Guide 2025
• At the Palace, Rilo Kiley Reminds Adults What They’ve Lived Through

This episode of RacketCast is brought to you by Minneapolis Cultural Districts.

Subscribe to RacketCast wherever you get your podcasts—Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, etc. • Wanna advertise on RacketCast? Email us at [email protected]. • Have a food/drink, event, or show recommendation? How about a civic hot take? General or specific question? Call 619-RACKTIP (619-722-5847) with your first name + city + 3-min.-maximum voicemail, and we might play it on a future episode. • Special thanks to local band Van Stee for supplying our podcast music!

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the grand tradition of this still-kinda-new podcast, we're bringing you conversations with smart and cool local sportswriters to preview upcoming seasons. The "for dummies" framing? The guests have nothing to do with that, and perhaps one day we'll stop the condescending approach. But today is not that day, dummies.

This week we've got Arif Hasan (The Athletic, Bleacher Report, Zone Coverage) on the pod, a veteran Minnesota Vikings cataloger and founder of the awesome reader-funded football website Wide Left. Hasan breaks down the fracturing sports media landscape, explains the top causes for optimism and concern regarding your Vikes, and even roasts the living shit outta the Green Bay Packers, a team that's near and dear to your host's heart.

But first! Here are the stories we gabbed about during What I Learned In Racket...

• Helen Hoover: The Pioneering MN Nature Writer You’ve ‘Never Heard Of’ Finally Gets Her Due
• A Chronic Hater Attempts to Enjoy the Minnesota Renaissance Festival

Subscribe to RacketCast wherever you get your podcasts—Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, etc. • Wanna advertise on RacketCast? Email us at [email protected]. • Have a food/drink, event, or show recommendation? How about a civic hot take? General or specific question? Call 619-RACKTIP (619-722-5847) with your first name + city + 3-min.-maximum voicemail, and we might play it on a future episode. • Special thanks to local band Van Stee for supplying our podcast music!

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No time for extensive show notes—this is an emergency! Listen to all four Racket owner/editors gab for an hour-plus about all the Minnesota State Fair official new foods we gobbled Thursday. Gov. Tim Walz even makes an exclusive cameo.

Subscribe to RacketCast wherever you get your podcasts—Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, etc. • Wanna advertise on RacketCast? Email us at [email protected]. • Have a food/drink, event, or show recommendation? How about a civic hot take? General or specific question? Call 619-RACKTIP (619-722-5847) with your first name + city + 3-min.-maximum voicemail, and we might play it on a future episode. • Special thanks to local band Van Stee for supplying our podcast music!

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How does public transit work in the Twin Cities?

To find out, we invited Metro Transit GM Lesley Kandaras and bus driver Al Chang to our St. Louis Park studio. (Kandaras, a true company woman who has ridden all 60 MT routes, even took the bus there.) Transit enthusiasts should enjoy this convo about the successes, challenges, new developments, and total disinterest in building a subway system surrounding our town's bus and light rail operator.

But first! We engage in the second-ever (and possibly last-ever) installment of "Birthday Breakdown" to celebrate Jay's big 3-8. And here are the stories we gabbed about afterward during What I Learned In Racket...

• Racket’s Year in Review: August 2024-July 2025
• Best Budget Bites: $9.99 Roast Beef Sandwich From Maverick’s Real Roast Beef
• 
  

Subscribe to RacketCast wherever you get your podcasts—Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, etc. • Wanna advertise on RacketCast? Email us at [email protected]. • Have a food/drink, event, or show recommendation? How about a civic hot take? General or specific question? Call 619-RACKTIP (619-722-5847) with your first name + city + 3-min.-maximum voicemail, and we might play it on a future episode. • Special thanks to local band Van Stee for supplying our podcast music!

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For many Minnesotans, it wasn’t just another building on the North Shore—it was the beating heart of the North Shore. Over its 144-year history, Lutsen Resort had hosted countless weddings, family reunions, and friendly ski trips along the the intersection of Lake Superior and the Poplar River. So when the historic lodge burned down in early 2024, many folks were understandably heartbroken.

Then, almost immediately, suspicion around the owner, Bryce Campbell, began brewing. Dire finances. Unresolved inspection violations. Contradictory whereabouts.

The State Fire Marshal’s investigation remains ongoing, but North Shore journalist/author Joe Friedrichs is already hard at work on a longform podcast series called The Fire: A Lutsen Podcast. Friedrichs and his team have assembled almost 30 hours of audio, including interviews with ex-resort employees, fire investigators, Cook County residents, fellow journalists, and even Campbell.

"It's such an important story, and not just for the North Shore—it needs to be treated with respect in terms of production quality," Friedrichs says. "I'm just so interested in it… it's time to do [this podcast]."

You can support The Fire, which is due out this fall, via Kickstarter. Enjoy our conversation with Friedrichs.

Subscribe to RacketCast wherever you get your podcasts—Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, etc. • Wanna advertise on RacketCast? Email us at [email protected]. • Have a food/drink, event, or show recommendation? How about a civic hot take? General or specific question? Call 619-RACKTIP (619-722-5847) with your first name + city + 3-min.-maximum voicemail, and we might play it on a future episode. • Special thanks to local band Van Stee for supplying our podcast music!

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The ghost of Jeffery Epstein, sex-trafficking buddy to the elites, continues to haunt Trump World.

Just this week the Wall Street Journal reported that the Justice Department warned Trump in May that his name is included in the Epstein files. (The White House called this "fake news.") Meanwhile, the drip, drip, drip of previously unknown Trump-Epstein entanglements keeps accelerating—videos, photos, sketches.

To discuss all of this, U.S. Sen. Tina Smith (DFL-Minnesota) joins us on this episode of RacketCast. Smith has positioned herself on the frontlines of the posting wars, sharing eyebrow-raising Trump-Epstein developments with the abandon of a lawmaker who, at 67 and with retirement fast approaching, has few fucks left to give.

But first! Here are the stories we gabbed about during What I Learned In Racket...

• Meet Minnesota’s Rocketman: Inside the Incomparable Life of Ky Michaelson
• Let’s Try Bloomington’s Buzziest Egg Sandwich

Subscribe to RacketCast wherever you get your podcasts—Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, etc. • Wanna advertise on RacketCast? Email us at [email protected]. • Have a food/drink, event, or show recommendation? How about a civic hot take? General or specific question? Call 619-RACKTIP (619-722-5847) with your first name + city + 3-min.-maximum voicemail, and we might play it on a future episode. • Special thanks to local band Van Stee for supplying our podcast music!

This week's RacketCast is brought to you by CannaCon and also by Minneapolis Cultural Districts.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.