After dozens of visits to Mia, I still find it as beautiful as the first time I came, though I can’t quite remember when that was. In high school, driving in from Chaska in search of something new? Not until I moved to Dinkytown to take journalism classes at the U? Whenever it was, my  ...

At the end of 2016, China extended a potential lifeline to elephants, rhinos, and other ivory-bearing animals. China has vowed to shut down its country’s commercial trade in ivory by the end of this year, closing the world’s largest market for tusks, horns, and other ivory material. If the ban is effective, it could dent the alarming rise in  ...

At the end of 2016, China extended a potential lifeline to elephants, rhinos, and other ivory-bearing animals. China has vowed to shut down its country’s commercial trade in ivory by the end of this year, closing the world’s largest market for tusks, horns, and other ivory material. If the ban is effective, it could dent the alarming rise in  ...

Among the sticking points about reviving American manufacturing’s heyday, when millions of men flooded into factories every morning, is that their jobs have been replaced by robots. And soon, artifical intelligence may have a go at more than just mundane work. Last summer, a European “neural network” studied the paintings of Van Gogh, Munch, and other  ...

On the first day of my first dig, in central France, I uncovered a dead man’s foot. It was the 1980s, the first of four seasons I spent digging a Late Iron Age/Early Roman site in the Auvergne during the hot summer months. The man had likely died in the first century CE and was  ...

On the skyway level of the Thrivent building in downtown Minneapolis, amid a coffee shop and a guard station and throngs passing through, is a simple brown door. Behind it is a kind of heaven. Rembrandt. Albrecht Dürer. Picasso. They’re all here, among some 1,200 prints and a small number of Old Master paintings, in the  ...

  It was my favorite painting at Mia when I was a kid: The Birthday Party, by the American artist John Singer Sargent. I looked for it whenever I visited the museum with my parents or on a field trip. The subject would captivate any child, but for me the image encapsulated what it would  ...

Dave Muller owns a lot of records. He assembled the soundtrack to his life many years ago—a roomful of records filed alphabetically—and he keeps supplementing it. (“The A’s start here,” he said on a tour of the shelves, then walked down the hall a bit. “The Beatles start about here.”) For a brief period in the pre-digital  ...

Rita Mehta had worked for Target for seven years—touring factories abroad, learning about sustainable sourcing, assessing product quality from Asia—when she realized she wanted to do the opposite of all that. She wanted to rediscover America—American-made products—specifically for women. Guides to men’s goods had already swung toward American brands; Mehta would do the same for women. She  ...

In its hundred-year history, Mia has hosted a number of royals. Early on, they hailed from Europe: the queen of Romania, in 1926, and the crown prince of Sweden that same year. More recently, however, the monarchs have come from Africa. On November 30, the King of Kings for the entire Congo Basin paid a visit  ...