Frank Bures

“On a cold Monday morning last January, Amy Klobuchar was walking down the sidewalk toward Central High School in St. Paul. I first spotted her long red coat, which made her stand out amid the snow and the crowd. Without it, I might have missed the senator, being as she is short and rather ordinary-looking.

Klobuchar does not look like one of the most powerful people in the state. She does not look like one of the most ambitious politicians currently at work in Washington. She does not look like Minnesota’s most popular public official, which she is. She is neither beautiful, nor ugly. She looks pleasant, sensible, normal.

Yet I could see as we walked into the high-school lobby that most people regarded Klobuchar as anything but normal. As she moved forward, her presence sent a ripple through the crowd, which had gathered to march in memory of Martin Luther King Jr. The school was full of people from all kinds of social strata. There were community organizers and aging hippies, eager students and dutiful civil servants. Some whispered as they saw her. Others pushed terrified children at her. More than a few wanted to talk.

“Thank you for fighting for us!” yelled one woman.

Klobuchar stopped to shake her hand. She seemed to know the woman, though that, of course, is the art of politics.”

Read the rest here.

“About a year ago, I made a radical pledge. It came after several years of feeling less and less able to deal with the tidal wave of information coming at me: 3.6 zettabytes annually, which amounts to 100,000 words each day. That’s a 350 percent increase over people’s exposure in 1980.

I was drowning in data. So, like an electronic-age Dutch boy, I put my finger in the dike. Each Monday, I resolved, I would spend the entire day offline.

I didn’t make this decision lightly. As a writer, I depend on the Internet to find information, to communicate with friends and colleagues, and to refill the well of knowledge and ideas. Yet the costs of constant access were becoming impossible to ignore. Sometimes I would go online to find one thing, then spend an hour or two reading about other interesting things, while completely forgetting what I had originally been looking for. I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t keep my thoughts straight. Sometimes I felt like I was losing my mind.”

Read the rest here.

At a party a couple of years ago, a girl told Josh Klauck, “You look like a catfish. An angry catfish.” Klauck found the name so fitting, he built a bike shop around it. Angry Catfish Bicycle and Coffee Bar opened last January in the guts of an old hardware store in south Minneapolis. “I used to go to the bar next door,” says Klauck, “and always saw bikes locked to the awning. It was already a gathering place.”

Read the rest here, or in the January issue of Bicycling.

A short piece I did in the January issue of Minnesota Monthly:

If you see Mike Klingensmith standing on a corner in the Twin Cities and need directions, chances are he can tell you where to go. That’s because he spent several summers in college driving a Yellow Cab around Minneapolis. Now the 57-year-old is back as the publisher of the Star Tribune, trying to steer the paper forward as he gets reacquainted with the city he left some 30 years ago. That was when the Twin Cities native set off for New York City, where he scaled the heights of various media and corporate empires, landing top spots at Time Inc. and Sports Illustrated and even co-founding Entertainment Weekly. On the eve of his one-year anniversary at the Star Tribune, we sat down to ask Klingensmith about his first year as publisher.

You’re a former financial analyst and investment banker who left to get into the newspaper business. Do you know something we don’t know?
I actually thought that the timing was pretty good. You know, things start to become conventional wisdom, like “There’s an irreversible decline in print.” I never really subscribed to that. I’m a little bit of a contrarian, and I felt like this just might be a good moment to get in. I honestly thought it was an interesting opportunity.

Read the rest here, or in the January issue of Minnesota Monthly.