RacketCast

For months Claire Luger has been sounding the alarm about a MAGA takeover of the Forest Lake Area School District. Luger's a special education teacher at a nearby district, a three-term member of the Wyoming City Council, a singer in the Minneapolis band the Silent Treatment and, relevant to that first sentence, a current candidate for the Forest Lake school board. She joined us to discuss what the hell's going on up in the hometown of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and also what it's like when the dolts at Alpha News attack your band for being—gasp!—anti-fascist.

But before all that Em and Jay enter the What I Learned in Racket arena to talk about...

• An Interview With the Person Who Put Hundreds of ‘Wedding Crashers’ DVDs in South Mpls Little Free Libraries
• ‘It Was Special, Then Bam!’: An Oral History of the Fighting Pike, MN’s Extremely Short-Lived Pro Football Team

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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Born into remarkable wealth, Mark Dayton could've loafed poolside, Billy Madison-style, amid the opulence that comes from being part of a dynastic Minnesota business family. Instead, he charted a remarkable life that includes stints as a U.S. senator, governor, and, most recently, rookie author of the compelling new memoir, Perseverance (read our review here). Dayton, 79, joined us for a 40-minute conversation to discuss all of that and more.

But first we engage in an abridged edition of What I Learned in Racket, followed by the debut of a controversial new segment: Rank Past RacketCast Guests by Famousness. We don't anticipate its return. Here's what Em learned in Racket:

• Mud, Rocks, and Mental Anguish: A Novice Mountain Biker Attempts the Race Across Duluth

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.

Happy Labor Day!

To celebrate the only legit holiday, we invite labor journalists Sarah Lazare and Amie Stager of Workday Magazine on the pod to discuss their brand-new book, This Is How We Win: A Guide to Building Working-Class Uprisings. How, exactly, do we win? You'll have to listen to their expert diagnosis of the current state of organized labor to find out.

And before any of that, Em, Keith, and Jay engage in a perfectly fine round of What I Learned in Racket. Here's what they learned...

• A Paean to Ye Old Mill, the Minnesota State Fair’s Worst (and Best) Ride
• I Took the E Line From Southdale to St. Anthony Main and Watched 4 Movies in Less Than 12 Hours
• And... well, Jay kinda goes on a rant.

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.

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.

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.

Since 2000, American TV viewers have gobbled up 838 episodes spanning the broader CSI universe—folks love seeing crime scenes investigated. Since 2010, Melissa Loren has worked as a real-life crime scene investigator with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, a field she entered because of her fascination with another pop culture depiction of her work, true crime.

We got Loren on the pod because, well, her work is incredibly interesting. (She refutes this, though admits people run up to her at parties with eager questions.) Blood-splatter analysis. Bagging evidence. DNA matching. It's enough to make most jobs (podcasting comes to mind) seem like inconsequential wastes of everyone's time! But we're happy Loren gave us some of her time to better understand the science behind sleuthing through crime scenes.

Before that! We tweak our regular feature, What I Learned in Racket, with everyone discussing just one story: our publication's big annual overshare report.

Oh, and another thing! We very cutely (too cutely?) tease a big surprise we can't talk about yet, but now we can talk about: In addition to celebrating our 5th birthday on August 28 at Arbeiter Brewing Co. in Minneapolis, Racket will also be releasing its first-ever physical book; details and RSVP here.

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.

All month long wildfires have wreaked havoc in northern Minnesota. The Boundary Waters are shut down until October, tourist-starved Ely businesses are trying to stay afloat, and the smoldering could last well into winter.

To better understand the fiery situation we booked Art Gonzales, a fire behavior analyst with the Southern Area Complex Incident Management Team. A former fire fighter himself, he now studies and tracks wildfires around the country to help teams extinguish them. Gonzales has been doing just that up in Ely, and we stole some of his valuable time to get a crash-course on how Minnesota's wildfires are, well, behaving.

Before any of that, Em and Jay get into a red-hot round of What I Learned in Racket. Here's what they learned...

• The City Slicker’s Guide to Twin Cities Auto Racing
• Minnesota’s on the World’s Largest Lake—Why Don’t We Eat More Lake Superior Fish?

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.

Books! We love those papery, bound little bastards.

