Books

Burberry, Britain’s once-staid fashion house, can’t help it if Sarah Palin wears their trademark plaid scarves. “[T]he conspicuousness of the pattern also means that the company has little control over how it is seen, or on whom,” the New Yorker magazine observed, in reference to Palin. Minneapolis has the same problem: today the Mill City [...]

The sequel to Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s 2005 smash-hit book “Freakonomics” — particularly the final chapter of “SuperFreakonomics” — is giving global warming skeptics hope that they can continue to shift attitudes toward their cause.

The New York Times riffs on Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion” today in the headline to Timothy Egan’s piece on how Western states have long embraced the concept of cooperatives — even health-care cooperatives. Egan didn’t mention that the radio host’s brother, Steven J. Keillor, wrote the book on rural co-ops in Minnesota, from the [...]

A group of artists have collaborated to create a comic book featuring the career of Rep. Michele Bachmann — using actual quotes from her media appearances.
The creators describe “False Witness” as a “behind the scenes look at the seedy, hairy, loathsome underbelly of the career of one of America’s most notorious right-wing nuts and demagogues!” [...]

In a review in the Seattle Times, one of Al Franken’s attorneys slams a book — “The Democracy Index” by Heather K. Gerken — for excessive verbosity about gauging how well states and localities run elections. “It’s difficult to imagine how she could drag out the discussion for 142 tedious pages (not counting footnotes),” writes [...]

In the main atrium of the downtown Minneapolis library, Norm Coleman beams at passersby — from the cover of ”Shared Vision: Norm Coleman and the Remarkable Revitalization of St. Paul.” The 2001 hagiography currently has pride of place in the Friends of the Library shop window. Price? Two dollars. Coleman quotes on miracles, persistence and good karma? [...]

Al Franken’s one word for Sen. Arlen Specter in 1996, when Specter sought the Republican presidential nomination: “Hopeless.” But Franken’s frank assessment of the man he hopes to join in the Senate went beyond that one word. Franken devoted a chapter of his 1996 book “Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations“ to the [...]

The Minnesota Independent contacted four outspoken critics of America’s torture policies and practices — Dr. Steven Miles, Douglas Johnson, Coleen Rowley and Kirk Anderson — for reaction to recent revelations about Bush-era treatment of prisoners. None of them said, “I told you so.” But the truth is … they told us so.

Gov. Tim Pawlenty unveiled his new Twitter home page only yesterday. Then why does the color scheme suggest it was designed for a Soviet socialist in the 1920s? (After the jump is Aleksandr Rodchenko’s cover for the 1927 book, “Materialization of the Fantastic” — not a bad campaign slogan for Pawlenty ‘12 actually.)

When Peanut Corp. of America CEO Stewart Parnell took the Fifth on Wednesday instead of telling the House Committee on Energy and Commerce why he let salmonella-tainted peanut butter kill eight people (so far) and sicken thousands, the setting was ironic. Because it was before another House committee (Ways and Means) in 1921 that the willing, winning, inventive testimony by the peanut’s greatest promoter, George Washington Carver, propelled the lowly product of the South to world prominence.