And we're guessing you, a supporter of local independent media, might also be a certified bookworm. As such, we're convening our second-ever BookCast council to gab about all things lit. This time 'round we've got a special guest: Racket contributor Deborah Copperud, who happens to have recently launched her own Minnesota-focused book podcast, Read Minnesota Books.

Deborah's lit coverage for Racket includes an interview with Mary Lucia about her memoir, a conversation with Deborah Jiang-Stein about her Twin Cities-focused flash fiction, a savage review Strib publisher Steve Grove's "résumé-padding" memoir and its "AI-evoking prose," and perhaps the only honest review of the drivel Liz Collin of Alpha News barfed up a few years ago.

...We like her.

But before any of that we break new ground by inviting our guest to join us for What I Learned in Racket. Here's what all four of us learned:

• Old Dutch Stuffed Cheeseburger Chips Are the Snack of the Summer
• When Nice Folks Make Cruel Choices: Journalist Justin Ellis on MN’s History of ‘Unaccounted for Repression, Rage, Discrimination, and White Supremacy’
• My Aunt From Minnesota Died 51 Years Ago. Decades Later, a Stranger Showed Up Claiming They Were In Love.
• Two Decades in ‘The Dork Forest’: Jackie Kashian on Pioneering Comedy Podcasts, Working With BFF Maria Bamford, and Coming Home to Acme

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 15 months our friends Jessica Lussenhop and Andy Mannix have been hard at work revealing sex crimes hidden within the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church.

The ProPublica reporters started their harrowing two-part series on Minnesota's North Shore, but the story of multi-generational abuses soon spiderwebbed across the country—the Dakotas, Wyoming, Washington. (Warning: child sex abuse is discussed at length.)

Lussenhop and Mannix take listeners behind the scenes on their important reporting to begin our interview, and then we take a hard tonal pivot to chat about their 2010s-era careers at City Pages, the dead alt-weekly from which Racket sprang.

But first, as always, we get into a spirited round of What I Learned in Racket. Here's what we learned:

• Minnesota Museums, Theaters, and Stadiums Are Becoming More Sensory-Friendly. Why Aren’t Restaurants?
• MN Restaurants Are Addicted to AI Slop Advertising—Is It Even Legal?
• Do You Know What Your Representatives Are Voting on Next? This Website Does.

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.

You there, dummy with some degree of affluence and PTO to spare: You don't know diddly squat about travel.

But Kyle Potter and Gunnar Olson, the team behind The Thrifty Traveler Podcast? It's their full-time job to scout for travel deals, report on industry developments, and, generally, make their audience smarter globe hoppers. We got the boys on the pod ahead of their big live recording session this Friday at the Parkway Theater in Minneapolis (more info here) to make our audience, the aforementioned dummies, savvier travelers as summer vacation season heats up.

Before any of that: We take listeners on a trip through What I Learned in Racket, where the riffed upon topics include...

• Every Bowl at Baba’s Hummus House, Ranked
• ‘I Felt Like I Was There 90% of the Time’: An Oral History of the Dinkytowner Café
• What Are People For? The Imperiled Boundary Waters, Late MN Nature Writer Paul Gruchow, and Me.

This week's episode is brought to you by the Minnesota Antiquarian Book Fair.

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.

We're halfway through the Year of Data Center Backlash. Americans hate the massive AI factories, yet tech giants continue to foist them on communities amid the current AI arms race. That negative sentiment isn't difficult to understand: They're noisy, energy-sucking IRL avatars for a product that's promising to eliminate your job.

At least a dozen data center projects are at various stages of completion throughout Minnesota. Earlier this year, we brought you an in-depth look at the battle to stop Google's "Project Loon" hyperscale proposal up in Hermantown, and for this week's episode we're headed south to chat with Aubree Derksen and Nicole Mills, two residents of Pine Island who are fighting like hell against Google's "Project Skyway." At the moment, they seem to be winning; earlier this week a judge ordered a temporary restraining order that halts construction of the 3-million-square-foot behemoth.

Before we have that conversation, however, we begin the pod with our usual segment, What I Learned in Racket. Here's what we learned:

• Stillwater Is a Riverfront Parking Lot With Some Nice Restaurants Attached
• ‘Long Live Conrad!’: Musicians, Colleagues, and Loved Ones Remember the First Avenue Stage Manager
• I Want My CRT: The ‘Insane’ Demand for Giant Old-School TVs, Explained

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.